A Modern Animal

Imagine for example if the government did not tax for or provide military defense. The free market you can imagine would generally lead to two results. One is that rich people will be the only ones able to afford military protection and will then rent out that protection to poorer people, maybe, if they can afford it. So basically medieval feudalism where poor people suffer. The second is that communities will create pools for voluntary contributions to public defense of their specific communities, or maybe do their own drafts, and basically have a mini army. The important thing about both these scenarios is that your defense becomes extremely inefficient. It is not fun coordinating many local armies together. There will be an underprovision of the public good. So we all suck it up and pay taxes for military defense or we die in the modern era. The military will have its own share of inefficiencies, but making people contribute to even if they might personally want to just have a mini army for themself--against the social good--is a good idea. Having uniform standards of operation, equal protection for poor and rich alike, and benefits of scale are some of the reasons we accept government funding for the military.

But paid mandatory schooling is the same idea. There are two aspects to this idea; there’s the “paid” part and the “mandatory” part. You need both.

Suppose you have paid schooling, but you get rid of the mandatory part. Okay, so rich people get to have an education. Other people maybe get to do trade/craft jobs, like HVAC, electrical work, etc. That’s not bad, but some people (and particularly our generation) hate blue collar work (don’t take jobs in those industries even if they pay very well). What if you can’t afford that schooling? Do you just not go to school? Do you get more people getting American evangelical religious educations (some ending up fine, some not so much)?

The part that seems to be contested in this post isn’t about having mandatory schooling, but getting rid of the paid part, meaning paid for by the students and their families. In this case, who pays for the good? If the government pays, who funds it? If you tax families with students, then they’re paying some, all, or even more of the cost they would have been paying anyway depending on the efficiency of the government and who else is being taxed. The only way a student “doesn’t pay to attend” is if you go out of your way to tax everyone else for a service they don’t use. Essentially you punish single people who are more likely to be poor, celibate people who are disabled, people too busy to have kids, etc, and provide all sorts of idiotic perverse incentives to have even more bad parenting in a world of lots and lots of bad parenting. That is, specifically singling out ONLY taxing people who do not have a student in school will land you in loads of trouble.

You could reasonably make an argument that says, hey, maybe people who don’t have kids should still be expected to reasonably contribute towards funding schooling anyway, since now they now always have the option to have a kid, and they are contributing to the public good of living in a more educated society. Maybe you can argue that we should provide assistance with regards to meals, fees, etc., to poorer people who will struggle to afford mandatory schooling. I think those arguments are reasonable. Most local governments, do try to keep those considerations in mind I feel like.

Collecting rainwater is not generally illegal, but it is regulated by states. The main reason is to protect farmlands and other places that rely on runoff water for crops. So for example, some states don’t let you just build large artificial lakes/dams for recreational purposes unless you have a permit. So even if you did want to collect gigantic quantities of water, you could do it legally.

In Colorado, a lot of runoff rainwater and water from the Colorado river ends up going to California, which as you may know in recent history, has had a prolonged drought. Desertification due to environmental changes can exacerbate these problems. All the more reason why it can be a good safeguard for the government to use environmental regulation to help people.

This is obviously a simplified explanation of things, but if you want to talk about collecting water in large volumes, consider this. Bottled water nowadays can be very expensive, if not more expensive per ounce than gasoline. Are these partly the consequences of large entities privatizing rights to vast amounts of water? Does a market efficiently allocate water rights, or is there a social externality not accounted for? Arguably, you could make the case that there isn’t enough regulation on collecting rainwater/natural resources and claiming it as your own.

Presumably the people in the above posts probably are more worried about individual rights to water collection than corporate rights to water collection. But that doesn’t change the case that maybe both should be regulated.

This article is an interesting supplemental reading: