Please don’t pay to use a pay toilet

Note: Spain was named for the smaller things like this; public toilets are not widely available here (even though there are some).

Well, there are many different ways to tax things. This is a pretty big area of study in e.g. economics and public polciy.

Certainly, one way to tax is to e.g. collect income taxes from everyone and then use it to maintain public toilets. But another way to tax things is to directly tax the thing itself - like in this case, taxing the use of the toilet.

This has some drawbacks and some benefits. One of the benefits is that you're making the toilet more akin to a regular, private good - people pay for what they use, which works pretty well in most cases.

Of course you can appeal to emotion and say "what, we'll make poor people not able to use restrooms"? Clever as that is, what about the alternative appeal - are you really comfortable with a poor person's taxes going to support the public toilets of the 1%? The areas they live have public restrooms too, and I'm sure they cost a hell of a lot more to maintain than most public restrooms.

I have no idea how this actually works in the real world - do rich 1%'ers public toilets cost a lot? Are they supported by taxes (at least, not on the municipal level)? Is there any amount of poor people unable to find access to restrooms that this is even a problem?

I don't know. I'm just saying, the view expressed by Stallman is not nuanced, doesn't provide any data to back him up, only goes for a totally surface-level idea of the morality, and supports it with emotion.

NOT everything in the world is a totally clear black & white moral issue, and not everyone that disagrees with you is necessarily morally wrong! When you make every issue a moral & emotional one, you lose out on actual thoughtful intelligence, or on the idea that smart people can think of different ways of cooperating that might make sense to them.

If local government can't use local taxes to provide free food to everyone to stop us all having to starve in the streets then what are they (and taxes) for?

Is access to toilets a more fundamental human right than access to food?

Edit: Stallman explicitly demands that public toilets should be free to everyone, independent of their financial situation. Using his logic, we should boycot food until food is available to everyone free of charge. Of course I'm not arguing against feeding the needy, or against social nets in general.

Totally agree with that and Japan and many countries in Asia really get that.

Almost certainly, it's a "joke".

Flagged.

From what I've seen, his extreme positions are often from him looking further than a lot of other people.

Amazon thinks of themselves as a publisher now, so when you put your book on Amazon without publishing via them they view you as 'the competition' using their hard won resources.

As a publisher, they view asking for exclusive rights to be a normal course of doing business.

The problem is that some people still think they're just a book store.

While this isn't applicable in all areas, a rule of thumb could be "those who making money with the people which have to use toilets".

Anecdotal example: I'm living in an amusement district of a big German City. There are very few public toilets and most of the few are paid ones. So every weekend the whole district is smelling like a big bowl of piss, except in winter when the frozen pee of multiple weekends accumulate until there is the big pee-melt.

Why not making all those bars, clubs and liqor stores pay for the maintanance of free public toilets?

For the private parts of a city (eg. apartments), they usually include toilets, and you expect your guest to use them instead of shitting in your kitchen or living room.

Similarly, as _owner_ of a share of the common parts of your city, you have the choice of providing public toilets, so that guests, visitors, or just citizen far from their home can be expected to use them, instead of shitting in the public space, thus degrading the bacteriological common space (feces can transmit some bad illnesses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fecal–oral_route ).

It can be paid for with land value taxes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Indeed, it effectively used to be - they typically are and were paid for with property taxes, which is a proxy for LVT. The political decisions to decline property tax revenue is the reason why many closed.

Landlords' entitlement to an ever larger stream of rental income that includes the value of land which they had no hand in creating or making valuable is largely why state/city budgets are in such a mess, why the 1% steadily gets richer and why property values keep going up.

There are two independent solutions for this: Many countries, like Singapore, have the government directly own public toilets.

In other places, like some states of Germany, the government instead pays restaurants and shops to open their toilets to the public.

The name is also a pun on a slang phrase for "see you later!" in Dutch.

Wouldn't work in Europe - Art. 18 TFEU.

So just like any touring speaker?

> - I am starting to think his addressing to "proprietary" stuff is more related to "avoid paying" than defending what is free.

This view is false. You should read more of what he has written, especially in regard to 'free' services that are only financially free.

I assume this means he was not paid for his intervention otherwise? That sounds perfectly reasonable to me. In my city, there is a big punk squat/concert room which does not pay bands for playing, but they provide them with shelter and food. That's like, the minimum when you ask someone to come.

Also, I wouldn't see myself inviting friends to my place and ask them to pay for their food.

That doesn't sound unreasonable to me -- it's probably the least "fans" could do to have a celebrity at their event, which he's going out of his way to attend.

Everyone* has a toilet at home, but its it the job of the government to supply sanitation in all public spaces?

Some exist in Finland (at least in Helsinki).

Also saw one recently in a train station in Belgium, and IIRC a train station in the Netherlands.

Also in the North of Argentina near some bus station, where you would pay directly to someone apparently responsible for cleaning/maintaining them.

For any bathroom facility there is already a relatively fixed regular cost being applied to maintain them. As free bathrooms are nearly always funded by community purses their existence is justified by usage, whereas paid bathrooms are nearly always funded by commercial entities which justify their existence with profit.