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Notes -
The degree to which a government decision is about budget exists on a sliding spectrum.
Consider two extremes:
ADA is somewhere in between these extremes. It is clearly has a direct monetary impact on businesses. And sometimes as with the free videos, the outcomes are clearly bad.
But I don't think it is 100% only about money.
Consider a community of 10k of people with 20 wheelchair users and a single non-wheelchair supermarket. Say the owner has done the math and building a wheelchair ramp would not be cost-effective. I see the following options:
A) The government shrugs. B) The government pays some allowance to the wheelchair users. They try to pool together to get that ramp. The owner agrees. Good outcome. C) Like B, but the owner still not want the ramp. The ramp would take one of the spots of the parking lot (in fact, the best spot!), and he wants rent for that. Eventually the government overpays severely for that ramp. D) Like B, but the government forces the owner to allow that ramp. The owner mumbles something about commies. E-G) Like B-D, but the money comes from the government directly based on general rules instead of the actual demand. This bypasses coordination problems, but risks being less cost-effective. H) The government forces the owner to pay for the ramp out of his own pocket. Again he grumbles something about land of the free. In the end, everyone pays through increased supermarket prices and the general costs of having to follow more laws. I) Some kind of technical solution. Exo-skeletons, shopping-as-a-service, whatever.
Most of these options are not great. Excluding wheelchair users whenever the market forces are not in their favor is not nice. Creating more regulations is also not nice. Having a bureaucracy which figures out how much the supermarket should be paid for allowing that wheelchair ramp also is not nice. Relying on technological solutions will not always work.
Making the supermarket owner pay for the ramp has at least the advantage that there is little bureaucratic overhead. You do not need to figure out a fair price for getting the owner to allow that ramp, or if the government should pay for a ramp in the primary color of the market, and how much the government should pay if the owner also uses that ramp to move carts of goods, or employ wheelchair ramp inspectors. Pay for the ramp or get sued is not the simplest law there could be, but it is not the most complicated either.
This does not mean that the pathologies you mentioned (e.g. that it is easier to sell hidden costs than visible costs) don't play a role, though.
Why not? Putting a request for grocery pickup with reimbursement on Instacart or Craigslist or the public library's bulletin board or whatever seems very simple and reliable. I assume it's backed up with small-claims court.
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I mean this seriously: who fucking cares? Government is supposed to be fair and just, not nice. It is also supposed to be deliberately limited in scope and power, and demanding every single building in the country include ramps if they want to let people in off the street isn't part of it.
The crippled should take it up with God, not with Uncle Sam.
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