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I suppose it probably made more sense for me to actually just continue, but it felt like a nice moment in the conversation to pause and hear a response. Your joke would have been well-timed in-person; it is much-appreciated!
In any event, to continue on to my point, if you used to have the right to use the highway without paying the search price, and now they impose a search price on use of the highway, I think one is perfectly entitled to claim that they have 'lost' a right, and that this loss has come without any compensation. In fact, imposing the search/congestion price is a loss for the people who choose to pay the price, too! The difference is that they valued the use more than the price.
So, where should compensation go? I imagine one might impulsively argue that we should somehow compensate the people who pay the congestion price, because of their loss. I'm not really sure about that. I don't think that we should necessarily just go around compensating everyone for their loss in response to every government policy.
Instead, I think there are two factors that I think should drive our thinking for how we build a framework to do this well. First, there is in a real sense a transfer of benefit from the people who choose to stay home to the people who choose to drive. As you said yourself, "Highways reach a congestion inflection point where each additional car results in less throughput (fewer people-miles delivered per hour) and that's a classical tragedy of the commons." That person who chooses to stay home provides actual value to the person who chooses to drive, in the form of a reduced travel time. Purely theoretically, some amount of the congestion tax paid provides value to the user just in terms of the road, itself, while some amount of the congestion tax paid provides value to the user in terms of causing others to not drive, saving them time. Ideally, we could figure out how to actually price "not driving", but trying that directly may run into the same problems as other "offset strategies". I'm really not proposing a specific solution here; just observing that there is a tension/problem yet to be solved.
The second factor, as I mentioned above, is that we should try to devise a scheme that ultimately incentivizes both an efficient number of roads being built and an efficient price being charged. Frankly, I'm not sure we're doing very well even on the latter, but one-sided congestion pricing is absolutely trashing the likelihood that we can ever accomplish the former. I really don't even have much of an "ideal" here... just that I think we have more work to do than just slapping made-up prices on things and calling it good.
I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole of this search price hypothetical, because it serves no purpose to search people before they use the highway, whereas it averts a genuine tragedy of the commons to tax people for using the highway while it is congested.
Discussions of "rights" is complicated by the overlapping and charged definitions people have for the word. It can be used in a positivist negative sense (the actual freedom from government interference in doing something -- I have the right to speak my mind on the street corner), in a positivist positive sense (the actual ability to invoke the power of the government to overpower private parties who try to stop you from doing something or who refuse to facilitate it -- I have a right to see what data Google has collected about me), or in a morally-charged economic entitlement sense (the normative claim to third party or public resources to procure a good or service for yourself -- I have a right to food/shelter/medical care). There are other variations too. I think your argument is technically the positivist negative sense, but feels like it is reaching, subtly, to insinuate the economic entitlement sense too, which (if I'm right) I think would be begging the question.
In the realm of positivist negative rights, I certainly don't agree in general that people deserve compensation whenever they lose a right. Such a rule would lock our country into a state of sclerosis; every change in policy reshuffles all kinds of positivist rights, and requiring huge financial outlays to change the rules in any realm of society would mean the rules could never change and we'd quickly devolve. Your defense against public policy that is unfavorable to you is to participate in the political process, or in the extreme to exit the jurisdiction -- not to sue for compensation. Eminent domain does not generalize; it is a specific doctrine about taking land. It does not even apply when the government imposes easements on your land.
I also disagree that there's any kind of "efficient markets hypothesis" about when roads get built. That stuff is intensely political, riven by special interests, collective action problems, grift and idiosyncrasy. We are nowhere close. There's no plausible mechanism by which it would be.
Finally, the whole topic requires recognition that overcongested highways are a tragedy of the commons, in which aggregate value is destroyed by allowing overcongestion. That's the primary basis on which I support it. That's the source of scarcity of highway space. And in any place where there is scarcity, we apportion it by price or we suffer deadweight loss.
If you don't like the distributional consequences of apportioning scarce resources by price, address the consequences with general social safety nets. Make sure that anyone can afford to drive somewhere efficiently when they really need to, at least occasionally. That's better than the overcongested alternative can offer. But it doesn't require remitting congestion pricing revenue directly to non-drivers. It just requires remitting it to the fisc, as with any other government revenue, and writing checks from the government to poor people.
You don't agree with who? I had said:
I get the sense from most of your comment that by "not going down the rabbit hole", you meant, "I didn't read your comment."
Yeah, I didn't claim that, either. I said that we should design incentives to make it more efficient.
I agree 100%. Duly recognized, and not in contradiction with anything I've said.
I don't understand what the antecedent of "That" is in this sentence. Can you clarify?
Yeah, going back to, "You haven't read my comments." I have reiterated multiple times in the comments that I am not arguing for wealth redistribution or anything that would be otherwise satisfied with general social safety nets. You're arguing against a straw man and not really paying attention to what I've been saying. Good day.
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