When resources are scarce they must be rationed somehow. Most frequently today resources are rationed by price. But some services, most noticeably subsidised public services like healthcare and (at my university) peak-hour parking, are rationed by one’s willingness to wait around in a line. Both ‘willingness to pay’ and ‘willingness to endure a queue’ are signals that someone really wants something. In that respect both rationing systems help move goods and services to their most valued uses. But whereas willingness to pay biases distribution towards the rich, willingness to wait does the opposite, ensuring the poor get more because they lose less in wages when they stand in a line. For this reason and because time is more equally distributed than income, queue rationing is favoured by some egalitarians.
The problem with queue rationing is the incentive it creates or more precisely the incentive it doesn’t create. If everything were rationed by queues, nobody would have any reason to work and create wealth. The road to riches would not be providing services others want, it would be standing in a queue somewhere achieving nothing. Everyone would be impoverished because you would have to wait forever in queues for increasingly scarce goods nobody has a reason to make. This isn’t so much a problem when only a few goods or services are rationed with queues, but the time people waste waiting in lines and the reduced incentive they face to work and produce wealth is still totally unnecessary. Why motivate people to spend half an hour pointlessly driving around a parking lot when you can instead motivate them to stay back and work for another half an hour?
When queues are just waiting lists that don’t actually require you to stand around somewhere (like waiting lists for some types of surgery in Australia) you avoid wasting people’s time but lose any redistribution to the poor and no longer prioritise people who are willing to endure the most queuing. If the resource is needed urgently by some, the unavoidable wait can be very costly to them.
Rather than redistibute resources to the poor by expanding the use of queues, we would do better to price ration everything and deal with equality using cash transfers to the poor. At my university for example, we could raise the price of peak hour parking until queues were eliminated and compensate all students equally by using the extra revenue to offset compulsory student amenity fees.
