The only thing that’s worse than an REO is a prepayment. That’s why there are prepayment penalties. You want people to pay their loans on time, or at least be no more than 30 days late. But you do not want people to pay off the entire loan too soon.
Like a world of dirt roads that you have to pay to use every day, manned by illiterates, and run by criminals.
Rollory, why do you bother?
P.S., He’s not an Objectivist. Ron is a Truther.
Well, to be clear, i wasn’t saying that roads wouldn’t exist in a “libertarian utopia” but that they would probably suck.
I think libertarianism is wrong for a lot of reasons, most of them deeper than the hyperbole i used.
Yeah… that toll road in LA is just terrible!! Better shut down those wacky liberteens, or we’ll need to spend a fortune just to get out of our driveway!
Yeah. So about half a year I looked into getting FastTrak and taking the 73 to work (which would have cut my commute down to about 15 minutes versus 25 minutes). Turns out it would have cost me about $2,000 a year to do so.
I actually think that toll roads aren’t that bad of an idea. However, Carey is way overselling them in that film and in practice they’re not the panacea that Libertarians often seem to think they are.
Or, alternatively, it’s not a good idea for you to sign up for FastTrak, which makes this even better, because you weren’t forced to pay for it anyway.
Kind of defeats the purpose of insurance, which is shared burden and risks.
The whole purpose of insurance is to spread out risk. Else, why have insurance?
Well, my problem with Los Angeles is not the quality of the roads (some of them suck, some are fine) but the lack of public transportation which is responsible for traffic in large part. Combine that with the sprawl of the city and you’ve got the massive traffic issue.
Theres a couple of bus systems and a hand-full of rail and it’s all crap.
Thats one area where i think privatizing might be a good idea. I have a friend who lives in Manchester, UK and explained their privatized bus system. Basically there are three bus companies, and the most expensive one comes every five minutes, the lower cost one comes every 15 and the cheap-o’s come every half. That would be a vast improvement over the “every bus comes whenever the hell it wants and is probably full” system we have now, even if it smacks of class-ism.
And the video you posted is a libertarian idea co-existing and improving upon a pre-existing government system, which is different than completely abolishing the FTA.
What are you trying to argue then? That toll roads are a good solution for the everyman, or no? $2,000 a year just to commute is not an effective value proposition for most people.
The toll roads in Southern California, while partially successful in providing an alleviation of traffic to some commuters, tend to only serve wealthier patrons. In many ways it’s the only reason they work at all – because if they were accessible to the masses then they’d quickly become overrun.
I.e. while there are some upsides to the toll roads in Southern California, they hardly provide proof that we could have a sustainable highway system that relied only on toll roads. Instead the toll roads are effectively a well-implemented luxury used by people wealthy enough to afford them.
I’m open to the idea of privatized buses, but it’s my understanding that it’s nearly impossible to turn any sort of profit on it.
Please, don’t say class-ism again.
That was my point. Someone was suggesting that the Libertarian solution for Roads is toll dirt roads. I presented a viewpoint of what they actually think on the subject, which is nothing like that. There’s no call from Libertarians to abolish the Federal Transit Administration any more then democrats want to enact full blown communism.
Taken to its logical conclusion, all taxes are thereby incompatible with property rights. Which is itself a good and internally consistent philosophy, just one which is incompatible with living in a modern society.
Getting back to the original post, I don’t think this issue is as cut-and-dried as the vote or the non-libertarians would make it. I can understand how insurance companies should not be able to discriminate against people with fuzzy tests that indicate someone may get heart disease or cancer. However, there are a number of diseases, like Huntington’s, where the genetic factors almost completely determine who gets the disease. My cursory understanding of this legislation is that insurance companies can’t use the fact that they know someone will get extremely sick, which seems like forcing someone to stick their head in the sand. This will allow people who know they will be sick to basically take money from insurance companies. While I have no love of insurance companies, they should not have to pay that type of unfair cost. Furthermore, as our understanding of the causes of diseases increases, and our tools for predicting who will get sick increases, this situation will only become more and more unfair for the insurance companies. It will only exacerbate the problem of sick people getting insurance, since people will be able to see into the future that they will get sick.
How about, if it’s not worth $2,000 to you, don’t spend it? I don’t see what’s hard to understand about this.
Where did I suggest that we make all highways toll-only? Did the FastTrak system make you take toll roads home when it was built?
Personally, I’m mostly opposed to toll roads because they’re inherently classist. Yay, the rich people get to go where they want to quickly, and the rest of us have to take the long way/sit in traffic/use surface streets. The government should not be encouraging that sort of divide, especially with the crappy state of transit in most cities in this country and coupled with the rising cost of fuel.
You didn’t suggest anything which is half my problem. You just made a sarcastic comment. If you want to actually make a specific claim then I’ll be glad to argue with that in mind.
Carey seems to be pointing to the Toll Roads as a solution to shitty commuter conditions in LA (following that up by glibly telling us that he doesn’t care because he can just take his own helicopter). However if I, a well-paid software engineer in a two-income family with no kids, can’t really justify the price of the toll road then it’s pretty clear that this isn’t solving any general commuter problems. It’s merely providing a luxury for the wealthy.
I’ll say whatever i like thank you kindly.
Heres a short list of things Ron Paul would like to abolish*:
“He would eliminate many federal government agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Education,[81] the U.S. Department of Energy, the US Department of Commerce,[72] the US Department of Health and Human Services,[72] the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Emergency Management Administration, the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Internal Revenue Service”
It’s rather annoying for purposes of this conversation, that he hasn’t specifically mentioned the FTA, but why wouldn’t he oppose it on the same principal that he (or libertarians in general) oppose all these agencies?
I give up. Have fun!
PS, Gabe… Who the fuck cares about Ron Paul, besides idiot truthers? Even Reason.com stopped endorsing him a while ago.
Sorry if I’m not up on the “who the fuck i should be caring about” libertarians these days.
It’s also worth noting that most of the libertarian comments to that piece were themselves very critical of it. The National Motorist Association (a libertarian group focused on increased driver’s rights) opposes toll roads basically because they believe that they are government-created monopolies that don’t effectively leverage market efficiencies, that tolls are less efficient ways of collecting fees for highway usage (as opposed to something like a fuel tax which is transparent to a consumer) and tend to be set up in a corrupt manner.