
If we do not have all of everything we want, there is a problem of rationing. This is the major corollary of scarcity. An individual cannot escape the requirement for "economizing." How shall he disburse his limited income?
The very impersonality of the pricing mechanism, which the advocate of freedom should consider an asset, does not appeal to the compassionate person determined to do good.
Thus we find widely advocated processes of rationing, founded not on each person bidding in the open market on the basis of his own scale of priorities, but on direct disposal of goods and services by some public authority on the basis of what the authority somehow decides are the relative "needs" of the members of the community…
The Smythean scheme [rationing by prices] achieves a number of desirable results.
First, the rationing is done with a minimum cost in time and inconvenience. Paying a price in terms of money, i.e., generalized purchasing power, is neater (although not necessarily smaller in the estimation of everyone) than paying in terms of a specific resource, in this case, the energy required in arising early and groping to the parking lot by moonlight. That, as Smythe has often said, is why money was invented.
Second, a dispensing bureaucracy—suffering the temptations of frail men, guided by arbitrary and often nebulous criteria, and subject to no rewards for efficiency or penalties for inefficiency—is avoided.
Third, there is upheld the basic principle that those who get (in this case, the parking spaces) shall pay. Fourth, there is upheld the equally basic principle that gifts and rewards are best given in generalized purchasing power.
Bill Allen
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