Incentives are grossly underrated. They can lead to the weirdest, dumbest behaviour, but can also bring out the best. If the world was incentivized to value scarcity properly, maybe we’d stop pursuing wildly implausible energy schemes that are nothing more than political Trojan horses. Read on…
BS. Same snake oil… different packaging….I refuse to sell myself into slavery
Not a good idea. Take used oil. Oil recycling companies would go around and buy up the used oil from mechanic shops. Then, government – likely upon the demand of a rent seeker – made oil recycling mandatory. Those companies stopped buying and began charging to take the used oil.
Incentives are just another way to abuse and force people into following one type of fascism or another.
True. When things really do become scarce no incentive will be needed because it will become survival of the fittest. The strong will take what they need and the rest, well, history has shown what happens to the rest.
My local used oil collector used to separate synthetic oil from natural oil. Now they don’t care. Mix it all up together. Which begs the question? What are they using the recycled “oil” for? It’s certainly not getting cleaned and put back in crankcases. So … it’s being sprayed as Road underlayment? Tar and gravel roofing? It’s also important to tell the public the TRUTH about where their recycled products are used.
The difficult thing is ensuring you’re incentivizing the what you think you’re incentivizing.
Say you want to train your cat that it won’t get fed if it’s sitting on the counter. So, when it’s feeding time, you sweep the cat off the counter before getting the food. After 2 weeks of this behavior, the cat knows that, in order to get fed, it needs to be on the counter so you can sweep it off. The resulting behavior is the opposite of what was originally intended.
Do you think it’s likely that government will be able to apply the correct incentives to make things run efficiently, or that it will come up with a vast well-paid bureaucracy that produces asinine Rube Goldberg rules of behavior and generally wastes the time and money of those who are forced to deal with them?
If government is the answer, it was obviously a stupid question.
Captcha is teaching me new four-letter words.
If it was worth while doing people would be doing it. People mine because there a need for there materiel if there was a cheaper easier way of doing it they would. Any time a government changes that it cost you money . Unfortunately Trump is about the only leader in the world that understands that.
If “Government” is for something you know it is unnecessary and doomed.
Let me demonstrate.
The flagship of Caring Government is Healthcare.
Why are we currently prisoners in our own homes?
To “prevent” the collapse of healthcare from too many Wuhan Flu suffer’s all at once.
So how is that “Free healthcare” working out for you?
Lets see,we have a service humans require,but only when sick,that requires compassion and quick allocation of resources to help at all.
Administered by a huge bureaucracy.
Almost as responsive as “You can apply..for help” being the help provided by your loving government..
And when your application comes to nought,politician’s response;government would have “helped you” but you are not worthy.
Another example of government incentivizing efforts going wrong: Back in the 1990’s Ontario threw money at all kinds of recycling efforts. How many tire recyclers remain in business?
One bright idea was to recycle low density polyethylene film, the stuff grocery bags are made of. People were willing to pay to have others take it to save on tipping fees at the dump.
Once government subsidized firms set up plants the landscape changed completely. All of a sudden there was a demand for “garbage” and people realized they could charge money for it. The plans needed more volume than was readily available locally so they started to import garbage from as far away as Florida!
These were not viable businesses and they died as soon as the government well ran dry. It does not make sense to sort garbage, shred, wash, dry and then pelletize the plastic only to end up with an inferior quality product with very limited markets. All of these processes are energy intensive and costly.
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Incentive? Hah! All CA government does is use DIS-incentives … such as slowly jacking up PG&E rates to the highest utility rates in the nation … to discourage heating/cooling your home. And … jacking up gasoline taxes, tolls, car registration, and instituting carbon taxes to discourage driving. Net results? More driving than ever. Homes as warm as ever. It’s all rubbish as far incentivizing goes … but it’s made Democrat donors filthy fkcuing $$rich$$.
Green energy is a disruption. The companies that have the know-how for energy production but no access to the grid, such as Samsung, aggressively use opinion manipulation to wedge themselves into the market. They demonize the existing producers and venerate themselves. This is economics, not politics.
KISS!