If poor people don't have enough money, then we should give them money instead of fake currency. Giving them fake currency reduces utility.
If we give them money they can buy whatever they want/need the most. If we give them scrip that can only be used on one thing then they have to buy that even if they would value it less than something else.
This also offers the opportunity for rationing, as it's possible to increase or decrease the allocations based on net usage.
If the credits expire after some time, say a few months, then there's the ability to bank them, but not indefinitely. This is not a form of perpetual wealth accumulation.
The argument could be made for either making the credits transferable, so that those less wealthy in other regards could sell them for other units of trade, or not, and/or to set limits on such transactions.
All of this occurs independent of actual currency, though there would be an overall budget to the programme.
And it accomplishes the goal of setting an opportunity cost to highway travel, and congestion, which could itself be varied according to circumstances (higher charges at peak hours / during high-congestion events, lower off-peak or when uncongested).
Then there's the question of interactions with alternative transit, telecommute, or similar schemes.
2) What is wrong with wealth accumulation? If credit recipients would rather do that than drive on roads they should be able to do so. They's how they get less poor!
3) If they credits are transferable then you are effectively giving people money. Just in an ass-backwards and overly confusing way.
IMO, the problem is "how do we allocate road so that high utility use gets precedent over low value use, without defining high/low value as 'rich/poor person wants to get from a to b'"
Expiring credits is an idea, as are a lot of options. Designed markets are a devil-in-the-detail endevours. A market is a good tool for this job, that's why economists and wonks like tolls. But, not every market needs to be the market. In this case, The Market is probably worse than the no market free-for-all.
I mentioned the option of transferability for completeness. I'm not advocating for or against it. I am noting that it would change the dynamics somewhat.
Your #2 is a rather more involved and tangential discussion. Historically, it has a strong tendency to end in tears, or worse.
I actually think this was a bit of an aha moment for me re: cryptocurrency and government.
It's possible for a government to setup a market for a public good, create a currency for that good and distribute that currency equally to people. All without spending actual currency(ignoring administrative costs of setting up a blockchain).
The value of the public good for people then determines the USD exchange rate, but poor people are never excluded from using the good and at the same time you are not massively inflating the money supply.
edit. In fairness, nothing about this requires a cryptocurrency/blockchain. It's more a general argument in favor of governments charging for public goods by creating custom (maybe fiat) currencies which they distribute equally to all citizens.
There might be administrative and/or psychological benefits to running all these custom currencies on blockchains.
Creating a whole new kind of currency with its own special rules is a huge undertaking. Not to mention the ongoing pain-in-the ass cost to every citizen when they have to carry around and think about a new special kind of money that can only be used for one thing.
If you did that with roads, what's stopping the upper income distribution from excluding everyone else from entire cities? A gated community concept might scale to an entire upperclass city with a private airport, hostpital, and 1000$ entry fee to keep out the poor. This might even effectively reduce overall costs for the municipality since homeless and property crime would be greatly reduced.
On the other hand if other currency is used, it makes everyone easily trackable.
I think the dumb pipes model still has some advantages.
zkSNARKs for the rescue! It's surprisingly easy to roll with that. (See Zcash, Monero, ETH and whatever.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramp_meter
I'd focus more on one of my other punts above: ways of drawing a correspondence between traffic and congestion, on the one hand, and alternative transit options (buses, rail, cycling, telecommuting, etc.) on the other. Market pricing signals fail to provide the coordination many of these options require. Typically, planning-based approaches are required.
I like driving, but I'm very bad at managing the stress associated with owning a car, finding a parking spot, sitting in congestion, trying to be there in time (speeding to gain a few minutes that makes no sense), hence I don't have a car.
And I wouldn't live in a place that requires one.
And I can't understand how the US is so deep in the hole with regards to mass transit / public transport, commute time, etc.
Sure, I know, it's a classic coordination problem, and I'm probably very biased by having access to a very cheap and efficient public transit network.
You'd need to solve inequality. That's a great thing to do, but meanwhile we can just fix fast lanes separately. ...just in case inequality still exists in 10 years.
They might rather spend that money on housing, or education or chewing gum or who the hell knows what.
The utility maximizing choice it to let them make their own decision as they know more about their preferences than you do. You making that decision for them destroys utility.
I don't know why the downvotes, you make valid points.
I think what you say is true, but not in the context of this specific scenario. This scenario starts with a public good that is freely available to all.
In the free-for-all, everyone has equal access to the good. The total value of that is somewhat diminished in theory, because the lack of a price system causes overconsumption ... traffic jams.
In the price system, there is a luxury option. In principle, options are good. If you really want to travel fast, you can for a price. In practice though (because income distribution), most of that negotiation does not happen within one person debating if he really wants that fast lane today. There will be some people (wealthy) for whom it is almost always worthwhile and others for whom it is never worthwhile.
What I am arguing is that calling this highest value use is just false.
Choice here does not extend to substitutes. You don't get anything for taking the slow lane.
This is why I'd like to see some less theoretically pure economists tinker with this. It's possible to create a system where what you say is true. This one is impractical, but one example could be a system where fast lane drivers pay slow lane drivers. Ie, negative pricing.
Maybe you earn fast lane credits for taking the slow lane, to be used in lieu of £40. That way all commuters get a taste.
Example: Using the express roadway once a month is $10/use. Using it 100 times is 50/use.
This is similar to how California tries to restrict water usage by the wealthy.
This does nothing to help fund roads or alleviate congestion.
Appealing to a right to an egalitarian "family dinner time" is also not terribly convincing. There are plenty of rich people who don't care much about family dinner time. There are plenty of poor who would eagerly spend half their day's wages to make it home on time.
Also, I'm not sure I buy the whole no competition argument regarding highways. The competition are the non-toll highways and driving on streets. There are several free options, and a paid option. The paid option has to compete against the free ones by setting a price that corresponds to the value it provides. If all roads were a toll road, then that would be a monopoly and a broken market, but this one seems okay.
You can put it in diminishing marginal value terms, but I'm basically saying the same thing with fewer assumptions. Family time (or TV time or whatever) is an example to demonstrate that utility does not scale with money.
On the whole poor people commuting enjoy their free time, pleasant commutes and the other things at stake just as much as rich people. That's a fairly intuitive point.
Given that, the price that does not correspond to the value it provides^, inasmuch as income is unequally distributed. It corresponds to the wealth of the person making a decision and the value it provides.
The value of the fast lane is fairly evenly distributed between commuters. Everyone wants to get home. Everyone hates traffic. There are differences, but they're not huge on average.
What isn't evenly distributed is income. Therefore the sorting that this mechanism does is a little bit of utility based sorting and a lot of income based sorting.
If income was more even, there would be an argument for such a system. Given the actual distribution, the system is probably utility destroying.
Tolls are just a revenue raising mechanism, not an efficient allocation one.
^or to marginal costs
But that seems ridiculous, and I think the issue here is that we're conflating capitalism with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism strives to maximize utility, i.e., total happiness. Capitalism strives for efficient use of scarce resources. They often overlap, but they are fundamentally different concepts.
Going back to the example, I buy your argument that tolls are a crude way of maximizing utility. However, they are a good way of putting a scarce resource (fast commuting time) to economic use.
A lot of liberal market ideas (Smith, Ricardo, etc) are essentially utilitarian. That is, they use utilitarian arguments to prove their points, so they're basically tied into the same assumptions. Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage is pure utilitarianism, and is the classical economics "proof" that trade is efficient. To this day, the most important theory of trade.
Efficiency in economic theory is almost all utility efficiency. The If not, what does efficiency? I guess you could say that in this case it's about maximizing revenue from willing payers. That's ok, but calling it efficiency is misleading.
When you say putting a scarce resource to its (most productive) use, what do you mean if not the enjoyment and benefit of its users?
Incidentally, there is a cool example of an artificial market for allocating food to US food banks. It uses a highly. Manipulated fake currency, with negative pricing and competitive bidding to improve "efficiency." The trick to making it work was all about being willing to define utility in non monetary terms.
Stating efficiency in dollar terms can lead to circular logic.
Maximizing efficiency is less complex than utilitarianism. Capitalism strives for efficient allocation of resources based on supply and demand, i.e., what people have and what people want, it makes no promises on maximizing total happiness or equitable distribution.
For a utilitarian "putting a scarce resource to its (most productive) use" would indeed be to provide the maximum amount of enjoyment. But for a capitalist, it's simply the amount that someone is willing and able to pay for it.
I know some free market proponents use utilitarian ideas to make their point, and there is overlap, but they are a bad fit. Utilitarianism is a moral theory based on maximizing total good. Capitalism is an economic system that seems to have worked more than most other systems. There are moral arguments for capitalism, but they are based on individual freedom, not collective happiness.
How does that not drive a person insane? Let's assume an 8 hour workday (so this would be a $10/hour job). How would you feel if you knew that after working your first 4 hours of the day, you basically aren't making any more money for the next 4 hours: all the money you make from that point on will be spent on getting home early. Why not just go home after your first 4 hours? You'll be home even earlier than when you take the $40 toll road, and you bring home the same amount of money for half the hours worked?
It seems to me that if you are regularly spending half your day's wages just to make it home on time, you are urgently in need of a different job (either closer to home or with different hours).
The world is tough and trade-offs between time, money, and future opportunity are constantly being made at every income level.
The solution is to auction road capacity and use the auction proceeds to fund maintenance of that road and construction of others. Besides being vastly more efficient (from a market perspective) than an arbitrary fixed rate, it also means that resources are allocated towards roads more efficiently (if your fund allocation mechanism makes some sense).
You might be able to do this in a two-at-a-time case, with two lanes of cars. Problem is that the lane behind the car that consistently underbids is being affected by a third party's decision.
It seems that there's a problem with the feedback/response cycle in one-at-a-time pricing systems. The more effective systems approach is to set a scheduled or contingent pricing, perhaps at 10-15 minute increments, minimum. A regular schedule (as with peak / off-peak rail or transit schedules) is another option.
Hence: how does OP propose to run an auction?
That's a slightly naive view of what 'poor' means. Try "can't eat this week."
The ability to afford food for the week is then unaffected, as it would be if the figure were $4 or $400.
(This is assuming that the poor person is not driving e.g. a (more expensive, fewer available as used) hybrid car that can idle in traffic without wasting gas)
In a nutshell, you need to get down to the "utility" concept. It's used (for example) to theoretically prove/support the idea that free exchange is always beneficial for both parties.
Putting prices onto otherwise unrestricted resources likewise optimizes for utility, especially if there are tragedy of the commons issues. The catch is that utility is measured in dollars.
Price systems increase efficiency by introducing trade-offs. If you don't really need to use the road you won't, because there's a cost to it. But (like you say), this trade-off is different for different people. For rich people, $40 is always worth it. For the middle class, $40 might be worth it if you can get home in time for date night. For poor people, $40 means you can't afford a date night this week. It's never worth it.
Basically, dollar-utility conversion is different for people with more or less money. To call this a utility-efficient outcome, you need to concede that a poor person's family dinner time is worth less. That's obviously false. We can't measure utility in dollars, if we have inequality.
On top of all that, roads are not "full" markets. This is not a free market solution. You can add a price system. but you don't have supply side effects. Prices don't reflect marginal costs of commuting, because there isn't competition. Price signals don't control supply, or lead to more supply. Even if supply wasn't exogenous in practice, the fixed/marginal cost ratio would make the "market" unresponsive anyway. This is not really a "free market" vs "public good" because free market just isn't an available option.
I would like to see some less idealistic economists take over on these issues. One interesting option is creating a fake "currency" for fast lanes. Ideas that assume people's time, enjoyment of the road and transport needs are equivalent. You probably can't take money entirely out of the equation, but there are ways of doing this without handing out benefits to the wealthy at the expense of the poor.