What A Parking Spot Costs

Matt Yglesias rails against parking regulations. Kevin Drum dissents. Ryan Avent comes to Matt's defense:

Let’s say you’re a private business owner and you want to provide parking for your customers but are worried about other stores free-riding on your spaces. What could you do? Well, you could build the parking, charge for it, and validate for your customers. And if you’re another business that doesn’t want to pay for parking but wants to make sure that your customers can park, you can approach someone who owns parking and offer to pay for your customers to park so you can validate too. It’s extremely easy to exclude people from private parking, so property rights are clear, so there’s absolutely no reason why businesses can’t negotiate efficient arrangements on their own. And in the real world, they basically always do when left to their own devices. So why should government mandate minimum parking? It shouldn’t, obviously.

2006-2011 archives for The Daily Dish, featuring Andrew Sullivan