Ezra Klein, and all his blogging flunkies have been on an extended rant regarding the necessity of the upcoming transportation bill. Among the things that's most annoyed me in what's been said is this:
the gas tax is no longer sufficient to fund the needed transportation investments and so it either needs to be raised or supplementedNeed is the big wrong think. Anybody using "need" in their thinking is likely to be 100% confused. It's all
Take 3 factors:
- Cost
- Benefit
- Other things you could do with the $ or time
After you've hit all 3 factors...you can talk about which things you would prefer to do. If you talk need...you're just nuts. Need talk is an attempt to short-circuit rational behavior, and focus entirely on benefit, and ignore both cost, and opportunity cost.
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6 comments:
Human beings need love.
(they also need a certain amount of food and water to survive)
Mad yet?
I am usually (51%) smart enough to tell when folks are intentionally provoking me. Then it's funny. I just fail the other 49%.
Got to fund that SWPL High Speed Rail somehow. The plebes love their roads - hide the tax in there.
Nothing a little opaque accounting can't do ...
Information-rich post here.
The "Mad yet?" was the clue that I meant to provoke. But since I can be quite the moralist, I understand why you might get confused ;-)
I just hope you wind up in the Chicagoland area in the second half of the year. Also, I'm still working on some metaphysics posts for you...
Herz,
I'm still suspicious of metaphysics as a discipline. I (think I) need epistemology to get to the point of needing a metaphysics. So the question for me is how you GET to metaphysics, not as much what the metaphysics. My interests probably massively nudging me here, but AFAICT, you have to start with epistemology. And that's why I have issues with Feser: he seems to play Aristotelian metaphysics-first. Incidentally, so did Ayn Rand (who I loosely followed for a long time), and it took me years to figure out where she was cheating.
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