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Politics : A US National Health Care System? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (14361)	3/11/2010 2:10:32 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 42652

We've subsidized cars by building roads for a very long time. On the federal level road spending is covered by gasoline taxes. On the state level there is an effective subsidy, OTOH without roads the governments own functions would mostly not work so well. You could build roads and not let people who aren't agents of governments use them, but that seems like a waste and also would be expensive to enforce. Road building is one of the most basic and long existing ways of providing public infrastructure. Roads are public goods (well toll roads are private goods, and arguably really congested non-toll roads are common goods, but most roads, most of the time, are public goods). See econport.org Energy is for the most part not public infrastructure. It isn't normally a public good since it is both rivalrous (its use by one person precludes its use by another), and excludable (it is possible to prevent people who have not paid for it from having access to it). Which makes it a private good. The economic justification for government investment in useful public goods is far stronger than the same investment in private goods. The traditional thought is that public goods won't exist or at least will be the subject of tremendous underinvestment, if government or other coercive structure does not pay for them. Private goods are not particularly subject to this problem. Its theoretically possible that the government could make wiser investment choices than the market, and might produce a better selection of private goods, but that's typically no the way things work in the real world, and things like the information problem, and public choice incentives for politicians make that fact unlikely to change.