You're not wrong, but there are far better ways to redistribute wealth than mandating the use of rent-seeking middlemen. Why not levy a tax directly and cut out the middle man?

Because the step past that of using the tax to redistribute is politically infeasible. It's like "Why not get rid of tipping and just give waiters a tax benefit?". Well, turns out we can't do the second piece so that's why we don't do the first piece.

If the purpose of dealership laws is redistribution then to get dealership laws you need enough public support for it to pass a law, in which case it might as well be the good law instead of the garbage one.

Moreover, this is exactly the sort of thing where the bad is the enemy of the good. If redistribution is good and cronyism is bad then allowing the cronyist redistribution law to pass not only placates the people who want redistribution (and so they fight less for the better one), it also inflames the good should-be-allies anti-cronyists and requires you to waste political capital on infighting.

Bad compromises are bad. Good law > nothing > bad law.

Usually when you do things like this, you package it in a defensible way. So maybe you decide you want some redistribution, but that's politically infeasible. Instead you package it as something else.

Another example is most big infrastructure projects in California. You'll notice that most don't finish in time. The real reason is to ensure that there is sustainable construction work going on. They're capable of finishing fast but no one wants that. They just want a large number of people employed. The Trojan Horse is "we're building infrastructure" because otherwise you have to fight the anti-redistribution anti-subsidy people.

That's because when a concession is made to people they rarely will fight to make it perfect in the name of perfect is the enemy of good enough. Anti-cronyists don't expend political effort because they don't have upper-level political support. It's not a thing anyone needs to worry about. Only people who want to get something concrete and people in danger of losing something concrete expend political effort.

> Usually when you do things like this, you package it in a defensible way. So maybe you decide you want some redistribution, but that's politically infeasible. Instead you package it as something else.

So do the same thing with the good solution. Make it a UBI but call it a negative income tax and tell everybody you're giving them a huge tax cut (which for the majority of people you actually are).

> Another example is most big infrastructure projects in California. You'll notice that most don't finish in time. The real reason is to ensure that there is sustainable construction work going on. They're capable of finishing fast but no one wants that. They just want a large number of people employed. The Trojan Horse is "we're building infrastructure" because otherwise you have to fight the anti-redistribution anti-subsidy people.

But that's the same thing. Instead of purposely delaying the construction, just finish it on time and then go back and say "look how inexpensive we can build things now, let's build all the things" and get a hundred more construction projects.

Blowing the budgets every time is how you get them all canceled by giving very inconvenient real evidence to the people who want to cut them out next time.

> Anti-cronyists don't expend political effort. It's not a thing anyone needs to worry about. Only people who want to get something concrete and people in danger of losing something concrete expend political effort.

All the cronyists and taxpayers are also anti-cronyists for everything but their own projects because everything else is competing for resources with them. A state can't pass a budget with a 500,000,000% deficit and expect anybody to buy the bonds, so every piece of garbage in the budget is crowding out the garbage that somebody else wants. The easier you make it to make the case against your thing, the more likely they are to get their garbage to replace yours.

> So do the same thing with the good solution. Make it a UBI but call it a negative income tax and tell everybody you're giving them a huge tax cut (which for the majority of people you actually are).

I think this might well be doable. I'm definitely on board with smooth social security over square-wave social security (what we have now).

> But that's the same thing. Instead of purposely delaying the construction, just finish it on time and then go back and say "look how inexpensive we can build things now, let's build all the things" and get a hundred more construction projects.

I'd say the origination costs angle kills this. There is high pressure to keep the tender process high-bureaucracy from all sides, so you can scale single projects into many dollars but you can't start many projects.

> I'd say the origination costs angle kills this. There is high pressure to keep the tender process high-bureaucracy from all sides, so you can scale single projects into many dollars but you can't start many projects.

That's the status quo. It sucks, therefore find a way to blow it up. Make it so that it doesn't work. Require the contractor to buy cost overrun insurance from an insurance company which obligates the insurance company to pay someone else to finish the entire job if the original contractor exceeds the budget by a penny, then let it be the insurance company's problem to figure out how to make the company come in on budget or contract the job out to someone else who can.

Once you blow up the bad thing (making construction projects exceed their budgets), the path of least resistance to more construction jobs becomes the good thing (many more construction projects that meet their budgets). But you have to blow up the bad thing first or it remains the status quo.

Sure, a step to setting foot on to the moon is to build a moon rocket, but it turns out the hard part is building the moon rocket. Methods exist today to incentivize speed and performance. It's not the lack of methods. What we don't have is a method to put the methods into practice.

We know the methods exist because we've used some of them before: https://www.tradelineinc.com/reports/2007-10/unprecedented-t...

What we don't have is a political method to ensure the per-project technical incentives are correct.

Then shouldn't that be the problem everybody is working on? Forget about construction projects and car dealerships, would there be a huge objection into research funding for how to most effectively combat political corruption? Or a voting system change like range voting? [1]

[1] https://rangevoting.org/

Should it? Like everything else, there are:

* Information Asymmetries: I don't know anything about you or any other org working to combat this so I'm not comfortable spending money on you.

* Coordination Problems: Where do we act, on what scale, etc.

* Value Assignation Problems: How do I benefit from this for the effort I need to put in?

* Risk Problems: What is the chance of success solving a problem of this scale?

Essentially, I'm only seeking to explain. Personally, I have no problem with the system existing as it does. I would prefer other systems out of an inner desire for elegance. But I'm pretty proficient in acting within these to my own benefit so I won't tear it down. Perhaps part of the problem is getting folks like me to care to change this. I'm happy to cheer you on, though. Good luck!

It is inherently unequal though. Not every community gets a dealership, especially poor neighborhoods. But they do have car purchases. If sales were online, and sales tax distributed by purchaser addresses, the tax revenue would be much more broadly spread out.

You're discovering the regressiveness of the sales tax.

Instead of a sales tax, let that person spend that money on other products and services. And to raise revenue, use a progressive tax such as income.

Entertainingly, dealership owners are notoriously Republican-leaning. Perhaps they just need a bit of help staying true to their free-market ideals some times.

I was not aware Republicans had free market ideals. Based on their actions at least.

It depends whether you're talking about the politicians or the constituents. There are plenty of Republican voters with free-market ideals, because who else are they going to vote for? Bernie Sanders? But the politics is systemic corruption. To get elected, both parties have to raise money from somebody, and not a lot of those "donors" are buying politicians because they want fairness and free market competition.

Is this the same logic that leads to making it illegal to step out of your car to pump gas, because the attendant at the gas station needs a job?