Korean Job Discussion Forums

[ernie]

dude: you're not acknowledging any of the points that are being made here in response to your arguments!

1. the whole idea of capitalism is to use the free market (rather than government intervention) to determine what something costs. unless there is a clear need to intervene, the government should stay out!

2. everyone agrees that we need alternative energy, so government intervention might be warranted. the problem is this: are you willing to bet the farm that energy source x is the best way? what is the proper alternative energy source? should the government just give subsidies away to any nutty idea?

3. it's not oil that fuels terrorism, it's foreign policy! oil is just a thing, it can't be 'good' or 'bad'... if the PEOPLE in the middle east (not just the corrupt oligarchs) received their fair share of oil revenue, they wouldn't be blowing themselves up about it... additional oil taxes aren't going to do anything except line the coffers of the government who is responsible for this mess!

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[ernie"]

[ontheway]

A man goes to a doctor. He has tremors, cirrohsis of the liver, he was found passed out on the street, he lost his job, his family is suffering ... The doctor tells him he is an alcoholic and needs treatment and must give up his addiction to alcohol. The drinking caused the problem. He has underlying personal issues that have caused him to drink, and those need to be addressed, too, so that he can stay away from alcohol.


Joo tells the man he needs another drink. He just needs to find an alternative form of alcohol.



Raising the gas tax and funding alternative fuels is the wrong approach. It is like giving another drink to a drunk.


Joo, you need to go back to school. Maybe High School. Maybe elementary school. You have no skills in logical reasoning.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[ontheway"]A man goes to a doctor. He has tremors, cirrohsis of the liver, he was found passed out on the street, he lost his job, his family is suffering ... The doctor tells him he is an alcoholic and needs treatment and must give up his addiction to alcohol. The drinking caused the problem. He has underlying personal issues that have caused him to drink, and those need to be addressed, too, so that he can stay away from alcohol.

[Pluto]

[ontheway]

Yes Joo, and Pluto too, it's you two who don't get economics. You're looking at the little picture.

An additional gas tax, unless it's huge, like $3 - $5 dollars per gallon, or maybe more, will have little effect on consumption. And in any case, it will not change the malinvestment that is causing the problem.

The malinvestment was caused by hundreds of billions of dollars in free roads, highways, rural electrification, RFD mail, government energy, heating, electric subsidies, subsidies to nuclear developers, waiving of free market insurance needs - actually trillions of dollars in subsidies that have caused at least $20 trillion dollars in malinvestment in infrastructure and housing stock.

The cost of gasoline is tiny by comparison, so people will continue to demand that roads, highways, bridges, schools, hospitals, houses, factories, businesses etc. be built in the wrong places because such a amount of subsidies gives them no incentive to change.

End the subsidies and, overnight, people will begin to reassess their entire way of working/living/commuting/shopping and transportation and development decisions can finally be made in a rational way.

Raise the gas tax, and the distortions actually become greater, and the malinvestment continues. The pressure for oil or for an alternative to oil derives from the existing and ongoing malinvestment. An oil tax does not change that.


You guys have only heard the words "supply and demand" on the news or maybe in an "Intro" class, but you missed the part about Complementary Goods, and when the value of the complementary goods is far greater than the good in question, being demanded under "supply and demand," then the demand curve becomes nearly inelastic, and consuption will fall little as the supply curve is shifted outward due to the imposition of a tax. The price will rise, but consumption will fall very little.

Liberty and the Free Market are the answer, Socialism is the problem, and you guys need to go back to school, study logic and read some books. Try: Ludwig VonMises, Frederich Hayek, Murray Rothbard.

[ontheway]

There is no evidence that the imposition of large taxes on alcohol and tobacco products has caused any significant decline in consumption. Users in existance contemporary to the time of a tax increase have shown little inclination to a decline in consumtion after the tax imposition. Likewise, new users who began at the higher price levels have continued to consume.

Nearly 100% of the declines in usage of alcohol and tobacco products has been attributed to the spreading general knowledge and acceptance of the idea that tobacco causes cancer in both users and secondhand smokers, and causes birth defects and that alcohol when consumed excessively causes health problems and personal and family problems. This knowledge has meant that fewer individuals actually begin smoking. Price increases due to taxation have had almost no impact, especially on tobacco.

The promotion of the concepts of being a social drinker, the fact that drunken escapades are no longer "cool" in many circles, and the great efforts taken to discourage drunk driving have contributed to the decline in alcohol consumption. However, the pattern of decline in per capita alcohol consumption began almost immediately after Prohibition ended and has continued every year from then until now.

One impact of higher taxes, however, has been the rapid increase in the at home production of beer and wine and private growth of tobacco in areas where this is possible. This production is untaxed, unreported, uncounted and excluded from production and consumption figures, although some estimates and indicators of its massive increase are available.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[Pluto]

[ontheway]

Yes, infrastructure is bad, when it is the wrong infrastructure, built for the wrong reasons in the wrong places.

For over decades the US has created this huge malinvestment. The Governments, federal, state and local, in a grand fascist/national socialist coalition of pork, corruption and just plain old stupidity built, rigged and corrupted the nation and the world.

Policies multiplied and reinforced each other and caused the US (and the rest of the world that has sought to follow) to invest in a high cost, energy dependent form of development and transport and is wasteful, slows economic growth, pollutes the environment and impoverishes the people. It has lead to dependence and war.

These policies have engendered urban decay and suburban sprawl, separated people from their jobs, schools, shopping, friends, relatives, recreation and environment. They have caused the people to become dependent on the most wasteful, inefficient transportation, energy and development model possible. It was stupid. It was populist, logrolling socialism run by a greedy gang of good old boys padding their pockets with pelf looted from the taxpayers.

The worst thing we could do now is to try to have the US Government (at any level) or the various other governments of the world try to solve or even mitigate the problem. We need to get the governments out of the way and let the market and the people solve the problem.

We need to privatize every single piece of the transportation system. It matters little how, but to be fair, the invesment and ownership of the public should be recoginzed. Roads and highways turned over to the people to own and manage, users charged as they drive, electric and other energy subsidies eliminated ...

The people could then begin to find the myriad of solutions that are needed to get us out of this mess. Primarily and foremost would be the need to REDUCE consumption. Conservation on a massive scale would begin. The market is much more creative than any government, and millions of solutions would be employed in a free market. By not taxing oil and other forms of energy, producers would be encouraged to produce knowing that they could keep their profits.

Taxing one energy producer takes capital away from producers with the skill and incentive to invest directly, and discourages investment by newcomers to the field, knowing they will be the next victims of a populist socialistic assault on their property, incomes and liberty.

The most important result would be that people, one by one, individual by individual would look to reduce their energy consumption. The infrastructure could be redesigned, replanned, adapted and modified to fit the new paradigm.

Relocating the endpoints of their daily lives would allow for the elimination of the need for most transportation on a daily basis. (This means that people would choose to live close to the places they want to go and would relocate all of these places to eliminate the need for most transportation.) This would require the incentive of tax free private ownership of all property and the infrastructure and the elimination of all taxes on property and income. All zoning laws and other governmental impediments to rational development must be repealed. With the endpoints relocated to reasonable distances, the least expensive available forms of transportation, which happen to be the most energy efficient, environmentally friendly, and healthy, could be employed. These include: walking, elevators and bicycles.

No factor in the consuption market should be taxed at a higher rate than any other, because that would engender more of the types of malinvestment incentives that we need to shake out of the system.

(For the remaining governmental funding needs, a flat tax only on consumption would be the least harmful, if kept under 10% in the aggregate for all levels of government combined. All taxes are bad, but this would do the least damage to the market, and reduce distortions to the lowest possible levels.

It would then become the goal, honor and measure of true success of successive governments to brag, not about new legislation, but the elimination of unnecessary laws, rules and regulations and the further reduction in the total aggregate rate of a single consumption flat tax.)

[ernie]

WOOT! ^

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

ontheway"]

[ontheway]

Joo,

From reading your last post it has become clear that you are not actually aware of the meaning of the words that you are reading and writing. It is no wonder that you don't understand.

You mentioned "public transportation" in your vacuous verbiage, and you seem to think that includes private automobiles.

The fact is, I haven't mentioned or referred to "public transportation" except in a general way. That is because the massive subsidies provided to the private automobile user, the ones that are destroying America and the World, are so massive, that public transportation (busses, subways etc.) have been largely killed off by socialism. Even with massive subsidies, they make barely a dent in the total daily transportation of Americans.

This is an unfortunate result of the socialism which you still support. When we finally end ALL the massive subsidies in the energy/transportation market, then the various methods of public transit and mass transit can begin to assert themselves in a rational manner. This cannot happen if we do not end the subsidies.

At the same time, we must not tax gasoline or oil. Public transport is another reason why oil and gas taxes are wrong. Oil and gasoline are major inputs into the provision of public transportation. In order to get the rational amount of public transport in the market, the providers of public transport must know and use the correct value of their inputs. Only in this way can they make rational decisions.

And, if the roads and highways, energy delivery and other subsidies remain available to those seeking the modern socialistically subsidized suburban style of living, raising the gasoline tax will have little affect on consumption. Yes, a few people will, over time, replace older high mileage vehicles with lower mileage vehicles, but the continued expansion of the suburban wastelands, and the continued displacement of the endpoints of daily life to greater and greater distances means that total consumption gasoline, oil and other energy products will continue to rise.

We need to contract those endpoints. We need to change the paradigm. We need to end the subsidies so that people will want to reduce their travel distances.

We do NOT need people to get better gas mileage or carpool. We need to get people to change their residence, working, schooling and shopping arrangements so that they can walk, bike and take elevators.

We need to reduce the distances and create smaller and denser fully contained communities where people can do all of their daily activities without cars at all. Where some simple, privately owned public transportation will be available to handle those exceptionally long trips, and the rest can be handled on foot.

Raising the gasoline tax will have opposte effects. It will hurt mass transit providers, it will take the place of real reform, it will convince people that we've done all we need to do, when what is needed now is total reform.

We need to ABOLISH the system that caused the problem: SOCIALISM.

We need to let the people face the true costs of their energy use and transportation decisions, and let the people figure out how to fix their problems in a rational manner.

We need LIBERTY.


Government made this problem by trying to impose simple solutions on complex problems. There are hundreds of billions of decisions to be made by hundreds of millions of people. The simplistic notions of a gasoline tax cannot work. It is facile to think that a gasoline tax can help us now. It is facile to believe that is will make things better.

Simple solutions cannot solve complex problems. That is why socialism ALWAYS fails. What you are proposing is just one more of those 5 year plans that always failed in the USSR. Socialism always fails to provide the variety of alternatives that are available in a free market.

It is simplistic and naive to believe that government can provide simple solutions to our problems. And government is too stupid, clumsy and cumbersome to provide the complex solutions needed.

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]

[Joo Rip Gwa Rhhee]