The Forum > Article Comments > Car madness! > Comments
Car madness! : Comments
By Rob Moodie, published 15/6/2006We need to be eased out of our cars, onto our feet or bicycles, and onto public transport.
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>>I suspect that the only advantage of the under-utilised bus service is that somebody else pays most of the cost rather than the person making the trip.<<
Your logic is that a person who does not use a particular service "subsidises" another who uses it. Once you embark upon that mode of thinking, nothing anyone can possibly say will prevent the conclusion that old people are, by their nature, uneconomic propositions.
In a private health fund the claim statistics are skewed "in favour" of the elderly, and "away from" the young. In other words, the young and healthy are "subsidising" the old and frail. Is this to be tolerated? Why don't we adopt a "user pays" approach and charge the young folk nothing, and soak the oldies?
By their nature, truly public services will be uneconomic. How could they be otherwise? If a service were "economic", private enterprise would take care of it, wouldn't they?
Once again, what services should a government provide with our taxes? How can we possibly avoid the situation where one individual believes that they are "subsidising" another?
Try this exercise. Draw a line down the middle of a page. Make a list of all the places our taxes are spent in the left hand column, and mark off all those that benefit you as an individual on the right.
What do you conclude? That you are paying a motza to the government, and get very little in return.
The key to solving this problem will be to rid ourselves once and for all of the ridiculous concept that you can somehow make taxpayer-funded services equally valuable to every member of the public. Doesn't happen. Cannot happen.
Once again, the question is what is the basic reason that we tolerate taxation, and to what use do we believe those taxes should be put?