From The Metro:
Car salesman Ben Holdaway is hoping to make thousands by selling a rude-looking number plate. The 35-year-old bought FF11 KED and used a Scrabble website to make as many words as possible using 11 as a ‘U’...
He bought the rude registration earlier this month when seven million new plates went on sale... Each plate cost £399 from the DVLA. He has already sold BO11AXX for thousands of pounds to a private buyer.
Isn't this a fine example of voluntary taxation, and the distinction between public and private tax collection?
1. The government imposes the obligation for all cars to bear a registration number (let's assume rightly so, on balance).
2. Private individuals notice that some people are prepared to pay thousands of pounds for the right to drive round with a certain combination of numbers and letters (such as their initials), so start selling them 'second hand'.
3. This is clearly privately collected taxation, as these vendors did not impose the obligation to use number plates nor do they protect the purchaser's exclusive right to use those number/letter combinations (that'd be the traffic police doing that).
4. But is is also entirely voluntary taxation - if you're happy to drive round with the number plate that happened to be attached to the car when you bought it, you pay nothing extra.
5. So the government finally wakes up (this happened years ago, but decades after number plates were 'invented') and starts auctioning off numbers in advance, the current starting price is £399. Obnoxio and others will be disappointed to learn that some letter/number combinations are not available.
6. A larger share of the voluntary tax is now being collected by the government. Clearly they aren't as good at spotting desirable combinations as Mr Holdaway from the article, but hey.
7. As a big enthusiast of voluntary forms of taxation, when I'm in charge you'll no longer be able to transfer fancy number plates from one vehicle to the next for free - all such numbers will be auctioned off on an annual basis, thus ensuring a steady flow of revenue from people willing and able to pay it.
8. In other words, exactly the same logic applies here as it does with land values.
Thursday, 23 December 2010
Car registration numbers
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22 comments:
I think I prefer this one -
http://i.imgur.com/ZfGQX.jpg
It will not be long before the government requires us to change or re-register our plates every year at a cost that will rise faster than the rate of inflation.
Ch, I don't get it.
D, know, that's the Road Fund Licence you are talking about, separate topic (that's a bad way of taxing).
Mine says:
I 5ha9 61rd5 11p t43 541tt3r
How about changing the registration number to the ownership of the individual, rather than the motor vehicle he or she owns? So, every time you change a car you keep the number?
And as I am the recipient of lucky chance and have had a my own private plate since the old man bought a new Jag, had it delivered to his office before he'd driven it or seen the number, and it turned out that the reg. no. was my initials plus (coincidentally) 11F.
So I am not personally going to vote for your change, Mr MW, but I will be happy to go with mine.
B, I am often tempted to buy a can of spray paint and spray my initials on the back of my car, it's be a damn' sight cheaper than a number plate "1 MW" or something.
L, the precise details of how the auction system works are complex, but as your number probably only has value to you and nobody else, if you ever wish to transfer it when your current car conks out, the chances are that nobody else will bid more than £10 a year for it, so it'll cost you all of £10 to transfer it.
If you had a number "[your initials] plus 1" at the end, then it might well be worth thousands of £s a year - so what you are paying for is the exclusive right to the use of that number, which is enforced by the state and who are perfectly entitled to charge for it.
As I far as I recall it used to be the case that anyone who owned two or more vehicles was entitled to switch the number plates as they saw fit provided that they kept the authorities informed of the current status. Of course the legislation may have changed since I last took an interest.
M,
That's why they don't pay you the big bucks...
It's a Nissan Cube. What is sold in cubes?
Google -
C6H12O6
Should be a law against it...
Ch, that is genius.
Apol's, I misread the "1" for a "J".
As a big enthusiast of voluntary forms of taxation, when I'm in charge you'll no longer be able to transfer fancy number plates from one vehicle to the next for free - all such numbers will be auctioned off on an annual basis, thus ensuring a steady flow of revenue from people willing and able to pay it.
Probably better, but I really can't get too worked up about the odd bit of lost value with number plates.
For one thing, the state auctions them now, so get the market rate at the time. Sometimes, things will appear that will raise or lower the value of a plate (I know one example) but that's rare. On top of this, such extra value is rarely because of the state.
Also, no-one protests about more plates being made because it will lower their plate value, using proxy wars, like the impact on the character of the roads as an argument.
Where your case really fits is that at one time, they didn't auction off plates. Garages would get numbers, and if they happened to get a juicy number, they'd then do things like put it on a car that the boss would buy, before selling the plate. It was a form of private taxation (like house prices that rise near new stations).
And this one has it's moments as well -
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dratz/1045336659/
JT: "... such extra value is rarely because of the state."
Maybe, but in the absence of the requirement for each car to have a unique number, no number plate would have any value whatsoever. The same with land values. Maybe 'the state' in the narrower sense is not responsible for whatever it is that makes a plot of land valuable, but without the state to enforce your right to exclusive possession, to allow you to build on it etc, that land would be worthless.
"... no-one protests about more plates being made because it will lower their plate value, using proxy wars, like the impact on the character of the roads as an argument."
Aha, that's the clever bit. There are millions of numbers that have expired in the past which can be resurrected and auctioned off.
So maybe you paid £10,000 (or £100,000) for "JT [digit, digit]" but there are a dozens of "JT [digit, digit, digit]" registrations that can be re-released and auctioned off for £500or £1,000 a year or something..? What happens to the resale value of your "JT [digit, digit]" then?
It's got to be better than having a Road Fund Licence of £1,000 and upwards (a very bad tax, IMHO).
Ch, I'm afraid flickr is blocked from where I work.
I agree about road fund license. Very bad, especially as it's being linked to engine size (which has sod all connection to how much you use the road or the environmental damage you do).
The irony in all this bad weather is how much activity there is on Twitter from people and organisations asking for help from 4x4 drivers to deliver medicines to hospitals, deliver brides to churches that sort of thing. Wonder if they've worked out what it would be like if we followed the Year Zero ideas of the Greens.
JT, good point about medicines etc.
As to taxation, there are lots of Bad Taxes on cars (VAT on new cars; income tax on profits from making and selling and repairing cars; benefit in kind charges; all the stupid disallowances for tax purposes; insurance premium tax; and the road fund licence to the extent it exceeds the adminsitrative cost of updating ownership records) and there are two Good Taxes on cars (fuel duty; and auctioning off registration numbers).
Tolls, parking charges and congestion charges have intellectual merit, but the costs of collection are enormous, so in practical terms, not good either.
MW - 'My' reg no is my initials, but it only has value to me because I got it from my dad who got it by accident. It's sentimental. And it has been on the same car since 1978 - one I built which is currently going through another rebuild (sort of perpetual recycling - the greenies should love me. Mind you it only has two seats and is viciously fast, so p'raps they won't.)
Just go back for a mo' as to having reg no's for drivers, not cars.
In my anarcho-libertarian world there would be no reg nos. at all. No MOT tests, etc etc. Or driving licences come to that. (I don't really think driving licences make a blind bit of difference to how well one drives - essentially that is all down to experience and a sense of responsibility). No-one else is going to swallow that, so the least worst option appears to be is to licence only drivers and to give them the reg. no. which they can transfer from car to car. This then is compatible with your (and mine) concept of scrapping all other taxes except fuel duty.
Anyway, you could still auction the reg. no. off each year if you wanted to, but as the number would be with you from when you start driving to when you die I may well have killed 'the market' anyway.
I also have plans to switch off all traffic lights and make all speed 'limits' and most other traffic 'laws' advisory. The corollary being pretty stiff penalties for getting it wrong. So that's going to make me very popular. Not.
L: "I also have plans to switch off all traffic lights and make all speed 'limits' and most other traffic 'laws' advisory. The corollary being pretty stiff penalties for getting it wrong."
Well yes of course, we'll turn off all the traffic lights the minute we're in government* and declare all roads (except motorways and some major roads) to be one giant zebra crossing. I'd have thought that was blindingly obvious.
* Authoritarian councils who want to give people a safety blanket will be permitted to leave traffic lights alternating between 'flashing green' and 'flashing amber' for a transitional period.
PS. I s'pose with my reg nos. for life concept 'The State' could charge a tax on transfer equivalent to some revenue maximising percentage found by trial and error? Plus a fee for the necessary admin.
So the price would be:
Cost of admin + 10% buggeration + tax%age.
Is that 'right'?
The other beauty with having driver reg. nos. not car reg. nos. is that dealers would have to more accurate with year of manufacture plus there would be no new car sales spikes caused by new reg. no. snobbery.
M,
Sorry to hear about the bondage and discipline at work, how about this one instead then? -
http://baldrics.wordpress.com/2009/08/17/its-a-feature/
L,
You're correct about all of those, there's that perfectly good principle that covers all of it, called 'driving without due care etc' that seldom gets used, because it requires that pesky stuff called evidence?
And remember that a licence is not about a piece of paper or a test, it is a right conferred on a person.
L, I care little for registration numbers and am happy to take what they throw at me for free. I have, however, used the same land line number for 17 years and have shifted it between five address in total, being charged a handsome £30 or so each time.
Of course, my telephone number is of no value to anybody but me, it's the same with your *** 11F number plate, the simple fact that you want to transfer it to your nexxt car flags up that it is of value to you, so you'd be happy to pay £10 or £50 a year to keep it. If doubt whether anybody would want to outbid you at any stage.
Ch, wordpress is blocked as well :-(
And remember that a licence is not about a piece of paper or a test, it is a right conferred on a person. Yes. Quite. It's a postive/negative freedom thing. I already had the 'right' do whatever I like, as long as it doesn't harm anyone else. So the State took away my 'right' to drive unless I paid it some money and passed some arbitrary assesment.
I believe MotoGP commentator (& renowned practical joker) Steve Parrish owns PEN1S
My vote goes to whoever spotted OBO110X and HOD650N (presumably a Mr Hodgson), which used to be regularly parked round the corner from me when I lived in London. I also once saw a car with the famous PEN15 plate, though a copper friend of mine who also saw it said that it's transfer would most likely be blocked by DVLA.
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