@djc in general, sliding scale pricing is a not-great form of redistribution, because it concentrates all the burden of helping the needier class arbitrarily on a very particular, small, somewhat adjacent class rather than causing the burden to be shared broadly. the poor should be able to buy mangoes. but why should only those among the wealthier who buy mangoes bear an unnecessarily steep cost of helping? 1/

@djc this set of concerns becomes less pressing if it’s a good just about everybody dies. so, Singapore’s clever means of simulating a social-democratic welfare state under libertarian ideology by offering sliding-scale pricing for goods like health care from the savings it forces via the Central Provident Fund works pretty well. 2/

@djc But, for example, the US practice of using sliding-scale pricing to finance private higher education is a horror. The percentage of families who will send their kids to sticker-price-expensive colleges is small, and making the sticker price very high to subsidize cheap rides for the poorer concentrates a terrible burden. The problem, of course, isn’t the cheap rides. It’s that we should all be subsidizing, not just a small, adjacent class of parents. /fin