That’s right. And use taxes can and should be calibrated to not just collect money but achieve public policy objectives. If the real marginal cost were close to 10 cents a page, we might be able to argue that funding the system other ways would be more distortionary but it’s not. We have decided with lots of static file services (including Supreme Court opinions) that the right use tax is 0, because zero-cost access is a desirable quality in itself.
The problem is threefold: the true marginal cost of a PACER page is closer to 0 than 10 cents; the fixed cost (building an electronic record system) is already paid by the public; and the complication of a price discrimination mechanism would drive up that marginal cost rather than capture true willingness to pay.
This trilemma shows up whenever we try to meter public goods in this fashion. We could, in theory, price public transit or water or what-have-you by evaluating willingness to pay and charging each person that value. However, in practice the invasive monitoring necessary to do so is an enormous burden. We can sort of spread this out with municipal services by (as you noted) replacing trunk lines/pipes with a general fund and asking individuals to pay for the last mile, but that mostly works because the real marginal cost is measurable and not near 0. Further, for utilities, the willingness to pay has good proxies: the end of the last mile is at a real house that isn’t going anywhere. For PACER I doubt that’s the case.
The AI wouldn’t care obviously but I thought we’d find less maximally ironic engagement bait to be made by machines. I think I didn’t have enough imagination.
It is similar to the problem with the neutron bomb. On the surface the idea of the neutron bomb (a bomb which kills humans via hard radiation but leaves infra intact) is not “worse” than a regular nuclear weapon. The dead die the same way and the living envy them. What CHANGES is the use calculus. I might not want to bomb an industrial valley if doing so destroys the thing I am trying to capture. However, if I have a bomb which kills the people living there and spares the factory, I might pull the trigger.
Similarly, it is cheap (relatively) to indiscriminately launch weapons at a distant place. It is extraordinarily expensive to send human troops in. They need food, water, and generally have families that expect some of them to come home. If putting a rifle on an autonomous vehicle works, then a ground invasion becomes cheaper.
2 things. First, landing a plane is abnormal! You're shedding a huge amount of energy and you're transitioning from a state where you can keep flying due to your speed to one where flight is impossible as you lower speed. That's an abnormal state to put an aircraft in, regardless of how often it happens. Second, what exactly is the level of automation you're saying is not necessary? Should we rip out radar systems that mark glide paths?
Landing is an abnormal situation for an aircraft which we make SUBSTANTIALLY less dangerous through intense automation. Do you want to rip out automated landing systems?
The crew and the plane are a single system. It is meaningless to imagine pilot “skill” without the plane. Further, we killed so many pilots in the 20th century through impossible workloads which we have now automated, it’s almost cruel to be wistful for it.
I know this is an analogy to AI, but I wish we would dispense with this idea that there’s some appropriate level of machinery which was reached just a hair before right now. There is no appropriate level of machinery, no point at which the nature of the system itself will unambiguously say “that’s enough.”
Even in the US which lags behind in this area it would be obscene to claim that grocery cashiers aren't being actively replaced. That's just not connected to reality. Most grocery stores I've been in have essentially 1 open lane with a human where there used to be a half dozen. You might as well say that airline ticket agents haven't been replaced.