The Case for Tolls

“Putting Customers in the Driver’s Seat: the Case for Tolls”, by Peter Samuel, Reason Public Policy Institute, Policy Study 274. Your editor spent considerable cerebral effort putting together about 20k+ words on the case for paying for main roads with tolls, rather than taxes. The booklet takes seriously all the objections to tolls and proposes how to handle them. A distinguished panel of reviewers had many good comments and suggestions for improving the work, some of which drove amendments. But most suggestions required a lot more words to be written, when the publisher wanted fewer words than we had. In the end painstaking editing of my drafts by Robert Poole has, I think, produced a compact, readable product putting a case for tolling that may be of special interest to many readers here. See www.rppi.org or call 310 391 2245. And look for IBTTA also to publish something on the same subject, shortly. Linda Spock and Dan Greenbaum, among others, have been laboring to produce a pro-tolls tract to be put out under IBTTA auspices. Keep an eye on www.ibtta.org or call 202 659 4620x232 for that. Let many different flowers bloom for tolls!

FOOTNOTE: Frederick Bastiat, the distinguished French thinker (philosophe is their beautiful word) put the problem of taxation most neatly: “Government is that fictitious entity by which everyone seeks to live at the expense of everyone else.”