A wealthy white man faces no greater adversarial power than the government, which is why self-identified Libertarians are more wealthy, white and male than any other political group (Pew political typography). But for most everyone else, other powers, though not as great <i>in theory</i>, are often felt more acutely, e.g. the economic power of the employer, the social power of family and peer groups, and the physical power of the male spouse.
Take a woman who works a low wage job and rents. The government never makes her choose between “not having sex with her boss” and “keeping insurance for her child”. She owns no property to which she can pose “no trespassing” signs, and according to libertarians, her landlord should be able to kick her out of her home for any and no reason. Her husband can beat her or withdraw financial support from her and her children. To her, there are multiple parties of adversarial power, some of which are countered only by government.
To characterize all her transactions as “voluntary” betrays a “why not eat cake” level of tone-deafness towards the lives of the masses.
You are quite simply incorrect I’m afraid. The tax/fee method allows greater flexibility and efficiency than the method you propose(which is simply an infinite tax and probably causes significant deadweight losses, especially if the costs to pollution are not infinite, which they are not. Unless you’re Greenpeace). I don’t understand why you think the government has ‘invested in a method’ when they institute a carbon tax. They are simply making it costly for people to emit carbon. It is entirely up to market actors to decide how to reduce this cost, and they can be as mobile across cleanup vectors as they wish.
You almost make a good point, that coercion/power need not necessarily be defined as the threat of physical violence, but then get carried away with the stridency of your appeal to emotion. Find me the libertarian who says beating somebody else is not an exercise of power.
As for the point that you’re attempting to make, I tend to agree with you that there can be more than one kind of power/coercion, and yes, I believe(though I don’t know. John Mace and Human Action would perhaps know better) that the libertarian answer to that is that the only kind of coercion/power that should be limited/considered is physical.
I’ve often considered this issue, and am conflicted about it. John, is there any chance that you could consider this topic to be one of your weekly threads?
Only because I do remember some libertarians saying that they aren’t completely against a government, I believe they would agree that low taxes are the goal and not elimination of taxes completely.
Then again, I also think that the noise you hear from libertarians in the media, inevitably through the mouth of Republican spokesmen, are totally untrustworthy. A real exchange of ideas cannot be made when each supposed libertarian tries to shout louder than the next to be lower on taxes.
Its a bad thing. We need high taxes because we can all pay money, but most of us cannot do the things and create the programs that would be more valuable to us than money. And of course government should try to promote certain behaviors it deems good. Even though I haven’t agreed with many of those things, I still see it as important to promote stuff
No private institutions can replace government collection of taxes. Its one of the few things that private organizations can’t physically do, because only government can throw you in jail or compel your boss to withhold taxes in your check
I agree that the purpose of taxes should be raising revenue. Using the tax code to subsidize behavior is not only inefficient, its deceptive.
What do you consider essential?
I think almost everyone thinks that providing public goods like national defense and roads essential government functions because noone else can really do it.
Is regulation an essential government function or will manufacturers, banks, drug companies, food companies, water companies, etc. regulate themselves?
Is providing universal education essential? Should we provide that education just up to high school or extend that coverage to college and professional schools?
Is providing universal healthcare essential? Should we only provide emergency care or extend that coverage to preventative and therapeutic care.
We had millenia of using this model and it didn’t work so well. In fact that are plenty of places in the world that use exactly this model (not just disfunctional failed states but some of the fairly developed asian countries) and it doesn’t result in a country anything like America, you end up with poor people dying of treatable illnesses and women prostituting themselves to feed their families.
I’m sorry, but you seem to be the one confused over this. Either the government is using those tax dollars to clean CO2, or we are simply diverting funds to the government as a penalty, which is, simply, not pragmatic and increases burden on the end user of that electricity without benefit. If we are going to force “costs” of CO2 onto the companies, then these need to be the actual costs of pollution - and not just for CO2 but for all pollutants.
If they ARE using the tax to clean the CO2 then they must invest in some form of technology or infrastructure that cleans CO2. And we all know how poorly the governments of the US perform infrastructure updates and upgrades. Newer technologies and infrastructure will not be built until absolutely necessary.
Power production systems are not fluid. A coal plant will operate for 40+ years. Establishing CO2 *reduction *is the way to go while these are slowly phased out. It’s not like a coal plant’s company will simply shutter the plant. After all, if it’s a simple tax that they and every other coal plant will pay and they’ll just pass along the cost to the downstream users. Now, it’s possible, though less likely, that they may invest in technologies to ease their tax burden. But it’s less feasible if they don’t have any skin in the game. And taxing production and manufacturing doesn’t give those that produce and manufacture any skin in the game. They are pass through actors for costs. Costs being equal in the form of a regulated tax means that they won’t care about those costs.
If you are trying to influence end-user behavior, that’s quite a bit harder to do in this case - the users are generally captured to their energy providers. The average person simply pays the energy bill or possibly signs up for a surcharge to use solar and/or wind power. You might have some movement from the utility companies, but even after all of the subsidy that solar has, it’s still not yet price competitive or demand competitive with traditional power methods.
So, until that time when solar and wind is price competitive with untaxed traditional power sources, you simply raise the cost of energy for no benefit by simply raising a tax that doesn’t go to CO2 reduction, which is the goal of the whole idea of raising a tax specifically on CO2.
If you are going to increase costs you need to give not only competition a foot in the race so that we can advance the cost effectiveness of those goals, but actually do something with those funds that are supposedly to solve an issue. If all you do is increase the operating fund of the government, you aren’t solving the issue.
That being said, I’m open to new information. Please show me instances the where the government actively interacted with a marketplace through taxation and caused increased flexibility or efficiency of the market and/or reduced costs.
I’ll try and explain this as best I can. Please be patient if you already know some of this stuff.
First of all - the problem is not pollution, in and of itself. The problem is that pollution is an externality(in this case negative, but it holds in the other direction also). In other words, it inflicts a cost upon someone external to the transaction, who did not choose to be a part of it. This results in the cost to the actual buyer being lower than it would be, because the cost is shared out, while the benefit only accrues to the buyer and seller. That is the market failure, and that is what prevents the market from being efficient.
When you assign a cost to pollution, by adding, say, a carbon tax, you move that cost back on to buyers and sellers. How that market adjusts to that cost is entirely up to them. If the carbon tax is at the correct level, we are assured that we’ve arrived at the most efficient solution possible, through the tried and tested market mechanism of supply and demand.
The immediate point to raise is that is a big ‘If’. And I concede it is. The correct level for a carbon tax is a complex empirical question, one that no one really knows the answer to.
But, this is where I come to my second point - your solution is no different from a carbon tax in any way, shape or form. When you say to a company that you must not emit any CO2, you’ve simply skipped the question of fixing a level for the tax, and decided on a tax of infinity.
Let’s take the example of electricity, since you’ve brought it up. I’m going to talk in a lot of hypotheticals just to clarify my point. I’m just picking easy numbers here.
Lets say a coal based power plant currently(without externalities accounted for) can sell power at 1$ a Watt, and emits 1 kg of CO2 per watt.
Lets consider a few scenarios
i) Carbon tax
The government decides(correctly! that the correct cost of this emission is 50 cents per kg, and levies the tax. The power plant is entirely free to react to this charge as it wishes! Critically, if zero carbon emission technology is cheaper than the tax(at 50 cents per kg), it can invest in it and get out of paying the tax entirely. If it wishes to continue emissions and pass on the costs to its customers, it can, thereby making alternative sources more attractive, and reducing demand. If it can think of other innovative ways to reduce emissions, it is welcome to do so. The only possible downside is if the carbon tax is set so low that it does not capture the actual externality.
ii) Mandating zero emissions
The government decides that companies must clean up all emissions. In other words, the tax on emissions is infinitely high. This is only correct in the case where zero emission technology is cheaper than the true cost of emissions. Lets say zero emissions technology is more expensive than the true cost of polluting, or an alternative energy source. In this case, you’re introducing a potentially large and certainly undesirable inefficiency into the system.
Human Actions writes: “Anarchism isn’t libertarian, because anarchism doesn’t result in liberty, it results in subjugation to the strongest warlord in your area. My cite is all of human history.”
You are mistaken, possibly because of your limited knowledge of human history. There have been quite a lot of stateless societies in the past, and they did not have the result you describe. Examples include:
The Commanche
The inhabitants of northern Somalia
Bedouin
Saga period Iceland was semi-stateless–a law code and courts but no executive arm of government, so all enforcement of the law was private.
If you are sufficiently curious I can point you to works on all of those societies.
Suppose I could convince you that minarchism was unstable, that there was no way of keeping a government from eventually expanding its power far beyond what libertarians would approve of. That claim seems rather better supported by the historical evidence, most obviously the history of the U.S., than yours.
Would you conclude that minarchists were not libertarians? Or only that they were libertarians who were mistaken about how to achieve their libertarian objectives?
Except that it’s not a tax of “infinity” to mandate cleanup. I’m going to use made up numbers for ease:
A coal plant puts out 100 tons of CO2 per year. A sapling oak tree sucks up 1 T of CO2 per year, with a long-term curve of +.1T per year.
Thus, to clean up enough CO2 to let your power plant run, you need to plant 100 saplings. It’s not exactly cheap to plant and care for 100 saplings, but it’s not infinity. Granted, the numbers are bigger, but there are multiple methods of sequestering CO2, even the “Brute force” method of growing a bunch of acreage of certain plants to create biochar with and then burying that biochar.
Thus, the cost isn’t “inifinity” and it adds the actual costs of cleanup to the production equation. We could even phase in these costs over 20 years by saying that 5% per year is required to be mitigated if it will be that huge of a hit for 100% the first year. But it brings the externalized cost of each type of production into the internal cost of production.
Mandating zero emissions absolutely is the same as levying an infinite tax. It ensures that you’ll do whatever it costs, even if such costs are above what you need to offset the externality. The ONLY hypothetical in which that is correct, as I pointed out, is if zero emissions technology is cheaper than the cost of the externality, whereas a ‘correct’ carbon tax is the most efficient solution in all hypotheticals.
Take your example - the carbon tax is still correct, because all you’re saying is that your zero emissions technology is trees. As already covered in my scenario (i) in my previous post, if planting those trees and getting to zero carbon is cheaper than the ‘correct’ amount of carbon tax, then you can do that and not have to pay the tax. On the other hand, if planting all those trees is MORE expensive than the ‘correct’ tax, then you’ve unnecessarily made it more expensive for the plant to produce power, resulting in a less efficient solution.
If it’s polluting in a manner that we cannot clean up in any way, shape, or form we shouldn’t use it at all. But, thus far, we haven’t created an energy source that is so dirty that it’s cost to clean up prices it out of the market. By market forces, those technologies wouldn’t even come to fruition. Even CO2 can be scrubbed from the atmosphere fairly cheaply for each generation method. A lot of the methods available to us are simply ignored because no one wants to dedicate the resources required. (Yay, politics)
But creating a tax on production doesn’t force them to invest in technologies that reduce their carbon footprint because they aren’t penalized by the tax, producers pass the tax on to their consumers. They are penalized, however, for the amount of resources they use constructing the carbon mitigation method (the first year in planting trees, for instance) in between the time that construction starts and the time the carbon mitigation goes into effect. They have to front the capital for construction, personnel, and so forth but also pay the tax that was levied. So unless something comes along that’s akin to a $100 appliance that sucks carbon out the air and makes nice bricks of it, they won’t move off of the tax for a long while.
Additionally, if that tax doesn’t go to clean up, you haven’t created a net benefit to the consumer for the price increase. It’s one thing to establish a government-controlled method of clean up (let’s say El Governmento’s Tree Plantin’ Service for the above scenarios) and saying “You must be pollution neutral” and giving them the option to pay into the government’s method or find a method that suits them better. It’s another to simply say “Pay us money. For protecting the earf. It’ll help in the long run.”
The second is simply about revenue. The first actually works to remedy the stated problem.
We’ll probably disagree, but that happens a lot around here. But let’s go back to the OP for this one:
What if voters believe that taxes should not be as low as possible? If Libertarianism has been imposed, the voters’ will is thwarted in this case.
What if the voters believe taxes should not be uniform across the population, but perhaps heavily skewed toward the wealthy? Again, if Libertarianism has been imposed, the voters’ will is thwarted.
It is the same with every single thing on your list. Encouraging/discouraging behavior? Can’t, it has been precluded by libertarian rules. Want to promote oil drilling because OPEC has become hostile? Too bad, the government’s hands are tied.
And
so
on. (Sure, maybe the free market will step in and take care of things. But maybe the free market is manipulated by billionaires and actually isn’t interested)
How can you say that this philosophy can’t be interpreted as stripping the government, and therefore the citizens, of power? Many potential government moves are simply cut off if these views are enforced.
In theory, libertarians are against the husband beating her. In practice, a number of libertarian positions are likely to increase her chance of being abused and/or decrease her chance of leaving: removal of welfare, repeal of VAWA, weakening of equal pay legislations, removal of child support laws, etc.
It’s the only kind of coercion in which the victim actually has no choice.
Please do. If you’re contending that, compared to modern states, these societies were non-violent and not repressive, I’ll need evidence.
[QUOTE=DavidFriedman]
Suppose I could convince you that minarchism was unstable, that there was no way of keeping a government from eventually expanding its power far beyond what libertarians would approve of. That claim seems rather better supported by the historical evidence, most obviously the history of the U.S., than yours.
[/quote]
The only way would be the will of the electorate.
Note that the same is true of anarchism; glance at a map to see how much of the planet is stateless. If the people, or a subset of sufficiently powerful people, want a state, they will get one. Any organization strong enough to stop it would be indistinguishable from a state.
No, I wouldn’t conclude that they weren’t libertarians. Anarchism, however, is sufficiently different from minarchism that a dividing line can be drawn.
Not really. I strongly advocate for a negative income tax, so my libertarian society (better still, the actual society in which I live) would have a “floor” for material prosperity below which one could not fall. Thus, horror stories of “sleep with the boss or starve on the streets!” would not occur.
…How the heck does this gel with libertarianism? I mean, I think this is a good idea and one more societies should consider, but in what universe is “the government gives everyone a minimum living standard” a libertarian ideal? Especially given that that money has to come from somewhere.
I mean, if that’s where we’re coming from, then I agree. And your suggestion would obsolete a lot of forms of coercion (can you use “obsolete” as a verb? ). However, there’s still things like “sleep with your husband or lose your children”, just to name an example that comes to mind…
Easily: public order is a public good. Preventing people from starving and becoming desperate preserves public order. Bread riots are bad for everybody, just like air pollution.
Further, this policy doesn’t restrict anyone’s freedom, beyond simply requiring the payment of taxes, which is already a given, a necessary evil to have a state that provides public goods and protects individual rights from other individuals (and, hopefully, from itself, though that’s always a risk).
I’m not following you, here…are you suggesting that child custody claims would be handled any differently in a libertarian society than in our current one?
If you’re just offering another example of a possible form of coercion…a frown of disapproval from one’s mother is pretty coercive, so is all the cool kids in the neighborhood buying the latest fashion fad; it doesn’t mean the government needs to get involved.
Public order is certainly a public good, and a negative income tax could be one way of achieving it, but this argument makes me uneasy, normatively speaking. I think it’s better to create disincentives to violence, rather than incentives to not be violent, if you understand what I mean. The latter feels wrong to me, like paying the mafia protection money.
that the correct cost of this emission is 50 cents per kg, and levies the tax. The power plant is entirely free to react to this charge as it wishes! Critically, if zero carbon emission technology is cheaper than the tax(at 50 cents per kg), it can invest in it and get out of paying the tax entirely. If it wishes to continue emissions and pass on the costs to its customers, it can, thereby making alternative sources more attractive, and reducing demand. If it can think of other innovative ways to reduce emissions, it is welcome to do so. The only possible downside is if the carbon tax is set so low that it does not capture the actual externality.
). However, there’s still things like “sleep with your husband or lose your children”, just to name an example that comes to mind…