[eru]

Give poor people money, if you think they need the help. No need to decide for them what is best for them by giving them help in the form of tickets.

Giving them a ticket is equivalent to giving them money, but restricting it be spent on park tickets only. Very condescending and paternalistic, isn't it?

Are you afraid they are going to spend their ticket money on booze?

[unionpivo]

Not from USA, but my opinion on raffles vs auctions:

Raffle is not giving them money. Raffle is giving them a chance. No matter how much money you give to poor people, rich people will always be able to afford to outbid them.

So sure, giving money to poor people (or better jet, making sure they get decent pay in the first place) is good idea.

And raffle makes sure, prices stay reasonable so that even poor/middle class people can on occasion enjoy the parks.

You do auctions when you want to maximize profit. You do raffles when you need to rate limit access to a limited resource.

[eru]

If you allow people to resell tickets they won in a raffle, it's no different from an auction.

(And why would you want to keep poor people from re-selling their tickets? Perhaps they need the x dollars that the ticket is more than the they need the ticket?)

[et-al]

Uh, it wouldn't be just poor people. It'd be the bottom 98%. You're proposing turning certain national/state-owned campsites into luxury experiences.

(Though arguably with bots and scrapers, that's maybe what they are now anyway.)

[eru]

Yes, if you don't have an auction, you just get bots and scrapers, and an auction-like secondary market.

> It'd be the bottom 98%. You're proposing turning certain national/state-owned campsites into luxury experiences.

I don't see how that works. We don't see the top 2% win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either.

[lozenge]

There are enough rich people to make the auction price of a ticket at a desirable location $1,000 and we know there is never going to be enough redistribution to prevent that. What you're suggesting would realistically make the activity inaccessible.

[ghaff]

$1,000/night is pretty much in the range of relatively primitive camping on private land in primo locations. I've been shocked at the price tag associated with so-called glamping (which isn't quite like pitching a tent but close enough) in locations I don't even think are that primo. Absolutely an auction for Yosemite slots on a summer weekend would be at least in the high three figures.

[19h]

You're completely out of touch with reality if you think $1000/night for camping is acceptable or normal.

[eru]

It depends on 'primo' the 'primo location' is, I guess.

It is very much on the high end.

[mnky9800n]

This is a very top down thinking approach. Yes we should give poor people money. But actually is that the job of parks? Perhaps parks should try to be as equitable as possible to let whoever wants in entry. Then a raffle not an auction is the best way to do it.

[eru]

If supply exceeds demand, you have to have some form of rationing.

Charging everyone the same fee (set via auction) seems very equitable to me. It's a form of rationing that treats everyone the same.

Raffles are designed to produce inequality. Some get lucky, some don't.

And if you allow people to resell tickets, Raffles essentially turn into an auction anyway. But the profits go as windfall to a lucky few, not to the park.

(Naturally, you could ban poor people from reselling their ticket. On the grounds of 'we know better' than them that they really need their ticket, instead of the thousand dollar they could get for it on the secondary market. They'll probably just spend it on booze! /s)

[olivermuty]

This argument is nonsensical unless you suggest the tickets should be sellable.

False equivalent argumentation.

Edit: Excellent idea to give poor people money either way though. UBI!

[eru]

Yes, of course, the tickets should re-sellable.

Naturally, you could ban poor people from reselling their ticket. On the grounds that 'we know better' than them that they really need their ticket, instead of the thousand dollar they could get for it on the secondary market. They'll probably just spend it on booze! /s

[karmakurtisaani]

You face a lot if opposition, but I fully agree with you. This is basic economic thinking.

Somehow people are fine with having healthcare, education, housing, transportation etc. being driven by market forces, but parks not? In my opinion the state should absolutely cash in on the lucrative public parks. Otherwise you will and up with scalpers and other perversions that will take their cut in pricing the true value of this good.

Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.

[eru]

Thanks for the support.

> Giving poor people money in form of UBI or tax breaks is the way to go in distributing all public goods.

Be careful, that's not the orthodox definition of public goods. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

Public goods (by the orthodox definition) don't need to be auctioned off, and can't be auctioned off: by definition, there's no way to keep the loser of the auction from enjoying the public good anyway.

You are right that most government provided goods, like public parks etc, should be charged for. And that includes roads.

However I wouldn't necessarily make a blanket statement that _all_ government goods should be provided like that. It's just a very strong default, and exceptions need a strong argument to convince me.

For example, some goods are very cheap to provide and very hard to exclude. Or their use has very big positive externalities.

An example that springs to mind are childhood vaccines. They are easy to exclude, but they are cheap to provide and other people benefit from you using them. So I am very sympathetic to an argument that the government should provide standard childhood vaccines for free, and perhaps even pay people to take them.

[karmakurtisaani]

Thanks for the correction, I was on a bus writing in a hurry with my phone, so no time for a comprehensive thesis. I agree that making a blanket statement like that misses a lot of important cases, real world has too many complications. The example of vaccines is a good one, as it's beneficial to everyone that everyone else takes them.

[eru]

No worries. Thanks for being so civil!

In principle you could still sell the vaccines and separately give people money for taking them. For cheap, well-established vaccines that would just be more hassle than it's worth.

For eg the first batches of the covid vaccine, it would have made a lot of sense though.

[hnbad]

Or just raise the ceiling income tax rate and introduce a wealth tax so there are fewer ultra-rich people skewing the "market price". You could then use the extra tax income to fund public services like housing, transit, medical care and food so the poor have more freely disposable income.

Wait, I thought we were talking about parks?

[eru]

Income taxes have lots of deadweight effects. Raising them mostly leads to more and more avoidance.

Establish a land value tax, if you want efficient taxation. You can't hide land, and you can't pass such a tax on, either.

[hnbad]

The biggest problem with income tax is that income tax does not distinguish by source of income. There was a proposal in Switzerland to establish a separate capital gains tax with a considerably higher tax rate that targets income from capital (rent, stocks, dividends, etc) though sadly it failed to get enough votes.

The problem with LVT is that most billionaires don't have most of their wealth in land. It's just a specific version of a wealth tax that targets a form of wealth that is no longer the biggest factor in what makes the extremely rich, well, extremely rich. LVT won't turn Bezos or Musk into non-billionaires.

[eru]

Most countries already tax capital gains at a different rate than other income. For example here in Singapore we have a maximum marginal income tax of 22% and a capital gains tax of 0%. (Dividends are taxed separately.)

What was special about the Swiss proposal?

> The problem with LVT is that most billionaires don't have most of their wealth in land. It's just a specific version of a wealth tax that targets a form of wealth that is no longer the biggest factor in what makes the extremely rich, well, extremely rich. LVT won't turn Bezos or Musk into non-billionaires.

Bezos worked very hard and his company Amazon benefitted many customers, workers and investors. If you have a tax system manages to raise a lot of money to the government with no deadweight losses, then it's an extra bonus if it leaves Bezos to his billions, too. That should encourage other people to emulate him.

Land is still extremely important in the modern economy. You might think eg modern Internet companies don't have much to do with land, but for some reason they still mostly cluster in a few spots around the globe, like Silicon Valley; despite the high rent in those places. They must get some advantage from that land there.

An LVT would allow to drop income taxes and capital taxes to 0%.

[hnbad]

> What was special about the Swiss proposal?

The proposal taxed capital gains significantly higher than income from wages. It also had a wider definition of capital gain. The tax was also to only kick in for capital gains income exceeding a certain amount that exempted most median income earners' retirement accounts.

> Bezos worked very hard

You and I have very different views of this then. By this logic the midwive or nurse who delivered Jeff Bezos should deserve more wealth than him because she not only delivered the baby that went on to become the man to do all those things but also delivered many others throughout her career and likely spent long hours working just as hard if not harder. Or if you think considering indirect effects is unfair, literally any sanitation worker probably works harder and benefits people's lives more than Bezos ever did directly. And somehow all of them do their work without needing the existence of billionaires to encourage them because nobody ever became a billionaire by spending their life decluttering sewage systems or delivering babies.

Even if you were able to make the argument that Bezos worked thousands of times harder than the workers that made money for him, I disagree that we should compensate such "harder work" on a near-linear (or even exponential) scale because once spending a thousand dollars or one dollar becomes a rounding error for you, money stops being something you exchange for goods and services and starts being something you use to exert power over a supposedly democratic system.

If you believe in democracy (i.e. political power should be evenly distributed among the people), you either need to abandon capitalism (or more abstractly: the ability to exert political power by using money) or prevent the existence of billionaires (i.e. massive inequality in the distribution of money). If you also care about the climate crisis, the latter seems a no-brainer because without the ability to exert political power all the billionaires' money is good for is wasting resources by trying to figure out how many gold-plated yachts you can stack on top of each other.

> Land is still extremely important in the modern economy.

And yet you can't make an argument for why "modern Internet companies" cluster in a few places with high rent. If you want to fix the entire economy by introducing a land value tax maybe you should first have a solid grasp on why certain land is currently valuable and how an LVT would impact that.

> An LVT would allow to drop income taxes and capital taxes to 0%.

I know that Georgites believe this but you also completely sidestepped my point about LVT in essence being a limited wealth tax. This also presupposes that dropping income and capital taxes to 0% is something we want when the only historical data we have suggest that dropping income taxes and taxing capital gains lower than income from wages has led to a drastic widening of the wealth gap.

The LVT is a tool specifically designed to hurt landlords (and arguably it's not even very good at that as LVT on rented properties just translates to higher rents). It tries to solve "efficient land use". I'm not interested in making the market more efficient. I see market extremism as as much of a threat to humanity as religious extremism.

[lazyasciiart]

Then you need to give all the poor people enough money to outbid all the rich people - otherwise no individual poor person can win the auction. Sounds a lot more expensive than letting people self select and assigning tickets based on some method other than money.

[eru]

> [...] otherwise no individual poor person can win the auction

I don't see how that works. We don't see only rich people win all auctions on ebay, do we? Nor do we see them buying up all tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert (to bring an example where supply is limited, Mr Bieber can only give so many concerts in his lifetime). Rich people don't even own all houses, either. Nor do they eat all the meat.

[lazyasciiart]

These tickets are orders of magnitude rarer than houses or even concert tickets. There are ~20,000 tickets to the Wave, total, each year - in 2017 alone there were over 1 million tickets to Justin Bieber concerts. There are over 700 billionaires in the US, and over 5 million millionaires. If only one third of millionaires wants to do these hikes, only once ever, and doesn't want to take anyone else, that's the next 100 years of tickets bought up.

[lifeonlars]

Does this apply to all public goods, or are there limits to this principle?

For example, is it paternalistic to supply clean water via a municipal utility? Do you think that the commonwealth should give poor people enough money to buy clean water in a public market?

[eru]

It doesn't apply to any public goods. It can't.

Access to national parks isn't a public good.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics)

> In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good)[1] is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous. For such goods, users cannot be barred from accessing or using them for failing to pay for them. Also, use by one person neither prevents access of other people nor does it reduce availability to others.[1] Therefore, the good can be used simultaneously by more than one person.[2] This is in contrast to a common good, such as wild fish stocks in the ocean, which is non-excludable but rivalrous to a certain degree. If too many fish were harvested, the stocks would deplete, limiting the access of fish for others. A public good must be valuable to more than one user, otherwise, the fact that it can be used simultaneously by more than one person would be economically irrelevant.

How would you even run an auction on a good that's non-excludable? By definition, you can't keep the losers of the auction from using the good.

> For example, is it paternalistic to supply clean water via a municipal utility? Do you think that the commonwealth should give poor people enough money to buy clean water in a public market?

Sounds reasonable.

Most municipal utility (at least in the places I lived in) charge for the water they provide. Usually those charges are very reasonable.

It sounds like a lot of hassle to give poor people a weekly water ration in kind. At the very least, you need to involve the water utility in the bureaucracy that administers welfare. Seems like a lot of hassle.

Just giving poor people money that they can use to pay their utility bills seems much simpler in comparison. And that's eg what they do in Germany (the country where I know the most about how government welfare is run).

At most, you sometimes hear people suggest that the poor need some extra money, if eg electricity or water prices are suddenly higher than before. But I haven't really heard anyone seriously suggest giving poor people a water allowance. Is that common where you live?

[lifeonlars]

You're not aware of the existence of water fountains?

[eru]

There's also aircon at government buildings here where I live, that you can visit for free.

However it would still be a bit silly to say that our government is providing free aircon to poor people.

Technically, they do. But it's such a niche case. Just like people don't typically go and fill up jugs at the public water fountains to flush their toilets at home with.

So you are technically correct, but it doesn't matter.