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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

First thing I thought of even though I never heard of this example: It's a terrible idea if you think about it with an economic mind. There are very few scenarios where making things "free" can actually provide a long term benefit for the public. The reason Communist economies don't work isn't because there's not enough wealth in society to guarantee a modest income for everyone. It's because once you take the incentives away people behave differently than they would normally. In the case of a guaranteed workplace with no profit sharing for example you get rampant corruption at the top and workers who don't see the point in doing their job properly because they neither get rewarded for working hard nor can they get fired. So they just show up and do the bare minimum.

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There are many free goods people don’t seem to (usually) overconsume.

Primary school is free, libraries are free, parks are free, etc. To know whether public transportation is more like free libraries or more like free parking, you have to run the experiment.

So, how exactly would you overconsume school, libraries or parks?

Presumably the same way you’d overconsume public transportation according to OP: staying too long, crowding out other users that want/need to use public goods more than you.

> there's not enough wealth in society to guarantee a modest income for everyone

One should notice that there a no Communist economies anymore in Europe for more than 30 years. Democratic wellfare states provide in my opinion the best balance between individual incentives and social responsibility.

I would argue that a lot of state-managed sectors in various European countries work a lot better than in the US (health care, higher education, correction, ...). One has to look into the details to see what works better in which sector.

Extent and details are, of course, something that needs to be permanently evaluated. But in general there is enough wealth produced each year to provide everyone with an at least modest standard of living. However, the differences between the countries are still very large: GDP per capita in the EU is aprox. EUR 32.000, ranging from Luxemburg's EUR 114,000 to Bulgaria's EUR 10,000.

(This may be an aside, but I want to add this)

While it is true that there is quite a difference in GDP per capita between different EU countries, please consider that Luxembourg has a very particular standing and as an outlier is not representative of the "wealthier" EU members. Most of those are in the range of 40k-50k, with only three above this: 114,370 Luxembourg 83,990 Ireland 57,140 Denmark

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_European_Union

Also Ireland is another outlier, making a lot of "income" due to being the EU corporate tax heaven. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation_tax_in_the_Republi...

China.

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