[jlebar]

> Part of the issue is not systematically using a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.

We don't do this for gasoline (in most countries), even though it is also vital for life. And yet people can still drive, afford to eat food grown with fertilizers, use plastic, and so on.

Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.

[thephyber]

Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.

When hurricanes come to South Florida, the well off migrate North to wait out the storm while the poor suffer the dangerous conditions. Part of this is due to the price spikes of gasoline in the local market as supplies dwindle due to fewer truck shipments and refineries shutting down for the storm.

Water is similar. Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.

The “markets work” heuristic is frequently wrong if you don’t glaze over the very many counterexamples.

[roenxi]

Yeah but that response is stupid, irrational, makes shortages more likely and discourages people from taking action when they need to do something different right now. In an emergency situation, people who can provide more of something that is in desperately short supply should be paid more. People consistently adopt a strategy of trying to not pay them more and it's one of those really annoying cases where people's instincts are primed to make them band together and do something predictably foolish.

Rationing is an inevitable response. But to say that is like saying witch hunts are inevitable - they are. They're still bad ideas. People who can maintain access to their higher reasoning should resist them.

[jlebar]

> Gasoline is absolutely rationed when it becomes scarce after having been plentiful.

Sure, but OP is advocating that we should "systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds." They're not arguing that this is something to be applied only in emergencies.

Similarly in your post, you use the need to ration gas after a hurricane to argue that we should ration water all the time. This does not follow.

> Both water rights and water utilities are gamed by people who have resources. The people that are hurt are usually poor utilities bill payers, rural residents who are the first to lose service when wells dry up, and anyone who thinks they have water rights until an upstream user exhausts their expected supply.

The logical extension of your argument here is that the world would be better if we subsidized gasoline for "poor utilities bill payers" and "rural residents".

But why gasoline and water specifically? Why not also healthcare, food, childcare, and other necessities?

Then consider, if we have a budget of $X per family to subsidize necessities, surely the government is not best suited to decide how to split up those dollars between water, gas, healthcare, food, and childcare? There's no right answer universally, some people need food more than they need gas, and vice versa. Surely an individual family would be better equipped to decide for themselves?

We have now invented "giving money to poor people instead of subsidizing demand", which I wholeheartedly support.

[alex43578]

200 miles will easily get you out of the path of a hurricane. 200 back home. 400 miles at 20mpg is 20 gallons of gas. Even if gas doubles from $4 to $8, that’s only an extra $80, likely less than the cost of that one night of motel, and certainly less than the economic costs of actually being hit by a hurricane.

As with many things, markets do work, but people don’t make rational choices for their well-being.

[da_chicken]

> We don't do this for gasoline

No, but commercial trucks use diesel, which carries about 25% higher taxes per gallon. And vehicle registration on semi-trailer trucks is significantly higher as well. They pay, on average, between $25,000 and $30,000 in taxes and fees each year.

> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone.

No, they aren't. They're ridiculously bad when you leave them alone because someone captures the market, ramps up anti-competitive practices, and immediately begins rent-seeking as hard as possible.

Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free. That lauded "self-interest" encourages businesses that have reached nearly 100% market share to increase profit in other ways.

[cma]

Heavier commercial trucks that run on diesel tend to cause more damage. Scales with roughly 4th power of axle load.

[AnthonyMouse]

That's a bad argument. There are gasoline trucks with a GVWR of ~20,000 pounds and diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord. If you actually wanted to do that then you'd instead do something like tax based on axle weight and miles traveled, e.g. by reading the odometer during inspections.

The better argument is that diesel is worse for air quality and then it's a pigouvian tax in proportion to how much you burn.

The realpolitik argument is that fewer people have diesel vehicles and democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. But taxing commercial trucks is also a pretty sneaky way of taxing ~everything while pretending to not, so it's also the principal/agent problem. Legislators want to spend money while pretending not to take it from you.

[cma]

> diesel cars that weigh less than a Honda Accord.

It is taxed less than gas in lots of Europe where that is more common. You also need to factor in mpg vs gas, where it is higher, so more road-wear pCO2 was part of the debate in Europe, even though it is longer carbon chain so worse co2 ratio per calorie, the engines are more efficient. Diesel is worse for local air, better for long term co2.

There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one. Farm fuel with no road wear isn't taxed much at all in lots of places and is more often diesel.

[AnthonyMouse]

> It is taxed less than gas in lots of Europe where that is more common.

But then it's even worse at recovering the cost of road maintenance from heavy trucks.

> You also need to factor in mpg vs gas, where it is higher

Passat TDI (diesel), ~3500 pounds, ~45MPG. Toyota Camry Hybrid (gas), ~3500 pounds, ~50MPG.

In theory diesel hybrids would be even more efficient but diesel engines and hybrid transmissions both add up-front cost and further efficiency improvements have diminishing returns because reducing a $100 fuel cost by 30% isn't as much money as reducing a $70 fuel cost by 30%.

> There are a mixture of factors and lobbying behind the differencs, road wear is one.

Road wear is the irrelevant one in terms of fuel. Because of the fourth power law, essentially all road wear is from full-size buses and semi trucks. The contribution from passenger cars and even the likes of diesel pickup trucks rounds to zero. Meanwhile the largest vehicles use a minority of the fuel because there are several times more passenger cars than semi trucks.

[AnthonyMouse]

"Someone captures the market" is the thing that happens when the government micromanages them. Laws that charge more per unit to high users aren't anti-trust laws. A farm doesn't have higher market share in food than Google has in a tech market just because it uses more water.

[jlebar]

> Free markets are pretty good at finding good prices. Markets that are left alone do not remain free.

OK but the market intervention being discussed here does not create a free(er) market. Its intent and effect is the literal opposite.

[thrance]

Gasoline is heavily regulated and subsidized. Leaving the oil market alone resulted in Standard Oil, and we obviously don't want that again.

[jlebar]

I am not saying that there should be no regulations on monopolies. We are discussing a very specific market intervention, namely the proposal to

> systematically [use] a pricing structure that charges disproportionately more for usage above high thresholds.

This is what I'm arguing is a bad idea, by using gasoline as an example.

If you want to argue that imposing this pricing structure systematically is good because it would help prevent a bad monopoly like Standard Oil, you'd need to explain (a) how this market intervention would prevent monopolies and (b) how it's a "better" way (according to however we decide to measure "better") to prevent monopolies than the alternatives. I don't see how this is true, though.

[thrance]

Your claim was:

> Turns out markets are pretty good when you leave them alone. But when they're not left alone (as is the case with water today!!) you get some weird shit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

[Straw]

Standard oil not only reduced consumer prices for gasoline, but was already losing its monopoly to competitors during the antitrust trial.

[cybercatgurrl]

excuse me? leave the markets alone? to do what? continue screwing people over with the cost of living? at some point the government needs to step in when greed outstrips the ability of the consumer to meet the demand. capitalism on it’s own will demand ever increasing profits and that is simply unsustainable for any civilisation