An economist! Shoot!
I can't remember how I ended up there, but I found this amusing cartoon at Russ Nelson's blog:
(The cartoonist is John Trevor, and he's got other cartoony goodness here.)
Although the cartoon pretty much says it all, that won't stop me from saying more. Market solutions are often invisible, or at least camouflaged. It's not all deregulation and privatization. Since the rise of the computer and internet age, a growing portion of the population (though still small) has come to realize that prices are not just amounts of money, but information.
The reason why price controls and so on don't work is that they are basically lies. Lies on a grand scale. They so distort the information that market prices are trying to transmit to both buyers and sellers that no one can operate normally. Black markets are in one sense back channel efforts to find the truth of what things are worth. Honesty is the best policy.
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Look up subsidy some time, B.
Look up _subsidy_ some time, B...it's the evil twin of price control.
Some of us view the situation in Iraq primarily as a subsidy of oil pricing. The recent energy bill, what precious little of it _did_ have anything to do with energy, managed to _subsidize_ oil again.
Rail pays all costs associated with its throughways (rails). Highways are paid for by the public. Which one is subsidized?
Ross, have you ever, ever,
Ross, have you ever, ever, heard me endorse any sort of subsidy? It is the evil twin of price controls. Farm subsidies, corporate welfare, these are things that I have repeatedly condemned.
I would disagree that the war in Iraq is primarily an oil subsidy. A better way to get cheaper oil would have been to lift sanctions and negotiate a favorable deal with Saddam in return for meaningless concessions, the way the French and Russians were trying to do before the libervasion. There were other reasons - which have something to do with oil, but not entirely and at a rather indirect level - for invading Iraq that were political/strategic. You can certainly disagree with the logic behind those reasons, but it's disingenuous to insist at this stage that it was some sort of blood for oil silliness.
The recent energy bill was a porkfest, and little more. Some hand waving in the general direction of alternative energy, and a bit of movement on the ANWR drilling. Otherwise, crap.
If we want to end dependence on foriegn oil, and do happy things for the environment, we need to do more than create a Robert C. Byrd Center for Alternative Energy somewhere in West Virginia.
ANWR drilling would be one positive step - minimal environmental impact that would get us lots of black gold. Starting to construct nuclear power plants on a large scale would be another one. Modern plants, with modern technology would have almost no environmental impact, especially if we ramrodded the waste storage facility in Yucca Flats. Puttin significant research dollars into other types of energy would make sense, too.
We could cut our dependence on foriegn oil in half in ten years if we wanted to.
Theoretically, we all pay for roads through taxes. I know it doesn't work that way in practice, but nevertheless the convenience is worth it. While rails "pay" for throughways, Amtrac gets billions direct from the government, as do all light rail and subway systems. They are a public good though and I don't have a serious problem with that, either.
Btw, email me back about the other thing.