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Saturday, May 05, 2012

Food Trucks Seek 'That Mystical Spot'

This article provides a good example of why "government is the problem" rhetoric sells well. Food trucks in Manhattan covet the perfect parking space, but there are way too few of those. In an effort to control what might otherwise become a third-world-like, chaotic mess, NYC holds an  auction, to ensure that carefully designed food truck-friendly spaces are allocated with maximum economic efficiency imposes many layers of byzantine rules to plague the food truck vendors, create jobs enforcing the rules, and undoubtedly offer rich opportunities for low-level bribery in exchange for non-enforcement.

Seriously, is there any other explanation for such an inefficient, frustrating approach that also ignores a nice, opaque way of raising tax revenue?!

I think the lesson here, of interest to non-ideological centrists and "good government types", is: government will be better when it does fewer things, well.

Next up: the artificial shortage of taxicabs in NYC (and many other cities).

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