Let’s make everything free

I cannot stop thinking about a comment to my post about panhandling. According to commenter John, no one using public transportation in Seattle can be required to pay a fare:

Got hit up by a guy in Seattle who needed money for the bus because he only had 50 cents and bus fare was $1.50. The bus driver kicked him off, he told me. I told him, just tell the driver he was broke.

I felt safe telling him this because I know a Metro bus driver who regularly complains about the fact he has to let ANYONE on the bus, because Metro and King County’s rules say, let the passengers ride whether they pay or not. And it’s generally the obnoxious ones who claim to have no money, yet want a ride. And he has to give it to them.

What that means is that whether people know it or not, public transportation in Seattle is now “free.” (In quotes because it isn’t really free; the taxpayers are forced to pay for it.)

I find the implications of this deeply disturbing, and I am now beginning to understand why the left is so absolutely, gushingly enamored with public transportation. It is the perfect foot in the door for the idea that “free” transportation is a “right,” along with medical care, housing, food, and the rest of it. Never mind that nothing that costs money is free. Never mind that making everyone pay for everyone else’s wants and needs constitutes socialism, which has been shown over and over again to not work.

If Seattle passed a law requiring cab drivers to transport non-paying customers, there would be a huge public outcry. People would say it was unfair to require a cab driver to subsidize his customers, and in all likelihood, the law would be thrown out by the courts as an unconstitutional taking. Yet because the buses in Seattle are “public,” and drivers are government employees, requiring them to transport non-paying customers is not seen as an injustice to them. I see it as an injustice to all. Er, I should say all taxpayers, for not everyone pays taxes.  But the only difference between making all taxpayers pay and making the cab driver pay is the way the subsidized theft of transportation services is spread out.

And I do mean theft. Calling what is going on “free” and claiming it is an entitlement is like saying a burglar has a right to the property in your house.

In fairness, though, there is another side to this argument. From an advocacy site called Free Public Transit:

Everyone benefits – Everyone pays

If public transit were free, more people would use it.
Fewer auto-miles would be driven. Carbon dioxide emissions
would drop. Everyone would benefit. It would be fair, then,
that the cost would be paid by everyone.

Autosprawl is bad for the economy. The profits generated by millions of single-family homes and millions of single-occupancy vehicles are not real profits. The waste of resources and other societal costs are “externalized” from the calculation of these profits, passed on to the taxpayer, future generations, and other countries.

Well, at least they admit that everyone pays. So why doesn’t that mean it isn’t free? Why use that word? And what about the idea that the profits generated by the sales of cars and houses are not real because the resources are “wasted”? Who gets to decide what constitutes “waste”? Why isn’t it just as wasteful to force the productive classes to subsidize the unproductive classes?

Everyone pays alright.

The cost of “free” is your freedom.

But I guess that if you’re a slave, whatever you get is free.

 

crowdedSubway.jpg


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3 responses to “Let’s make everything free”

  1. Simon Avatar
    Simon

    Committing frottage on private transportation is difficult. (The girl in the red hair is kinda cute).

    Of course the estimations of the value of that will vary. Depending.

  2. Hugh Avatar
    Hugh

    Only the responsible and accountable become slaves in the socialist state, those collecting the benefits, (doing nothing, contributing nothing) are still free and live at a standard equal to or better than the slaves.
    However the governing class becomes the new elite, all powerful and supported as kings.

  3. Keith_Indy Avatar
    Keith_Indy

    The cost of “free” is your freedom.

    *****

    Great quote, you need to make that into a bumper sticker…