Another Insight to the Coase Theorem and the Situation in Canada (Required)

Earlier, I remarked that the truckers increased transaction costs for trade with the U.S. 

This isn't a positive thing, but one response to that would be to note that if they increased costs by X, then any negotiation that cost less than X and got rid of those costs would be beneficial.

Instead, the government of Canada spent Z to impose transaction costs of Y on the truckers and their associates.

I noted earlier that X is a flow variable, so it's loss is largely permanent. 

Total costs to Canada are then X+Y+Z. 

It's hard to see how that's a good thing.

One way to do so is to use game theory to view this as a repeated game. If Trudeau's government did not spend Y, and incur costs Z, would there be more protests in the future (or a continuation of this one) with costs that were many multiples of X? Quite possibly. But that's all the more reason to see X as the budget for successful negotiation.

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Ballparking again. What would be the cost to compensate unvaccinated truckers for 2 weeks of quarantine (not that anyone seems to have proposed such an obvious thing)? I'm guessing they make about $100K per year, so say $4K per quarantine. That would cover 75K quarantine events. There's actually very good data on loaded truck transits: 1.1 million over the Ambassador Bridge each year. That works out to 75K in about 3 weeks. But the reports are that 90% of truckers are vaccinated and aren't required to quarantine, so it's more like 8 months worth of unvaccinated truckers.

So, let's get this right, 1 week of blockade imposed the same costs as a (fairly humanitarian gesture) of compensating affected truckers for 8 months. And this is what the government of Canada chose not to do. 

I think the Robert Burton quote applies here. This is "penny wise, but pound foolish".

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FWIW: I'm vaccinated and boostered. I think it's dumb not to be. But I don't think the phrase "this is something reasonable people can disagree about" is strong enough here. Reasonable people should disagree about this sort of thing. But they should also be able to compromise.