No entity that claims to be for any level of democracy can at the same time be for there being a cost to using Public Transport,
as that cost in some cases completely stops poor people from equal participation in the ruling of their own lives,
as well as, you know... having to choose between buying food or affording going to work.
🇳🇱
@b9AcE Or you can just be perfectly accepting of the cost of public transportion and then support welfare to ensure anyone too poor to afford it has the financial help to do so.
Life isnt so black and white "this is the only option" as people tend to make it out when it comes to political issues.
@freemo ...or, you can have actual experience of that system you propose and it repeatedly failing and your argument is nonsense only leading to increased bureaucracy (or if you're a Capitalist... "increased cost").
You can talk to me about my nails tuning black and dropping off, because that system failing its administration and losing my forms for sickleave. That was pretty black and white.
@b9AcE As with many systems run by governement (including public transportation and welfare) you are entierly right. Many countries fail at it. Some countries succeed.
The best approach rather than dogma is to understand how and why and go from there. You certainly wont get any argument from me that welfare is broken and would need to be fixed, it cant simply be implemented as-is.
No doubt you had a failure in your expiernce. My guess would be based on your expiernce that you are american. Some of the worst implementation of welfare exists there.
@freemo No, Swedish.
Stockholm reportedly having the highest Public Transport cost in Europe, while that subway was entirely funded by taxpayer money on the explicit promise that it would become free of cost in some years, but instead it turned into a corporation with profit-demand, barriers that crush children if they follow their parents too slowly and police using the fare-checking system to do racist-profiling immigrant-checks.
@b9AcE As you pointed out earlier, government programs are often far more wasteful and inefficient than the alternative.
People are going to pay for public transportation one way or the other. It can be through tax, or it can be direct to a corporation. We already saw in england how the privitization brought down overall costs, so there is merit in that approach.
Free simply does not exist, it takes money to keep these systems running so it is not possible in any sense of the word for them to ever be free. the only difference is how you pay, and how much money you waste.
@b9AcE Your end goal isnt what is in question. As I pointed out there are just more than one way to get there.
Again a welfare system that is successfully implemented ensures that public transport (and any other resources) are equally accessible to everyone. That holds true whether it is government run or privatized.
So no it isnt too much to ask, its just that your way of getting there is not the only way.
@freemo OK, either one makes all the power over each individual's life accessible by moving it near every individual or one makes every individual able to reach it equally from where they live.
As the first is anarchism, that won't e implemented by States or adherents of that concept.
The other is "free Public Transport", which moves the "cost" of democracy from being a barrier only against the poor to instead being a cost shared equally by everyone and therefore so tiny that it won't even exist on the average tax-bill, especially compared to costs on the same of e.g. war.
@freemo Uhuhh... apart from "free simply does not exist" being nonsense, of course you are right and that is why I was talking about Public Transport, not taxis or even anti-union black-cabs such as Uber.
Is it an acceptable cost to ensure the places of power are accessible to everyone equally if one claims to be for equal access to ruling our lives (i.e. "democracy")?
I'd say yes.
I'd also say it's just a plain good investment both socially and economically to ensure that everyone has equal access to reaching education, work, etc if they are most appropriate for participation there, not hindered by a cost that usually is still just a fraction of the tax portion of Public Transport's income.
Unless one wants to maintain socio-economic segregation of course.