Summary: <br> <a rel="noreferrer noopener external" href="https://twitter.com/GrahamNeary" target="_blank" data-wpel-link="external">Graham Neary</a> is a financial commentator who has been a fund manager and analyst in the London financial markets.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> *****<br> <br> <br> <br> The transport minister, Eamon Ryan who is also leader of the Green Party, it has been announced <a href="https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41086138.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener external" data-wpel-link="external">will set up an inter-departmental group to make sure the transport sector</a> meets its emissions reduction targets.<br> <br> <br> <br> Related to this, The National Transport Authority has published what’s called modelling on transport climate targets, which basically means having an educated guess about the effect of various possible policy choices. This basically means they have a go at understanding what would happen if they increased bus fares, kept them the same, or reduced them, and then the same for a variety of combinations of other policy levers that the government could pull, or push, or not change at all.<br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> <br> This is a fairly normal process that the civil service and other government bodies uses to present the government with policy options, and be able to give an educated guess of what the effect of those policies might be.<br> <br> <br> <br> These scenarios necessarily include a pretty wide range of options. One of the scenarios imagined a €10 daily charge for driving in cities, and significant increases in parking charges.To be clear, this is not government policy. This is not even proposed government policy, this is just one of several scenarios that the NTA offers an opinion on, as to what the likely outcome would be, if it were to be adopted as government policy. It would go alongside sharply reducing public transport fares, and would obviously be targeted at creating a modal shift in transport from private cars to public transport.The purpose of the NTA study is to assess what level of impact it would have, how big the modal shift would be.<br> <br> <br> <br> That didn’t stop an avalanche of criticism on social media, and other media, to the effect that Eamon Ryan was … well, everything from Stalin to Pol Pot to … who knows what. Eamon Ryan, I think we might guess, might be sympathetic to effecting that sort of modal shift, but the fact that these weren’t his policies, they weren’t even his proposals, that hardly mattered to the outraged right-wing motorist mob.<br> <br> <br> <br> There wasn’t much said in all that that was rational, so I’m don’t think there’s really much point in trying to engage in a debate with blind outrage, but I still think that there is something here that is interesting.<br> <br> <br> <br> The theoretical justification for free markets is that resources are allocated more efficiently when people have to pay for the stuff that they want. The free market opposition to socialism is that the government is often not very good at producing stuff, but even if they were, the model of taking payment through taxes and distributing stuff, whatever stuff, free at the point of use, the objection is that people then use that stuff wastefully.<br> <br> <br> <br> If you waste bread, you get punished by having to pay for more bread. On the other hand, if there was an annual bread tax, like the TV licence, and then you could take as much bread as you wanted, you would not be motivated to only take what you need. The wasteful would be subsidised by the prudent, and the prudent would likely get fed up of that and not bother to be so prudent.<br> <br> <br> <br> This argument clearly doesn’t work for some goods and services. An obvious example is healthcare. People can’t be sparing in their use of healthcare, because when you need it, you need it. And you might know that you need it,
