Jason Kuznicki has a yet another very good post up at positiveliberty.com. This time, it's about how societies determine value. In general, I agree with the post, but I wanted to quibble about one thing (and I made a comment to this effect):
I’m skeptical of a carbon tax in particular because even if we could determine the properly discounted value of the amount of social harm that global warming will do to the largely unknowable preferences of our descendants, it hardly follows that paying money to our current government will make things any better. We might be able to inhibit the market preference for carbon-based fuels, sure. But does the government really deserve to be the beneficiary here? By my way of thinking, a larger government is likely to be a drain on our descendants, and not a help at all.
I’m not convinced that a carbon tax is quite the same as other types of Pigovian taxes. I think of it this way: A carbon tax isn’t necessarily about inhibiting certain types of behavior, but applying a cost to a resource that is being consumed.
With cigarette taxes, the government is theoretically trying to curb that behavior because some group (the majority?) has decided that behavior is dangerous (of course, I disagree strongly with this — let people go to hell in their own way). But there is no inherent harm done to other people in society by smoking cigarettes (you can quibble here and talk about health costs, etc, but in a truly free society, no one else would bear the cost of another).
Compare this to a carbon tax: sure, some people want to curb this kind of pollution because they think it’s evil and/or dangerous. But there is a resource being consumed here — the air. We pay for any other resource used as part of the price of a commodity. Why should this shared common resource be “free”?
I agree with his inherent mistrust of the government to spend the money raised with this kind of tax, and I don’t have a good solution for that. I just wanted to point out that there is a subtle difference that makes me at least somewhat in favor of a carbon tax-type solution while still opposed to other types of Pigovian taxes.
2 comments:
> Why should this shared common resource be “free”?
Historical precedent? You wouldn't want there to be a tax on breathing, now would you?
Breathing is fundamentally different from polluting. Presumably, we all breathe approximately equal amounts and each breath takes only a small amount of oxygen from the air. If some people went around breathing 20 times as much as others, maybe you'd have a case.
Secondly, if oxygen were to become a scarce commodity, maybe then we could think about taxing it. Since it's hardly scarce, let the law of supply and demand deal with it -- it's in extremely high supply relative to the demand, so it's price might as well be free.
Post a Comment