I was going to write a piece with that title (assuming the allusion would spare me from discipline for scattering the star-field with apostrophes) but it seems Richard Tomkins in the FT has done it first, and, almost certainly, better.
However, that’s a subscription-required piece, so I will rehash my main thoughts for those who do not subscribe, and do not still have a venial physical paper habit like mine.
I was dumbstruck by the general soft welcome among free-market types for Alastair Darling’s hints at individual travel charges by satellite. Sorry ladies and gentlemen, but the only word that springs to mind is – “suckers”.
Just because a minister says something is “road pricing” does not mean it is a real live example of a market mechanism. In fact, when a minister in the current UK government says something, one would have thought that by now most people would be looking for the misrepresentation. If the minister seems to be saying something, then the truth is likely incompatible with the impression. The thing is, it is not a price unless you get a choice. Road pricing as conceived by freemarketeers involves someone being willing to pay the cost of more convenient travel, someone else being prepared to provide it, and a bargain between them established when the buyer chooses to use the road.
The price is determined by the market, and the choices available depend on the costs of the providers and the willingness of travellers to pay. There are geographical constraints, and competition with non-transport uses for land, but politics, though it might influence the course of the roads, has no direct effect on the price you choose to pay. The turnpike company does not care who you are, or how far you go, as long as you pay the toll. It is only selling roadspace.
What Mr Darling offers us under the same name is no choice. The state will ration travel. The state will control the charges on the basis of what it thinks is good for you. There is a monopoly provider, the state. Its nominal purpose is to “reduce congestion”, that is, stop travel, rather than assist it. And it insists that total surveillance of – and therefore control of – the individual traveller, is necessary to do it, rather than a disinterested payment mechanism.
Still like the idea? Here is another example of how to deal people who want to be where the government thinks they should not be.
And now the Train companies are joining the party.
Rail ‘congestion charge’ proposed(Link)
You couldn’t make it up, as a certain hack keeps reminding me.
No; I don’t think that’s the same thing at all. They aren’t proposing to charge retrospectively, nor are you compelled to travel with a particular carrier. They are just pricing their capacity higher at peak times because it is easier than building more. The same principle is in play as when a power company sells you an energy saving lightbulb. It is adaptation to constraint.
Should it to emerge that the railway companies (all of which rely on heavy subsidy and are subject to close bureaucratic control) are doing this because the rail regulator tells them to, or else, then I will agree with you.
This is a very astute post. The government loves to make out that it is somehow borrowing ideas from the free market in order no doubt to get the Economist, FT and the usual lazy suspects from the MSM on board for its ideas.
In reality, planning controls (which I see no sign of going away) mean that the supply of roads will be relatively static, which means the price mechanism cannot really work as in a proper market. Tolls are primarily a revenue device. In as much as tolls affect traffic use, they will hit the relatively less welloff the most, which is rather odd coming from a supposedly progressive government.
If the government is worried about congestion, taxing petrol seems the least-worst approach in the current road/planning environment.
I really meant that the train carriers were using the knock on effect of the government road-pricing plans to up their revenues.
Damn right it’s easier than putting on more trains, I doubt if that concept even entered their heads.
This isn’t a true market force at work, it’s taking advantage of the governments plans, you can’t blame em.
Once again, this will hit those least able to afford it, those priced out of their cars on one hand will have no choice but to pay extra for NOT driving their car.
The rail regulator will not be behind this but will probably find no way to prevent it.
Next thing you know, the usual suspects will be talking about “road poverty” and they will subsidise those on benefits to get about by car at the expense of productive members of society who will have to pay not only for their own travel but the subsidy to the others.
Frankly I would have thought more people would be worried at the implications regarding the tracking of their movements. It may not be directly tracking you the individual, but if you’re the owner of the car and the only named driver on the insurance then it amounts to much the same thing for your driving. Do you really want that? And with that useful relation of speed = distance/time I can see the camera “partnerships” practically salivating at the thought of this scheme.
Jeebus Wolfie I hadn’t thought of that.
Another thing I just thought of was how would Taxi’s cope, would they have 2 way satellite tech to make working out the fee possible or would you get the bill in the post a month later.
On the bright side this is the Blairistas we are talking about,the people that computerised the Self assessment forms. Some smartarsed computer firm has told a minister that it is well within the bounds of current technology and will be cheap.
Could they really launch this and ID cards and get it right?
Jon writes:
“I can see the camera “partnerships” practically salivating at the thought of this scheme.”
Well, yes, but the sort of vermin who run (and work for) ‘safety camera partnerships’ (note the careful Blairite bastardisation of the language there) are close to the heart of the Gramscian project.
Jon, right now you can be very easily tracked by your mobile telephone handset, down to almost millimetric spot positioning. Of course the Blairites would argue that such tracking is ‘there to protect you and your property from terrorist attack’ …
It is easy to see that there is not the slightest wiff of “free market” anywhere in this cow pat.
The rail operators and road chargers should be in competition, thus driving prices down. They currently seem to be in a mad frenzy to drive prices up.
Looking at it from a market viewpoint it is obvious we either need a massive increase in travel infrastructure, or an equally massive increase in road/rail charges before a free market can operate. The former is feasible, if only we had the political will (which we haven’t), whilst the latter would bring the country to its knees.
So if neither of the above is going to happen it must just be another tax.
The ironic allusion in the title (now vanished in tribute to Margaret Thatcher’s “the lady is not for turning” speech, in case anyone is now confused), was to the Marks & Spencer’s motto, “Don’t ask the price, it’s sixpence.” If it is a good enough allusion for Lord Sieff it is good enough for me.
Rich: This isn’t a true market force at work,
Yes it is. Where people get a choice in an exchange market forces are always at work. That a market works in odd circumstances doesn’t stop it working as a market. The “force” is a metaphor for the effect of choice.
You wouldn’t say the wage market isn’t controlled by “true” market forces just because it operates under conditions of partial employers’ and workers’ cartels, minimum wages and tax-rake offs, welfare benefits, minimum commitments, time-risks and opportunity costs. The choices are still there to be made. But every choice is determined by both the taste of the actor and external conditions. It’s just that some actors look dominant in the rail case. But they aren’t while they can’t remove the choices of others.
“Market forces” exist whenever there is the possibility of exchange. If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice.
The mistake that a lot of authoritarians and socialists make when they object to markets and seek to set them aside by fiat–the reason for so many unintended consequences–is that the “force” involved is people seeking to promote their own ends through choice in the use of the means available. That is one of the (perhaps inadvertently) cunningest things about the Darling plan. Arbitrary penalty retrospectively applied minimises the opportunity for meaningful choice, and improves the likelihood of pushing the population into docile passivity. (It works for the FSA, and the other FSA, and the HSE, and …)
I do think, as does Richard Tompkins, that the most pernicious thing about this is the panopticon personal tracking involved. But my post was about how it has been sold: the mastery of reality created by control of the language of debate.
These proposals have been put forward by he Association of Train Operating Companies.
Surely with all rail companies working in unison to raise prices you are effectivly dealing with a rail monopoly, who are faced on the other side by the road monopoly. They are currently trying to work out just how hard they can squeeze us, this isn’t a market, it’s shooting fish in a barrel.
Yes that does indeed give you a choice, the devil and the deep blue sea.
As for the tracking aspect, yes this is the bigger part of the problem, luckily the government are rubbish at IT projects and no one has told them how easy it will be to subvert these things.