Oil is at a 12-year low

[Ironduke]

If I understand this correctly, you advocate to add tax and to tax some people more, due to their geography in order to subsidize everyone more. How is that efficient? The Europeans you've mentioned, just increase subsidies in public transport. How is that efficient?

What would be efficient IMV is to let the market mature via competition and if you think you should switch from fossil to another source of energy, due to clean air or some other benefits, create one time funds to help them develop/enhance the "tools".

I live in a country where most of the population lives in an intentionally government-engineered system and infrastructure, with highly inefficient lifestyles and commuting/economic/consumptive patterns in the suburbs. Perhaps 70% of the US population lives in this manner. There's nothing organic, natural, or market-driven about it. It's an artificial system that was incentivized and created via government subsidy.

A 70-year welfare program, given to three generations now of Americans who believe they've never been on welfare. ;-)

With regards to rural residents - they would literally have to choose between food and gasoline. Children would starve and people would freeze in the winter in parts of rural America. We didn't need to create these vast, economically inefficient and impractical suburbs that 70% of our population lives in - but rural residents are much lower-income, more impoverished, and even more dependent on automobile transportation than the suburbanite, many of whom can gradually transition from their lifestyle into a new one. There are parts of the US where vast numbers of people live no different than a third world country - in urban slums, former mono-industrial areas, and in rural areas, and without a car they'd be absolutely sunk, the last leg holding them up would be kicked out from under them.

That's why I'd support a refundable tax credit for rural residents on gasoline tax as a stopgap measure, until battery technology improves to the point where battery-powered cars are affordable to people of all income levels, not just the wealthy in California or the upper-middle/upper class.

While I believe our metros need to be retrenched and consolidated - I don't believe we should starve 10-15% our population living in rural areas and smaller towns to death. The suburbanite has been receiving massive amounts of welfare for decades and doesn't even realize it, and to a large extent, takes a great amount of pride in believing they have never received it (which is a fiction) - I don't think rural residents should suffer for the sins of the 70% of our society.

[snapper]

Well here is the thing regarding your x6 increase (via taxation if necessary) increase in oil prices; everything else goes up due to increased production and transport costs. Harvesting grain to make bread costs more as does transporting the bread to shops... literally everything increases in price if not by x6 by double at least. Pensioners who have retired in the country cannot afford to live and drive into the nearest village to buy food. Civil servants will need to be payed more as the prices rise, wages will rise and the primary beneficiaries will either be the oil companies or the Central Government, whom I presume you wish to direct the tax windfall into 'alternative' and renewable energy sources - very libertarian. As it is the solar efficiency is getting alot better and the investment in wind and wave (though not yet tidal) or serious work on geothermal in Europe is turning the corner - I read that the UK had a day without coal based energy last month. Sure a day is nothing in the greater journey but the first steps in any great journey are always the hardest and in the getting there a Government has the responsibility to cater for all the people it represents.

[Doktor]

How is it libertarian to tax **** out of people? Taxation is theft, remember?

[zraver]

It seems you're invested heavily in where you live, you probably own property, have most of your social capital there, and that the lifestyle you live is an integral part of your identity. I can't deny your perspectives regarding lifestyle and where you choose to live, yours are as equally valid for you as mine are for me, both of us making free choices within the constrains of the resources and means we have at our disposal.

Thank you

There are more efficient ways to move goods than tractor trailer.

Not really, bulk movement over long distance yes, but thats not every type of product.

We used to use trains for the most part, but in the post-1945 Age of the Automobile and the Suburb, and when oil was dirt cheap, we decided to ditch train transportation for the most part and use tractor trailer to move goods. The railroads were allowed to fall heavily into disrepair, they went bankrupt, and at the same time railroads were folding left and right due to loss of customers and revenue, the oil prices started going up. We should have never disinvested in rail.

You would be surprised at how much goes intermodal now. Pretty much everything that is not a JIT item moving from Big Port or Big Bulk shipment point to Big Urbn area or Big end user goes intermodal. You can't ship JIT and most high value or fresh perishble foods by rail. Nor does it make sense to send an entire train to service Podunk Ar, Lostagain TX, or Whereami MT.

It was a short-sighted measure predicated on 1950s oil prices.

See above. A lot of rail slack would be freed up if nt for coal and oil trains. We don't necessarily need more rail capacity.

When my grandpa joined the Navy in 1945, he was the ONLY enlisted man on the flagship of the Mediterranean Fleet who knew how to drive, as he was the son of a cattle rancher from the Midwest. Imagine that - being the ONLY enlisted man who could drive, on an entire ship with hundreds of men on it. That's 1945 America for you. Unimaginable today - yet somehow we assume and delude ourselves into believing our country has always been the way it has been. I'm not referring to you, but anyone who actually believes that 1945 America was anything like 1960 or 1980 or 2017 - it is a pure retroactive continuity, a fantasy, and not based in reality.

Your grandpas story is an outlier. By 1939 even with, maybe in spite of, or perhaps becuase of the great Depression most American boys grew up knowing how to drive, wrench and do basic fabrication. It ended up being a secret weapon. Our stuff didn't just last longer becuase it was better from the factory, it often wasn't. However it was used by people who could figure it out and fix it. The US Military in WWII was the most technologically adept and proficient force the world had seen to that point.

[Ironduke]

How is it libertarian to tax **** out of people? Taxation is theft, remember?

I don't remember that. It's a great cliche though.

[Ironduke]

Your grandpas story is an outlier. By 1939 even with, maybe in spite of, or perhaps becuase of the great Depression most American boys grew up knowing how to drive, wrench and do basic fabrication. It ended up being a secret weapon. Our stuff didn't just last longer becuase it was better from the factory, it often wasn't. However it was used by people who could figure it out and fix it. The US Military in WWII was the most technologically adept and proficient force the world had seen to that point.

There were only ~26 million private automobiles in a population of ~90 million adults in 1940.

In 2016, there were 263 million private automobiles in a population of 249 million adults.

It's not an outlier - most navy recruits were from East Coast cities with highly developed mass transit, not the rural Midwest.

Automobile ownership was relatively common for back then where your granddaddy and my granddaddy lived, but not where everyone's granddaddy's lived back then. We can't extrapolate the rural 1940 Arkansas or Minnesota experience to hold true in 1940 New York or Philadelphia, or even most major cities in the US, back before the suburbs were created.

Yes, most city people worked in factories, but there was also highly developed transit systems in which they read the newspaper and ate breakfast whilst riding to work in the morning, and drinking a beer and eating a snack on the tram on the way home. Perhaps getting off to go to a bar, pool hall, or barber shop before getting back on, then coming home for dinner.

Even in the area I was born, Greyhound had been founded some years earlier, charging 5 cents to bring miners to work, as most miners did not own cars even in these areas back then. There were ferries on the Mississippi bringing thousands of people who lived several miles downriver to work in downtown Minneapolis , and something like 50 tram lines covering the entire extent of all of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and what suburbs existed, where one only had to walk a few blocks at most no matter where they lived or worked in the city. The same was true for nearly all US cities of any size.

[Doktor]

I don't remember that. It's a great cliche though.

Libertarians advocate higher taxes? Since when?

[Ironduke]

Libertarians advocate higher taxes? Since when?

I'm more of a civil libertarian.

That being said - it seems your idea of what libertarianism is is rather narrow. It's not some cookie cutter thing where everybody believes in what Doktor seems to think the word means.

[Doktor]

I'm more of a civil libertarian.

That being said - it seems your idea of what libertarianism is is rather narrow. It's not some cookie cutter thing where everybody believes in what Doktor seems to think the word means.

I don't know where are you headed and who is narrow here, but I asked you to show me when Libertarians advocated raising taxes. Is it that hard to answer without resorting to nicely wrapped ad hominem?

BTW, you might not like definitions, since you are above them, but please tell me where in the lower government and the government being a service and not an intruder into my rights the higher taxes and planned neighborhoods fall?

Edit to add:

Crap, I just saw that BHO declared himself as a civil-libertarian. Explains a lot.

[Parihaka]

Crap, I just saw that BHO declared himself as a civil-libertarian. Explains a lot.

Yup, the old international socialist game of renaming yourself every three years, and demeaning the newly adopted label at the same time. Liberalism? Globalism? Progressive? This week lets be Libertarian while we're shitting in the living room.

[snapper]

Presumably being a "civil libertarian" now means picking and choosing which taxes one wishes to raise 6x and ignoring how that may effect peoples normal other liberties. Suppose I suggested more taxation for a universal healthcare service? Would that make me a 'socialist' or a "civil libertarian" interested in health?

[Parihaka]

Presumably being a "civil libertarian" now means picking and choosing which taxes one wishes to raise 6x and ignoring how that may effect peoples normal other liberties. Suppose I suggested more taxation for a universal healthcare service? Would that make me a 'socialist' or a "civil libertarian" interested in health?

Depends whether you're an ideologue or pragmatist. Personally I prefer viewing philosophies of economic schools as tools, some work in some situations but not others. You don't use a screwdriver to plaster a wall.

[Ironduke]

I don't know where are you headed and who is narrow here, but I asked you to show me when Libertarians advocated raising taxes. Is it that hard to answer without resorting to nicely wrapped ad hominem?

BTW, you might not like definitions, since you are above them, but please tell me where in the lower government and the government being a service and not an intruder into my rights the higher taxes and planned neighborhoods fall?

Edit to add:

Crap, I just saw that BHO declared himself as a civil-libertarian. Explains a lot.

Everything I've discussed in this thread in regards to environment, pollution, and so on, has to do with negative externalities.

Negative externalities created by you affect me, and you don't have a right to infringe and trample over on my health, life, access to clean air, clean water, and so on.

If you create negative externalities that infringes on the lives and health of others, you should pay costs to mitigate them.

This is not inconsistent with libertarianism. I'm also a civil libertarian, but libertarian generally in outlook as well.

Creators of negative externalities have to pay for them. The basic premise is, it's your responsibility, be accountable for your actions, don't pass the buck on me, don't pour motor oil in my drinking water, or paint thinner that ends up in my iced tea. Quite simple.

Negative externalities can have diffuse origins from the actions of thousands/millions/billions of people. I can't sue an entire metro area's population of 3 million people if I get cancer from something 3 million people did that gave me cancer. They can also be caused by a corporation, or a single individual. In this case you can sue, but you might be dead and your family bankrupt before they settle.

Not getting cancer because of something you did, or dying of thirst because of something you did, or suffering from heat stroke because of something you did, and in general not dying because of something you did, is a civil right.

That's where regulation and taxation enters the picture in a libertarian model. To protect the rights of others against infringement by people each acting in large ways, or small ways on a macro-scale, that in turn harms others in ways that cannot be held to be the responsibility of any definite party, but is of indefinite origin from the mass actions of many people.

The answer here was so obvious, and so common-sense, I can't believe that somebody had to ask.

Pari - if you think that's socialism, go ahead and call it that. It's not what it is in my book, but everybody has an opinion, I suppose.

[zraver]

Presumably being a "civil libertarian" now means picking and choosing which taxes one wishes to raise 6x and ignoring how that may effect peoples normal other liberties. Suppose I suggested more taxation for a universal healthcare service? Would that make me a 'socialist' or a "civil libertarian" interested in health?

I'm a civil libertarian... What you do with your life is none of my business so long as you are not hurting/endangering others. This means I am against most zoning laws, the war on drugs, militarized police, religion defined moral codes enforced as law. I am pro-right of contract, pro- BoR as it is written etc.

[zraver]

That's where regulation and taxation enters the picture in a libertarian model.

That is where lawsuits enter into the picture, not taxes. Reasonable regulation to prevent uncompensated downstream effects is way different than taxes designed t be hgh enough to pick winners and losers in a social engineering context.