Second Amendment Blog
Auto Buybacks
Posted by:Sebastian on 
Aug 11th, 2008 | 
Filed under: Economics
Well, it look as if someone has proposed a scheme for a government car buyback. Alex Tabarrok points out that this scheme will have the same economic problems that gun buyback schemes suffer from.
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August 11th, 2008 at 1:08 pm
Never mind the economic problems. What about the fact that the idea is fundamentally flawed to begin with?
You cannot buy back something that you never owned in the first place. Therefore, any “buyback” program is really a “buy” program.
Now that we’ve got that cleared up, exactly where in the hell does any government have the extra money lying around to buy up a bunch of busted cars/guns/etc.?
tweaker
August 11th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
oh, come on. this idea may not make enough sense to implement, but i can think of several reasons it makes a lot more sense than gun buybacks. just for a few, the expected goals (reduction in pollution, improvement in gas mileage) are actually sort-of measurable and not totally incredible on the face of it; there’s no particular reason to believe folks would hold back on selling their gas-guzzling clunkers, unlike criminals with guns; and, unlike disarming poor folk, this idea would be likely to increase social equality rather than decrease it, even if only minutely.
(yes, having reliable, cheap-to-operate transportation is a social equality issue. it improves your chances to get and keep a job, for instance.)
sure, it’s badly misnamed. but if that were the only thing wrong with the program, i’d say go for it in a heartbeat. it’s certainly far more likely to actually help people than gun “buybacks” ever are!