Too much public policy these days is created only for the rent it produces. It’s an old trick that originates in the very founding of public government. To finance his kingdom’s defence when costs exceeded his personal fortune, the local monarch of Genoa, Italy, the birthplace of modern government, hit upon the idea of making laws about tolls for roads, then sold the rights for the collection of those tolls to the highest bidder. He then used the one-time lump sum to bail out his generals faced with soldiers disserting in the field for lack of pay. There had previously been no laws about traveling on roads. New laws, enacted at no cost and requiring no work by the king, produced huge revenues for him. The lesson has not been lost on governments since.

Governments big and small have craftily created laws and then have sold the rights to collect the resulting fees and fines to enjoy great profits for no work. The City of Vancouver, for example, made laws about how high anyone can build a building on any piece of privately-held land, and then collected very handsomely from builders willing to pay the fees to build higher. The province of British Columbia built a fleet of car-carrying ferries—really just bridges in the public highway system built too short and so outfitted with motors to slide over to the other unattached highway bridge ramp—and then decreed that tolls must be paid on these mobile bridges, and have then sold the rights to collect this rent to a private company, realizing a good profit in the meantime.

The government of Canada likewise built a railway system with public funds, then enacted fees for people, farmers and companies to use the tracks they already paid for, and then sold the rights to the collection of those fees to a private company—in this case, a US-based company. Canada did this also with a national airline system, building it up with public funds, then, once it had become established as a critical aspect of national infrastructure, sold the rights to collect fees—in this case, seat prices on Air Canada—to a private company.

Laws prohibiting possession of marijuana offer the opportunity for several quasi-private companies—in this case police unions—to collect the resulting fines, once they’ve been filtered through courts and public finance bodies before being turned over to police in the form of higher wages and more hirings.

Canada’s unwelcome and unprecedented military occupation of Afghanistan is another example. Here, entirely new public policy involving Canada in aggressive war-making was created to generate more state spending on goods produced by arms-related private companies.

New laws with associated fees or fines meant to change behavior give rise to a certain level of dubiousness especially for libertarians, like new City laws banning smoking on patios or near doorways. But quite another level of public skepticism is excited by new laws meant not to change behavior but to encourage and profit from it, like provincial highway tolls. Where the anti-smoking laws would be seen to work best when in time no fines are collected, quite the opposite is the case with highway tolls. If everyone stopped traveling a highway due to those fees, the policy would be viewed as a disaster.

There is a third category of law-making that is to be singled out for condemnation for being justified on the grounds of inducing positive change to public behavior, while in fact meant to encourage that behavior and generate revenue. Such is the case with new provincial legislation regarding carbon taxes. These are new, soon-to-be-implemented fees charged at gasoline filling stations. The collection of these fees, said the BC Finance Minister Carole Taylor, are intended to change public behavior—to make us drive less—and would be, she said, revenue neutral from the point of view of the government. An amount equal to what is collected in carbon taxes is to be returned to the public, likely in the form of tax reductions in other areas of taxation, or in direct payments to citizens.

The effect of this revenue neutrality, however, will be to create a new dependence of the state on the new revenue stream. Tax cuts and direct payments will come out of general state revenues, meaning that collections of carbon taxes will go into general revenues. The tax cuts and direct payments will inevitably and quickly be regarded as permanent and will be expected and anticipated by the public. They will then serve to put the state into budget deficit if carbon taxes serve their stated purpose of reducing the purchase of gasoline by drivers. The government will therefore come to encourage more such purchases.

This has happened before. Gambling laws were originally enacted on the grounds that public behavior regarding gambling needed to be altered. Today, gambling companies pay the government big fees for the rights to circumvent anti-gambling-inspired laws and to collect the proceeds of gambling at private casinos. What is more, the state itself now runs its own huge and very lucrative gambling business with lottery tickets, over which the state reserves to itself by means of more new laws a jealously guarded monopoly.

At first the proceeds of state-run lotteries were meant to support activities the state didn’t previously support, like charities and arts groups. Today, lottery ticket proceeds flow to general state revenue where they offset the need for the state to collect taxes to cover all the ambitions the state has developed. As a result, the state now uses it’s law-making abilities to encourage that which it’s laws were first meant to curtail: dangerous levels of gambling pushed by advertising slogans such as “Hey, you never know,” and, where an extra fee could open a lottery ticket to even greater gambling wins, advertisements picturing severely depressed gamblers who chose not to pay for “the extra,” even though they did win.

Any change to public behavior that might reduce gambling is now directly and deliberately debased and undermined by the state even though the state’s original entry into the world of gambling law was predicated on a widespread public desire to see gambling reduced. The same thing is fated to happen regarding the state’s recent entry into the world of fuel purchasing. Originally based on a widespread public desire to see gasoline purchasing reduced, along with the resulting greenhouse gas emissions, the state’s new laws are fated to soon come to debase and undermine that public desire and produce the opposite effect.

One can well imagine soon enough state-sponsored advertising encouraging people to take long driving holidays around the province, all in order to beef up revenues collected from carbon taxes charged at gasoline filling stations regardless of the environmental destruction it causes, just as gambling is today aggressively encouraged by the state where the then-new laws were originally meant to curtail destructive gambling.