The Pankian Metaphor 3138

the comment is not to eliminate payments (in the form of fees and taxes) for roads ... it is just a statement about correctly apportioning the taxes and fees based on use. This is "use" as in acutal wear and tear on the infrastructure, aka make the use fees ... not proportional to the number of times that you pbutt through someplace ... but proportional to the amount of wear and tear that you cause when you pbutt through someplace (flat rate charges tend to buttume homogeneous and uniform wear & tear use).

as mentioned in past postings, somebody else even posted a reference to several states have gone to a 3rd fee. that it was recognized that straight fuel tax didn't accurately account for heavy trucking "use". As a result, some number of gov. bodies had added registration fees for heavy trucking that were proportional to the vehicles gvw. However, this second kind of gvw fee was still static ... it didn't actually account for the different amounts of wear and tear that happens based on miles driven and load carried (aka miles-ESAL ... miles-equivalent-single-axle-loads). The 3rd fee attempts to accurately account for actual wear and tear use caused by specific vehicles based on something akin to miles-equivalent-single-axle-loads).

if you more accurately account for actual costs ... the economics of doing something might change. one change might be that the amount of long-haul trucking is reduced ... since if the actual costs of long-haul trucking was accurately accounted for ... it might increase the costs of some of the products that were transported, if there was some increase in the costs of products transported by long-haul trucking ... some people might buy less of it and buy more of something else.

a possible point is that any "efficiency" in "market economy" is at least partially the result of having dynamic adaptive feedback operations based on actual costs (and prices accurately reflecting those costs). "managed economys" may enormously distort prices (with respect to actual costs) and therefor drastically distort the "market economy" ability to accurately, efficiently, and rapidly adapt to changing configurations and workloads.

some gov. bodies may try and achieve some trade-offs between degree of distorting prices and the efficiency of "market economy" ... possibly because "market economy" may heavily over optimize for short-term results at the expense of longer term optimization. however, one of the previously issues raised is that the people in gov. may have the least experience and skill to make such trade-off decisions.

past posts on the subject in this thread:

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