Sometimes I read headlines and just shake my head. Lately this has been happening more often than not. Here’s a few…
Some people are more equal than others
The “Justice” Department has declined to press criminal charges against Eric Holder for refusing to release documents related to the “Fast and Furious” sting, in which nearly 2,000 small arms were lost across the Mexican border. One of these weapons was subsequently used to kill US Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.
Lobbyists poised to hijack Obamacare
The WSJ expects a tsunami of lobbying as hospitals, medical-device makers, pharmaceuticals, insurers and other special interest groups scramble to divvy up the Obamacar pie in their favor. Unless you are a special interest group, this is not going to work out to your benefit.
Student loan rates steady at 3.4%
Congress renewed $6B worth of funding to subsidize student loan rates at 3.4% as part of a $120B “transportation” package. Why is this part of a highway funding bill?
Army Leverages 100-Year Old “Technology”
Knows as the Long Endurance Multi-Intelligence Vehicle (LEMV), it’s a blimp the size of a football field and is being contracted by military rent seekers extraordinaire, Northrop Grumman Corp. There is something to be said about going lo-tech; guerrilla tactics and improvised munitions tend to wreak havoc on organized forces expecting “conventional warfare. But if your lo-tech solution costs half a billion dollars (Northrop Grumman was awarded a $517,000,000 contract to develop), you’re blowing it.
A dollar an hour to park in royal oak..I bet businesses love that…not! (via Twitter)
If I had my druthers, the city would stop collecting property taxes and say to all the people and businesses: “You figure it out. The roads, the parking lots, the meters, they’re all yours now. Do with them (or not) as you wish.” So, this is not a defense per se of the proposed increase.
With that qualifier out of the way, I responded with a little Econ 101 knowledge: especially on a Thursday-Friday-Saturday evening, they could easily charge $3-4 per hour that much and there would be no shortage of people willing to pay. This is fundamental economics: when the price of a good or service is set lower than the market will bear, there will be a shortage of that good or service vis à vis the number of people who want to consume that good or service.
If parking were nominally “free”, it would be even more difficult to find a parking spot. Right now, parking is inexpensive, at fifty cents per hour during normal business hours and it’s still very difficult to find a parking spot. This is the number 2 reason why I don’t visit Royal Oak.
The number 1 reason is a preponderance of douchebags. I think the douchebags are attracted by low parking fees.
Stephen responded that, “As a rule, merchants resist parking price increases… they have a tendency to drive away business, but your point is well-taken.”
The notion that these customers (the same people who gladly pay $6 for a pint of beer and $190 for a pair of jeans) are going to be off-put by a 25-cent per hour increase in the meter fees is as retarded as a football bat, by the way.
Let me rephrase that: The business interests downtown oppose any change to this fee structure which would result in them bearing a greater amount (i.e., their fair share) of the burden for maintaining public parking lots in the city. The taxpayers in the City of Royal Oak are providing corporate welfare to the businesses in Royal Oak, predominately in the city’s downtown district. It is a direct transfer of wealth from the people who live and pay taxes in Royal Oak, to the people who only visit Royal Oak.
In a free market, there would be no taxpayer subsidized parking lots just like there would be no taxpayer subsidized bank bailouts, because there would be no taxpayers in the first place! How the parking situation might resolve itself, if I had my druthers (see above) is anyone’s guess. Here are a few options:
Parking lots could be strictly private: belonging to a person or group of people who may (or may not) choose to explicitly charge for their use.
An independent parking lot would probably charge daily or hourly fees to maintain the parking lot.
A restaurant might charge a daily or hourly fee for entry, and validate the charge (or a portion thereof) for any restaurant patrons, or a restaurant might keep the lot for patrons only, building the cost of maintenance/upkeep in to their menu prices, just like they do with the amortization costs of the establishment proper.
Or parking lots could be communally owned and operated — perhaps by a group of neighbors/citizens, but more likely by a group of commercial establishments with less absolute need for parking lots may pool resources together and establish shared lots, perhaps managed by the group or by a third party.
But instead, we have this pseudo-marketplace where the state or city zoning board sets (more-or-less arbitrarily) a uniform price for all places & times. The fact of the matter is that, although business interests may unanimously oppose fee increases, raising the parking fee is not necessarily “bad for business” or “bad for downtown Royal Oak”. The effects either way are probably de minimis, but I would argue that at least on principle of basic economic theory, subsidizing parking lots is a harmful distortion to market prices.
The results: parking is a clusterfuck during weekends and high-traffic events, and there are too many idiots wearing Ed Retardy jeans and fist-pumping all night long in sunglasses after dark.
