Ramblings

The Waxman-Markey bill has passed Congress. I don't like that it doesn't have auctioned permits (or that it lets agribusiness off the hook, but that's a whole other post for another day).

Here's a proposal - auction more stuff. Think about where it currently works. Google auctions every advertising spot each time a page with Google-served ads appears. Icelandic fishers are incredibly efficient because of tradeable fishing permits. So let's expand this idea onto other realms where it should work:

All pollution should fall under a cap and trade scheme with auctioned, tradeable permits. Let the EPA set the maximum total pollution output for each regulated pollutant in say, each regulatory district, and then let the industrial markets decide how much they want to produce of sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, ozone, PCBs, mercury, etc. With all the revenue, return it all to the residents of those districts on a per-person dividend (see Alaska's oil dividend). The market forces should regulate pollutants, compensate Americans financially for environmental damage done where they live, and even encourage polluters to move operations to less environmentally sensitive areas.

Event organizers should auction its tickets instead of letting scalpers profit from their inefficient prices. Let everyone bid a maximum price for each section/seat type up until 14 days before the event, and then price the tickets in each section to the highest price where the tickets would be sold out. In the current state of affairs, fans have their time wasted while organizers run the risk of not filling seats and/or leaving potential profits on the table (to be claimed by scalpers). Airlines already do this with seats on airplanes. There's been a lot of research into this, and a lot of it could probably be applied to event seating.

Transmission rights on every piece of wireless spectrum should be put up for auction. The length of each lease should be variable (some would last 1 year, others 2 years, and some could be like 10 or 25 years to encourage stability for those applications that would need it). These permits should be tradeable, and the federal government (including the military) should have to submit bids as well. As it stands today, wide areas of spectrum are underutilized while engineers are forced to try to maximize the use of some pretty crowded spectrum bands. I want fast, cheap, ubiquitous wireless internet. Artificially scarce spectrum is making it more difficult than it needs to be. As above, revenues raised could be used to just give cash back to ordinary Americans.

Auctionable and tradeable permits for access to ports and runways would probably make much better use of our existing transportation/logistics infrastructure. Similarly, congestion pricing for highways and parking spots would essentially be real-time auctions for scarce resources.

And that is why I cringe when people call liberals like me "socialist," since, you know, I really love markets and think they're great. And pretty much all the above ideas involving government running auctions would possibly raise enough in revenues to pay for themselves so that we could reduce taxes and other wonderful things that everyone likes.