The government is not some magic money source. Saying the government should pay for something is saying the everyone should share the cost.

By mandating that taxis are available we are saying that the cost of off peek taxis should be paid by people that use taxis. If I never go to a town big enough to have a taxi service, or if I drive my own car everywhere, then I never share the cost for subsidising off peek taxis.

Which is more fair, everyone pays or only taxi uses pay?

I contend that is unfair to levy a societal benefit solely on customers of taxis during the hours at which taxis would be available anyway without government mandates.

I would even go so far as to say if the government is mandating something, then the costs should be distributed amongst that government’s tax base (can be progressively distributed, but across the whole tax base nonetheless).

There are many cases in which we might want the government to mandate something and direct the cost towards a particular group. For example, when a societal cost is caused by the choices of a particular group. Distributing this cost equally or progressively may be a less fair way to do it. And in some cases, distributing this cost to society as a whole may remove an important financial disincentive for bad behavior.

e.g.:

* making polluters responsible for cleanup costs

* making investors responsible for the costs of overseeing the markets they profit from

* making bad drivers responsible for paying for the consequences of their actions

I'd say it's more fair to say that we could distribute costs to society when it's a public service that generally benefits everyone, or the disadvantaged. But I don't think we would want to distribute societal costs incurred by the rich or reckless.

Your first and third examples are punishments for violating the law (or harming society), not societal benefits. Hence not applicable to what we are talking about here, in my opinion.

The second example I see no problem distributing amongst society, if functioning markets are providing a benefit to society.

There are corruption risks with making government functions dependent upon the thing they are policing.

To what degree to you believe that should be the case? There are multiple political interpretations of that sentiment throughout history with widely varying implementations and downstream consequences.

Is it just public transportation? Are airlines and trains public transportation? Is it other critical infrastructure? Utilities? Energy? Healthcare? Communication? Other societal necessities like food/housing/shelter?

It sounds like a line of reasoning that programmers fall into. "This code is so stupid! Shouldn't it be like blah!?" And then a more senior person tells you a story and yeah, you couldn't have found a better solution given the circumstances.

Not really. The solution is just not politically palatable because it requires increased wealth transfers from the haves to the have nots.

Whatever the population feels like should not be subject to market pricing.

Also, whatever is prohibitively expensive to duplicate, such as water/sewage/gas pipes, electrical/fiber wires, etc. Or public transport like underground train systems.

"not subject to market pricing" is quite a spectrum of practices, and depending on how you define it, it could be almost nothing, or almost everything in the US.

Taxes, tariffs, subsidies, affect market pricing quite a bit and are extremely common. Some consumer protection laws place very loose pricing rules on businesses that are literally price controls, but in practice allow pricing to fluctuate with market rates. Some other industries have segments which are price controlled, and other segments that are not, i.e. healthcare, insurance.

I mean that the market price should not be obfuscated. I have no qualms about society choosing to subsidize certain things, but the costs should be explicitly recognized.

For example, give people access to higher education. Okay, have the government operate the higher education institutions. Or give the students cash to pay for the higher education institutions.

But do not obfuscate costs by guaranteeing all student loans with zero underwriting. (The more politically popular method since it keeps taxes low now and lets politicians say they helped people). Of course, this price obfuscation rears its ugly head in 20 to 30 years once tuition is now $50k+ per year.

3/4 of post-secondary students in the US do go to schools operated by the government, that doesn't preclude those institutions from charging tuition.

Do you mean 'obfuscated' or 'inflated'?

I'm not sure how prices are obfuscated in US higher education... prices are published and you sign several pieces of paper with the price on it before you walk into class for the first time. Guaranteed loans don't obfuscate prices (in fact, DoE loans have more paperwork than private loans), they enable schools to inflate prices because it gives more buying power to their students. This isn't something that would be fixed by handing out cash instead, in fact, grants/scholarships are another factor that have enabled schools to inflate costs. If you shift the demand curve up and to the right, the equilibrium price goes up -- it doesn't really matter what shifted it.

The lack of underwriting is what obfuscated the prices (along with non dischargability of loans in bankruptcy).

A prudent lender would not lend a teenager tens of thousands of dollars to study something the society does not want (indicated by high probability of low paying careers as a result of that education).

Grants/scholarships/subsidized tuition might push demand and hence prices higher, but because grants impact taxpayers’ wallets today, there would be a built in check on spending. Not so with lending the money to teenagers.

> because grants impact taxpayers’ wallets today

The government can defect spend, and raise taxes later. That's even more of an obfuscated price than an ill-advised loan. Either mechanism of surprise costs is a bad thing.

The root of the higher-ed problem is social. We're forcing kids to make career decisions before they're ready, and we're forcing them into paths based upon 1970s stereotypes about the workplace. 50% of counselors and secondary-teachers are clueless about the broader workplace, and the other 50% would be politically chastised by parents if they told the truth.

We'd solve 80% of our student loan crisis if it was politically okay to tell kids:

1. If you don't have an interest in higher learning, don't want to go to college, or "just want a job" you shouldn't go to college. Don't go to college because your mother is pressuring you to do it, because she finds it 'unfashionable' or 'embarrassing' if you don't.

2. Just because you can do something doesn't mean someone will pay you to do it. How many job openings are in that career path, how many people are competing for that job, and how do you rank against them?

3. Academic talent is 50% of what employers care about. Nobody is going to care about your GPA if you don't have social, professional, and self-marketing skills.

That's one way to do it, as I said. The other way is to share the burden of the service by all of its users.

In the case of Taxi service, I find to be more appropriate users of the local service sharing the cost of the low hours. Central government paying for local services tends to be very inefficient.

The question is does society benefit from taxis being available all night long? If that is the correct question, and the answer is yes, then society should be paying for it.

By restricting the distribution of costs over only people who use taxis, then people who use taxis are unfairly shouldering a burden that society benefits from as a whole.

People who use taxis also get an unfair benefit by making a disproportionate use of publicly-funded roads which they don't pay for. Very few things are 100% private or 100% public. Most large organisations necessarily exist in a space of negotiation and compromise with the rest of society - you can use this public resource, but you have this public obligation. We'll reduce your taxes by this if you agree to provide that. We'll build this for you if you pay that. And why should the world work any differently?

I definitely sympathise with your main point - there's a tendency to see a problem and go looking for a nearby business to soak rather than funding it through general taxation. But assuming we accept that there should be a fleet of taxis that operate overnight to provide this socially-mandated service (and whether that fleet is directly owned and operated by the government or is something that private operators provide as part of a mutually agreed bundle of rights and obligations is immaterial IMO), for private industry to undercut the profitable segment of that service would be a both direct social loss (money out of the government's account) and a waste of real value (those expensive taxis sitting in the daytime).