“The government should subsidize agents to induce them to internalize positive externalities but should tax agents to induce them to internalize negative externalities”
What do you think about this mainstream treatment of externalities? Can you think of any philosophical problem with the Pigouvian method?
The most obvious problem with the method is that if its measured, its usually statistical… which has to be shaped and molded by psychological bias to be meaningful and understandable.
The Global Warming Fiasco is a clear and present culprit in this phenomena, it uses ‘Scientists’ who collect and then ‘explain’ the data, and then near unanimously advocate ‘The Kyoto Protocols’ given the scary imperative that rang in its scary end of the world scenarios.
Only a handful of people, mostly steeped in the classics of Western Philosophy, would of noticed this near exacting model to Stoic beliefs of ecology and the end time… such as a heated sun drying up the oceans in global climate change until the earth is completely lifeless, until it’s engulfed in flames, and universe restarts itself. The tax was pretty much useless by most estimates, as the earth was melting either way in runaway global climate change,etcetera, for the rest it looked eerily like religious sacrificial appeasement to the Sun God to make amends for their Carbon Sins to it.
The other group not to impressed were geologists, paleontologists, and archeologists, who knew the industrial revolution didn’t melt the glaciers of the last ice age… and certainly not the flint chipping or bronze and Iron Age metal workers, or Roman Imperialism. The glaciers would of melted with or without us being industrial, like the did the last three ice ages and warming periods.
However, the supporters of this tax, armed with their science and statistics, blamed evil industrialists who were already harried by the Psuedo-science of the various Marxist factions with their joke economics and sociology. They were easy pickings, easily targeted and hated… and fit the logic of this tax model exactly.
It all started going bust a few years ago when people started speaking out, challenging the supreme authority of this cult with other sciences. In England, a email ring was discovered where scientist falsified and distorted information. In China, it was discovered Vile and Evil Sulfur emissions were actually lowering the earths temperature… not raising it. Then people started backing off from the tax, saying instead we should just arm missiles with solar blocking mixtures to ‘save the world’, because that stuff worked so well when meteorites blocked the sun, of volcanic eruptions do it… leading to mass extinction events.
Now, given the formerly reputable scientist are not so reputable, now the cultic nature is increasingly apparent to more and more, the news have started carrying scientific shockers the former set of statistics can’t explain against the new… the world isn’t warming, it’s actually cooling a bit, but not that much… and it looks like larger historic and prehistoric trends of change. This is pissing some people off, who cling to scientific claims of consensus, which is now known to be a joke, because it misses the ‘real issue’, the need to take, control, and make amends to society and the earth. The original means of control via science and statistics has been refuted, its shown the tax hurts business and therefor the society it helps employs and provide products to. The pollution the produce that hurt the earth is already regulated, such as toxic chemicals, and breathability via air quality was already tackled in the era preceding the global warming cult. Therefor, who is it making amends to? The Sun God, and upsetting the political careers of a ever increasing number of politicians, and hitting the core political values of a substantial portion of a overextended intelligentsia who’s roots are less in hard science and independent verification of the soundness and reason of facts and more in group think.
Kyoto was a potential international disaster of theologically motivated malice backed by bad science that didn’t make sense historically, and had/ still has potentially hazardous side effects via final solution groups who want to build solar shields to block out the sun… which should qualify as a international military threat deserving of preemptive strikes preventing this potential insanity from being played out.
Now… given the above analysis, wether you agree with it or not (you may hold to the Religion of the Angry Sun) you can easily see other ‘taxable concerns’ can arise on a similar basis, thought to be most rational and scientific, only to be shown to be false after the fact, long after the harmful, destructive taxes have been administered.
Questions I can’t answer myself, that have philosophical merit to be persued from the perspective of this kind of taxation. Most obvious is, how on earth did a largely dead religion and Philosophy- Stoicism, so awkwardly leech into the intellectual outlook of late 20th century liberal thought? How did it undermine and redirect the assumptions of our best scientists? A opportunistic stoic or a Jungian would claim archetypes or that its the natural religion built into the unconscious of man… this could be debated, but seems historically incorrect… Given the work historians of philosophy have done in showing Stoicism’ many diverse and often conflicting precedents and awkward coming together, it wasn’t so seemless and natural in its development, and changed a lot since classical times.
My assumption is, it was so deeply saturated into the Cynic-Stoic minded intellectualization of Christianity, that when many Christians jumped on the Athiest Bandwagon, they were culturally attracted to the culturally comforting and Psuedo-Scientific outlook of a largely unimaginitive stoic outlook, becoming increasingly attracted to its environmental explanations largely unconscious. As Atheism continues to diversify and solidify into sects, with second, third, and forth generation Atheists expressing this view, the overall Stoic outlook on global warming will loose near all merit and fall away, as the millennialist sentiments of Athiest euphoria would be better understood… not as inevitable, more reasonable or ‘progressive’, but a statement of belief with its implied silly cognitive loop holes and tendencies to illogical assumptions.
This tax is utterly unable to acknowledge the possibility of this phenomena. It’s rooted in assumptions of the self evident goes hand in hand with the statistical ‘hard sciences’.
I’m very much opposed to it without heavy stipulations and awareness of its defects. The issue is, it assumes were not biased and are objective, when its whole aim is to encourage bias and abuse… The Celtic Tax against the Fat or the Muslim tax on Christians, Mandaeans, and Jews is reminiscent- a byproduct of ignorance and hatred of those different from us. It doesn’t hurt the in groups, only the ‘minorities’ or ‘weak’.
It can be employed as a means of corrective punishment, not from the viewpoint of science but of statecraft, applied sparingly and rarely, for if we do it too much, punishment shifts back to being monetized like in Old English Times and in Xeer Law, penalizing even murder via financial obligations… a wealthy person can kill without real repercussion, paying a fee. A wavy businessman or consortium of savvy businessmen could diversify their assets, and run the fiat currency the are taxed by into the dirt, keeping their business going via alternative means, be it alternative currencies or gentleman agreements. Bad wording of the tax or weak political leadership and enforcement could also be exploited.
The tax on cigarettes in the US is admitted even by smokers, who via self evident Heath degregation and social backlash by non smokers unwilling to be exposed to the smoke, causes many to break a well established and near universally acknowledged addictive tendency to smoke more and more.
In this case, unlike global warming, it’s self evident on a personal level, and the bulk of the benifits at this point for quitting gravitates to the smoker, and less and less ‘society’ which is largely segregated from the smokers actions in public. The tax return for largely bullshit programs (by bullshit meaning not actually related to the act of smoking, such as paying smokers future medical bills, instead paying a save the turtles bill, which may or may not have merit if unrelated as something worthy of funding from the state). Global warming taxes have no obvious benefits to the factories, to the power plants, to the bill payers, you and I everytime we turn on the light. If we tried to craft a reasoning of casual benifits to society, via unrelated benifits, such as a socialist program, the tendency is going to be the overall taxable wealth of the state will actually DECREASE given the productivity of the original business was curtailed, as well as the number of employees it could support, the quality of pay, and the positive stimulating effects of that pay from top to bottom. The sum of the taxable parts BEFORE extra taxation is greater than after excessive taxation. This is the gist underlying The Ibn Khaldun-Laffer Curve. You have to be careful in both how little you tax, and how much… especially given the nature of our fiat currency, which can explode to great worth then sudden plunge to nothing via stupid, immature taxation and short sighted currency manipulation via central banks.
Categorical Imperatives need to be applied to this form of taxation, phasing Individual Taxation to Group (guild, social, cooperate) and severe cognitive restraints need to be enplaced on legislation of this tax, as well as cruel and unusual judicial excesses via cruel judges, and in war it needs to be used as a preventive measure of a temporary use within territory, and not applied on populations for the long term to discourage behavior, as they will grow to resent it, find ways around it, and in doing so perceive you as weak.
However, as a seldom and rare used strategies, carefully applied and wisely withdrawn with a keen eye to the passions of men, it can have a temporary positive value to even those who are taxed. It shouldn’t be a means to ‘social justice’ as its been shown that its unable to objectively identify its underlining prejudice that brought it into being. Fanaticism and state dependency can result, and in the long run, the weakening of society and perhaps even the collapse of the state.
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