Carbon tax

[orion]

Anyone have a good response to this cartoon?:

[Pizzly]

It is too small to read clearly, so it looks like a detailed analysis of the diglett mating ritual.

[Sam Gunn (since nobody got Admiral Naismith)]

Zoom in dood.


The argument against it is the same against any argument against any form of social engineering.

[orion]

It is too small to read clearly, so it looks like a detailed analysis of the diglett mating ritual.

Click on the image to get the full size.

[Peppermint Pig]

I'll sort through the comic strip and leave some arguments. Take what you will and form a rebuttal.

"Environmental policy is not a matter of black and white."

"They are the unintended side-effects of human progress and development?"

"Human progress is merely a series of unintended side-effects, children!" FAIL. Refusing to assign value to the actions of INDIVIDUALS consequently leads to the notion that it is acceptable to measure the value of action at a societal level, which is ethically nihilistic and ultimately bears no responsibility for the creation of "good" OR "bad", however the author perceives these concepts.

While green may be a color residing somewhere between the poles of black and white, the author's advocacy of 'green taxes' several panels down is actually a painfully failing 'black and white' concept.

The comic is self-defeating:

"Economic markets fail when the total costs of an activity are not measured by its price."

First off, 'economic markets' is a redundancy in terms, absurdly suggesting there are markets not based in economics.

Secondly, the solution this comic strip concludes upon is to socially engineer (read: force) a solution, which is an explicit disregard for the 'total costs' of said activity. Again, this is self defeating as it destroys the argument for value.

"If the total societal costs are not internalised by the company conducting an activity..."

"... these costs are 'externalized' and passed to society to remedy."

The argument cannot qualify itself as value judgments are formed by, and serve to inform, individuals. Society is not a concept which can be measured on an economic level. This form of argumentation tends to imply that the author knows best what "society", aka billions of individuals, want, and therefore presumes to make value judgments on behalf of it.  

The author mentions 'the company', implying that the subject matter is solely applicable to 'companies'. Government is the largest cause/enabler of pollution and harm to individuals.

"This is an inefficient way for our world to operate, and it is created unintentionally by our current laws and mindset."

Opinion, followed by a potentially useful fact, followed by a collective generalization.

"Our current approach to taxation is twisted and tangled."

One day you'll get it right, I'm sure...  

"So often it discourages the activities we want more of..."
"...and encourages activities that we want less of"

The author is following a train of thought which leads to a personality disorder, insanity, or at the worst a series of contradicting and indefensible beliefs.

"Our current system throws a blanket over all businesses operating in the economy, regardless of the burden their activities place on society and the environment."

Solution: Businesses that operate outside of the economy?? Profit!? (Think this one has been tried before)

Author is relying on oversimplified characterizations (society, environment, business, pollution, current system, etc) and trying to demonstrate their relationships like some half-baked Greek philosopher explaining the classical elements of nature. It does not stand the test of scrutiny when challenging each element and the perspective by which they are measured.

Speaking of half baked Greeks...


http://www.ashersarlin.com/archives/2005/01/oh_come_on_plat.php

"We need a "green tax shift"..."

Old faithful...

It gets better in the following panel, where the author argues, in black and white, that 'good activities' should be taxed less, while 'bad activities' should be taxed more. It even has cute antonyms sprinkled between the two sides, such as "services" and "disservices"  

This comic strip insults its own target audience, which appears to be 4th graders.

"Following a green tax shift, the tax a business pays would be proportional to the amount of waste generated."

And libertarians or agorists are accused of being utopians???

"...let's turn industry itself into the force that reverses humanity's impact on the planet."

Enforcement of this author's utopian vision brings up more questions than answers. If the solution is to use government to influence change, then politicians have a mandate to grow the government, which is an ever-expanding sink-hole with the nasty side effect of attracting people who want to seize power so they can be above the law, or so that corporate friends can benefit. Repeat indefinitely by growing enforcement if you need more fail to convince you.

If people can't be motivated to see the good in an activity, then what purpose is there in using force? Furthermore, if you object to violence, pollution, or any other harm, why would you entrust the government to solve for these when it is evidently inadequate and clearly detrimental?

A side note: Here in the "green" state, you can't set up tall wind power generators on YOUR OWN PROPERTY because people feel they are entitled to a view. These are the green aesthetes as I like to call them. They aren't much different from environmentalists actually who want to force their opinions on others.

[Cognitive Dissident]

Well, they start with what Ayn Rand clearly identified as fighting words: "it's not a black and white issue."  They mean to turn rights and wrongs into "opinions" to deny you of any of those rights, and then attack you with the argument from pity/need.

Paraphrased:

"Oh really?  You mean there's not right and wrong?  So you mean to define everything as gray, so you can redefine everything you want as right, and all my rights as wrongs."

She wrote an entire essay on socialist methods of denying real ("negative") rights by creation of fake ("positive") rights to crowd the real rights out.

The Virtue of Selfishness, Chapter 13: Collectivized Rights

[orion]

She wrote an entire essay on socialist methods of denying real ("negative") rights by creation of fake ("positive") rights to crowd the real rights out.

The Virtue of Selfishness, Chapter 13: Collectivized Rights

I'll have to check that out.

Peppermint Pig: The "companies" will just pass the cost on to the consumer anyway too I suppose. Thank you for the detailed response!

[Peppermint Pig]

While the cost must be passed on (else the company goes under), it is still detrimental to all actors in the chain of production to the benefit of the legal plunderers who did not earn it. Politicians and bureaucrats operate on victim mentality, but never cease to prey upon people, furthering actual incidents of injustice. Those people that politicians label as victims will rarely, if ever, get anything out of the scheme proportional to the political rhetoric used to justify the theft, and it is of course NEVER EVER ethical to begin with.

On a side note, advocates of democracy or socialism who attack Libertarian/voluntarist ideas will often use charged rhetoric demanding that 'if you don't like OUR system, why don't you move to Somalia'. This sort of attack conveniently ignores the fact that the system they defend has caused or promoted the impoverishment and violence of foreign regions, OR it ignores the constantly uttered humanitarian argument that such impoverished people are, in their minds, victims, and need to be 'helped' (which often leads to unintended harm such as glutting developing nations with resources that stunt recovery/growth). Whether or not it is true that Somalians see themselves as victims, nobody has the ethical authority to label someone else as a victim. It's interesting then that in all other circumstances people of a 'social justice' position will advocate on behalf of environmental or poverty concerns, but ignore these concerns when it gets in the way of trying to discredit an ethical pro-liberty ideology which, arguably, the vast majority of Somalians do not hold or recognize. It's a projection of impressively moronic proportions.

The author is promoting the idealism of a state possessed with a solid, unquestionable foundation for doing what they believe to be ethical (aka 'social justice'). Rand would call this kind of detached thinking mysticism. They either ignore the causality of the matter which created the current situation, choose to believe forcing others to act is ethical when it satisfies their interests, or both.



You're welcome, orion. I'm sure you can modify the comic strip to reflect the reality, and possibly do it in fewer panels than the author used.

[Diogenes The Cynic]

Since the comic makes a couple of claims all at once, I'll address them in a numbered format.

1. Environmental damage is damage.

I agree with this, but its impossible to assess the cost of that damage.

I asked my Rabbi a question tangentially related to this a while back. If I borrow my friends graphite tennis racket, and toss it onto the ground in anger, I just caused micro-fractures all over the racket. The racket will now not last as long, but there is no external signs of the damage. How do you assess the value of the loss?

He said that if its impossible to assess a value for the damage, you aren't liable for it.

So, if someone causes damage to the air everyone breathes, but the value of the damage is impossible to assess, they don't have to pay for it.

2.Green taxes work

We have no way of knowing that. They haven't been done yet, but if the plan is to make a market for pollution, then the perverse incentives created by this could cause horrible problems.

3. Green taxes would provide greater incentives for businesses to engage in cleaner activity

True, but a better incentive would be to remove the current system that discourages good investments in nuclear power.

4. The government is the answer

No. Look at the government and how it "helps" keep our air clean with emissions standards for cars. Totally counterproductive.

[atomiccat]

green taxes would be introduced at a rate equal to the roll back of existing taxes

My ass, they will just go up up up


each year the government will raise standards.... preventing small business from coming into the market



the easiest way to cut down on pollution would be to get rid of corporations and allow the companies to be fully liable for any damages they do. that would force them to cut down on their pollution or be sued into the ground, and this would also get rid of a lot of corruption as well.