Tyler Cowen: preference

Transcript context

…If we go to this system, it will be such a massive percentage better that we can then deal with the cheaters. I’m sure we can find some way to solve that problem. That’s the small part of this. If I think of District of Columbia, when I get these tickets, there’s some zone that is marked as 25 and I’m driving what I think is a perfectly safe 37. I don’t even see that it’s 25. I get this weird ticket in the mail and I’m baffled as to what happened. I just pay it. Shouldn’t I have the same concern with tolls that I don’t trust the government in the District and they’re just going to screw me over because I’m from Virginia? I don’t in any way vote there. Do I really want them to have tolling authority over me? The real thing is, imagine if we did with food what we’ve done with the roads. We pay for the grocery stores with taxes in various ways, and therefore, everybody feels entitled to show up at a grocery store whenever they want, take whatever they want. There would be a line out the front door. You couldn’t possibly butcher enough cows. There would be agricultural engineers and they would talk about induced demand. It’s like, it doesn’t matter to have more cows. People just keep eating the steak. Then we would have this conversation about, how could you possibly charge people for grocery stores? How would you figure out who took what? We could sit here and talk about it abstractly, but we all know that’s absurd because there’s a thing called a cash register and pretty soon Amazon will figure out how to delete those and you can still get charged for what you take.…

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