International Mafia Firm – IMF
And the Liberal Conspiracy with gusto resumes its attacks. It will never stop until it drops dead. This time, the assault is centred on Greece, with peripheral attacks under European Union leaderships in Portugal and Spain, and to some extent, Ireland. “Greece poses a threat to economic stability of the EU,” they say. The faith of investors is at stake, and to earn their ideological respect, they are willing to do anything. As always the insane dogmatic Friedman-loving nutters whose diseased ideals infest the offices of most of the worlds economic consultants, start rambling nonsense about how all economic trouble are the result of political interference in the economy.
Which brings us back to Milton Friedman. When politicians decide to rule economic and monetary issues, the results are usually catastrophic.
There is nothing economic that is not also political. Economics is politics. This however, cannot be debated with those insane Austrian school religionists, dogmatic lunatics as they are, since they do not believe in statistics and proposing theories but just spout their retarded opinions as self-evident facts, and therefore insist that economy exists beyond the political, which is simply not true. This does, however, reflect a certain abominable trait in post-modern thought, the tendency of de-politicisation, the attempt of many streams of thought to claim that there is the political and the economic and the social, that these are separate spheres. They are all a part of the political. Everything is political.
The intelligent thing to do would of course be for the Greeks to leave from the poor policies of the ECB and the Eurozone, and re-establish their own currency, no longer bound by the insane requirements of the liberal obsession with inflation fighting and decision to ignore not only unemployment but also currency over-valuation; all for the purpose of fighting inflation, a useless aspiration insisted upon by the mentally ill liberals, the Austrians, the Chicago-school and other similarly ill-fated beasts. Then they would be free to devalue the currency, and to ignore the profanely stupid regulation prohibiting any budget deficit larger than 3% of GDP at the penalty of fines and other political restrictions, known in the liberal crowd as “austerity measures”.
The golden rule for every nation should be to never loan money from the International Mafia Firm (IMF).
Death to TollRoadsNews
Toll Roads News, a “journalistic venture” by some liberal cretin, is truly the stuff of legendary nightmares capable of inducing suicide, heart attack, coma and even death in some. Such generic, and furthermore excessively stupid, nonsense is vile. A pro-toll propagandist, to this end using liberal rhetoric that surely finds fans amongst the anti-tax and individualist imbeciles, a vile monsterous perversion of all sensibility of any worth–
CRUSH THE TOLLCISTS!
Anyway, let’s closer examine the idiocy of this nonsensical “background” article closer:
Around the world there’s an upsurge in toll roads because tax financing is not producing good enough highways.
Of course, this is strictly not true. There are several reasons that a State would want to pursue toll road financing rather than tax income and public spending; but “good enough” (quality) is not one of them. The state might have very limited funds available, or desire to shift the responsibility onto a body which it in turn can blame (to avoid it self being blamed) for any potential problems that arise with the execution and operation of a motorway or a system of such.
The reason for this “upsurge” is many, but this “upsurge” is largely illusory outside of parts of Europe and the U.S. Much of the world has for long time had motorways being primarily tolled networks. British advisor’s in the 1950′s encouraged Japan to establish a network of toll roads to speed up the development of new roads and infrastructure. In the U.S. and Europe, those politicians and organisations arguing for the establishment of more toll systems (many always have and still do, exist) use various ideological arguments at times to justify their decisions, arguing from (like the author of that moronic piece of yellow “journalism” that is the TRN) the liberal market-loving perspective, but the true reason is simply one of cheapness. The U.S., burdened by the perverse disease known as Congress and the corrupt Senate, full of failed politicians the brain-dead American public constantly vote in and cherish like the sacred cow of liberty, has for long time been unwilling to provide funding for roads, and thick-witted local governments remain just as unwilling and inexcusably inept. Thus, they ponder different solutions, and one of those is giving the mission to a corrupt money-hungry investment banker, the vilest devils of them all; a good example of this kind of verminous dregs are the filthy criminal scum of Macquarie Infrastructure Group.
Voters reject tax hikes because they don’t get highway value for the tax dollar.
Voters reject tax hikes because most of the time they are short-sighted idiots, something politicians and corrupt commercial enterprises like to encourage. This is not always the case however. Phoenix voted yes to a series of tax increases to fund the regional motorway network, and Phoenix is a terrible desert hell-hole. This has nothing to do with “highway value for tax dollar”, a majority of voters don’t think in such terms, and furthermore, even if they did so, there would be no meaningful way of comparison, no picture complete to make it easy to comprehend, the geography of the matter is far too complex. Something our intellectually challenged “journalist” would have a hard time understanding.
And they are frustrated by congestion on inadequate overloaded roads & tie-ups which cost tens of billions in wasted fuel, missed meetings, downtime from work, and unnecessary pollution and accidents.
Oh, personalisation of the problematique, great. Never fails to convince idiots of whatever you’re trying to sell.
Tolling is a way to build and rebuild roads without having to resort to taxes. Toll roads dip into the capital markets for their funds, not into taxpayers’ pockets.
Capital markets funds came from nowhere. Typical liberal rhetoric, “not into tax payers pockets”. Alluding to the whole “tax is theft” argument. If something is theft, property is. Propertarian cunt.
It’s the fairest system and the most efficient…
As fair as fair tax. Never seen that nonsense before.
And the prospective toll revenues will often allow special measures such as the complete undergrounding of roads in environmentally sensitive areas, special services such as separate cars-only roadways, and electronic guideways for hands-off, feet-off driving (the ‘automated highway’) to make roads safer.
Prospective. An often absent prospect, I might add. Since when is the automated highway a good thing anyway? It’s basically an new form of that old stupid concept of Personal Rapid Transit. It’s as stupid and loathsome as flying cars. And those other things apply to tax-funded projects all the same, but to be honest, roads are rarely tunnelled due to environmental concerns. As is known, at best, it only shifts the location of the pollution. It’s generally done to satisfy whiny NIMBY’s and people whose idea of environmental concern is fighting something they think is “ugly” from being near them.
Because of the logic in favour of tolling
Shit logic.
major new road projects around the world will mostly be built as toll facilities
Not because of your great toll-logic, even if so.
And increasingly as old highways need rebuilding private sector funds and management will be needed. Tolls will be the way people pay.
Fuck your system.
The important thing is they all bring highway service into the market economy.
Oh, no, I know where this is going. Do you?
Change is difficult. The automobile is an intensely ideological contrivance and its associated infrastructure is equally controversial. An important part of elite opinion dreams of a return to rail transit and bicycles, and opposes most new provision for motor vehicles. Populists denounce tolls as “taxes” and assert that “we have already paid for roads” in gas taxes.
ELITE! Is that the so called “liberal elite” (meaning soft-centrist social-liberals in the U.S.)? We can see from what political perspective this person speaks. He speaks for the liberal capitalists, the children of the 1980′s, the Raygunites, the psychotic lunatics, the raving insane, for the owners of investment banks, for the supporting pillars of world capitalism. You’re not being controversial, your controversy is an illusion. You’re perfectly in line with what is expected.
Tolls are not taxes but the price for a service. Now that service may be well or poorly provided. It may, or may not, be considered value for money. But the user-pays principle of tolls – that those who benefit from a road pay directly for its use – is good.
No. The user-pays principle is always bad. That’s the argument of those who oppose any social programs. “Why should I pay for their (insert some nonsense about homeless, hobos, drunks, criminals as slurs for poor people) health care/ education / whatever?” Mind you I am not a supporter of the price system whatsoever however. But this is not about what I want. This is about how vile this person is.
So army engineers have built roads and general taxes have been used to finance them, but in the early days of the industrial revolution the most common method was the corvee, or forced labor. Each able-bodied citizen was required to present himself with pick, shovel or other tools to work for several days per year fixing the local roads & or else send a substitute. ‘Pitching in’ for the common good worked when the people doing the work were the ones who benefitted so the corvee sometimes worked on a very small scale, but most roads are used by outsiders and the people doing the work then resent it.
“Why should we slave away, take time off from our income-producing job when the guy who benefits is that merchant passing through or those sightseers going by?” they ask. The ‘corvee’ was described in the late 18th century in England as a “ridiculous farce” because of evasion, favoritism, loitering and general ineffectiveness (p101) In Virginia citizens eligible for statute labor were described as “working out the road tax” and taxed the equivalent hourly wage rate if they failed to show up for statutory road work. Like other kinds of taxation the corvee was seen as unfair and oppressive and enlightened thinkers argued for the user-pays principle.
Enlightened scum argued for the user-pays principle. Notice also the intentional induction of “forced labour” and the comparison of this with taxation (as well as classic liberal slurs, “unfair” (poor rich folks worked so hard to earn their honest money!) and “oppressive”, totally original nonsense. Fuck you.
“When the carriages which pass over a highway or bridge…pay toll in proportion to their weight or tonnage, they pay for the maintenance of those public works exactly in proportion to the wear and tear which they occasion of them. It seems scarcely possible to determine a more equitable way of maintaining such works.” So wrote the famous thinker Adam Smith in his “Wealth of nations.”
What’s with this use of the strange wording “thinker” anyway? Fuck Adam Smith. Fuck the Wealth of Nations.
At a time when Americans (and many other peoples) are skeptical about the value they get back for taxes paid seeking loans and investment secured against toll revenues is often the only practical way to finance needed new roads
Blah blah. Ugh. I get a headache.
Only overhead gantries such as those used for signage are needed for the electronic toll ‘readers’ and for video license plate recognition cameras. In this way electronic tolls can be collected more economically than road taxes and are less likely to be squandered by politicians and bureaucrats!
Typical anti-tax liberal American.
A further major advantage of tolls in the era of microcircuitry and electronic communications is that toll rates can be varied by time-of-day to help combat traffic congestion and guarantee a swift trip through to those who really need it, as measured by their willingness to pay a premium for that privelege. As the stop-&-go traffic on the urban highways of America and Europe make painfully clear, highway space is a scarce and highly valued commodity, especially during rush hours. The prices of food, telephone calls, fuel, airline seats, metals and many other items vary according to supply and demand to the benefit of consumers and suppliers alike and there is every reason why urban highwayspace should do the same. It will provide revenues to improve transportation facilities, help transit compete, and persuade those who can reorganize their movement to leave the scarce roadspace to those motorists who need it most. Best of all it will offer people choices & spend less, get less or pay a premium for premium road service. It’s the way the rest of the market economy works.
So much for being controversial. The market economy is failure.
Such toll projects if properly implemented will be win-win reforms.
Reformist! I hate reformists! Shitty reforms at that.
“There’s a simple solution to this traffic problem. We’ll have business build the roads. And government build the cars.”
- Will Rogers quoted Bay Area Council
Liberal humour is so unfunny.
“There’s no such thing as a free road. There’s a toll road, or there’s a taxing road, or there’s no road.” Our adaptation of an IBTTA (the tollsters trade association) slogan. 1996
If free is the absence of the price system, then there is such a thing as a free road. Tollroad Pigs Lobbyist Propaganda Association.
“Road building is not a government monopoly any more. Those days are over.”
- Federico Pena, US Secretary of Transportation, Transportation Research Board address, Washington DC, January 8, 1996.
Again, what a surprising thing for a populist idiot to say. Since when was road building a government monopoly anyway? The only thing that has been anything even remotely approaching that is planning and funding… But idiots, etc.
Apparently the ingrates in the Netherlands are planning to enact a road pricing scheme… sickening– the world is spiralling into an abyss of failure the likes of which never have been seen before.
In closing, Toll Roads News suck.
Privatisation drive
The Japan Railways Group, more commonly known as JR Group (JRグループ, Jeiāru Gurūpu?), consists of seven for-profit companies that took over most of the assets and operations of the government-owned Japanese National Railways on April 1, 1987. Most of the liability of the JNR was assumed by the JNR Settlement Corporation.
JNR Settlement Corporation (日本国有鉄道清算事業団, Nippon Kokuyū Tetsudō Seisan Jigyōdan?) was a corporation formed to handle long-term debts and redundancies following the privatisation and breakup of Japanese National Railways on April 1, 1987.
It was dissolved on October 22, 1998 after being unable to pay back more than 30 trillion JPY in long-term debt. Following its dissolution, its assets and liabilities were inherited by the Japan Railway Construction Public Corporation.
In 1998 JRCC assumed the assets and liabilities of the JNR Settlement Corporation; JNRSC’s existing long-term debts were incorporated into the national government’s general debt. The JRCC was dissolved on October 1, 2003 and its responsibilities were passed to the Japan Railway Construction, Transport and Technology Agency (JRTT).
Increased efficiency and profitability. Sure. Silly liberals.
