Translation:

When someone says something is free -> "I will pay for that and you will owe me nothing"

When the government says something is free -> "I will hold a gun up to Bob's head and make him pay for that for you"

@freemo

There's the funny case of "someone will save money by providing this to you", which is sometimes the case for e.g. making public toilets free.

@robryk not sure I follow, what do you mean?

@freemo Providing a free public toilet reduces the incidence of people urinating on a random wall in the vicinity, which makes cleaning of the vicinity cheaper. If the location if e.g. the local train station, then often the cost of toilet maintenance and of additional cleaning would fall onto the same institution.

I know that some communes have decided to keep their public toilets free for that reason, but don't know how they established that this actually saves money.

@robryk So you are still holding a gun to one persons head (toilet manufacturers or the rich paying for them) in order to benefit someone else who is getting the service for "free" (in this case the people operating train stations).

Now you eliminate taxes in the situation and you get the same benefit but without the moral problem of taking from one to pay for another. For example without taxes now the train company is commercial and pays for those same toilets, and still makes them open to the public, because the expense of the company saves the company money.

The key here is optimizing a situation at gunpoint still generally fails considering the same optimization occurs when you eliminate the force (collecting taxes).

Not that im against taxes overall, I'm not. Just saying "it saves money overall" isnt a good reason on its own.

@freemo

> toilet manufacturers or the rich paying for them

Do you mean "rich who pay taxes and so finance the commune"? Otherwise I'm confused. I'm confused anyway by the "toilet manufacturers" part: Public toilets are usually maintained by communal government in my area; the toilet manufacturers are usually far away and don't pay taxes to the commune.

> Now you eliminate taxes in the situation and you get the same benefit but without the moral problem of taking from one to pay for another. For example without taxes now the train company is commercial and pays for those same toilets, and still makes them open to the public, because the expense of the company saves the company money.

Basically yes; I think that you describe the same situation as I do, except that in your case both are owned by the train company and in my case both are owned by the commune.

I didn't mean to say that your statement in the original toot is incorrect, but rather point out that providing something for free can sometimes decrease costs, so it can transform your descriptions into "I will save some many and you'll owe me nothing" and "I will still hold a gun up to Bob's head, but I'll be making Bob pay a bit less than if I wasn't providing this to you for free". I don't have an opinion on whether your dichotomy is correct (yet).

@robryk I am refering to the fact that someone has to pay for those toilets. When we talk taxes, specifically progressive taxes, then you are forcing rich and well to do people to pay for the toilets for other people to use. In the case of a free-market scenario those toilets must be paid for by the train company and ultimately the funding comes fromt he passangers who use it.

The point is you arent "providing something for free".. one of two people are paying for it, the people who ride the train (in a capitalist/free market situation) or random people, mostly rich, who may or may not use the train (taxes).

The issue here is not if the access to the toilet is provided without a cost-per-access. It is if your holding a gun to someone elses face to fund it or if you get that funding through the people who use it. Either case it is not free.

@freemo

If we have a restricted choice between:
- the commune finances cleaning of the train station it owns out of taxes,
- the commune installs a public toilet and finances less cleaning.

Then doing the latter instead of the former:
- provides one additional free thing to random people,
- reduces the amount of money the commune extracts by a threat of force from its inhabitants.

Do you think this restricted choice is a contrived way of looking at the situation, that the reasoning is bad, or something else?

@robryk Yea this doesnt quite add up to me because it assumes the taxes are needed to maximally clean the toilets.

The axiom however is that providing free toilets to people (that means the cost of cleaning and maintaining it) lowers cost because clean toilets are cheaper than cleaning walls of urine. If cleaning toilets truely does represent a reduction in cost then there is no need to get tax payers to pay for it in the first place. In fact it means you should **make** money by cleaning them and thus their expense should not be an issue in the first place.

@freemo

I don't know how to make money on operating a toilet in case in which the walls are owned by many different entities.

Let's assume we have ~20 different owners of walls in the vicinity and that reduction in cleaning costs of ~15 of them is sufficient to fund the toilets. How would you envision the setup where they share the cost of the publicly accessibly toilet, without each of them being incentivized to cease to do so (because even without them it will be beneficial for everyone else to pay for the toilets, so they will still get the service without paying for it)?

@robryk Why does this need the complexity of 20 different owners. We are talking about a train station. There is one owner, the train station.

If we do want to talk about multiple owners where it isnt the simple case of a train station then we dont have a set of walls with 20 owners we have 20 owners that each own different walls but own each wall 100%, those walls are close to eachother. So how would they fund a bathroom, simple, they agree to pool their money together and pay for one and split the costs.

This is in fact the norm. IF there is a strip mall with 20 different stores and there is one bathroom for all the customers in the location typically its because the 20 local businesses decided to pool their resources and share the cost.