Of course, there's no middle ground, such as going over and asking 'What are you guys doing?' and upon being told, replying 'Cool, have fun!' and then continuing along the way.
I don't have a problem with police not bothering them (and the article doesn't say trusting is bad), but nor do I have a problem with police (or anyone) saying 'What's up?' in a non-hostile manner. You present a very absurd, and obviously false, dichotomy.
This article isn't about the invasion. It's about the Google News error in reporting it. If you can handle jokes with any connection to serious issues then you'd do well to avoid Slashdot, along with most every other aspect of the Internet and real life alike.
You're missing a second major issue thst the article, for some reason, decided to ignore: Arnold is trying to lower their salaries for these Californian workers to BELOW the California minimum wage ($8.00/hr), all the way down the the FEDERAL minimum wage ($6.55/hr). Is it any wonder the system wouldn't be designed to allow wages to be set before the minimum wage? Maybe the programmers, unlike Arnold, were actually sane.
No sane person is going to say "No" to a man with a gun, a badge, and government backed authority to shoot.
FBI agencies have a government-backed authority to shoot people in some circumstances. This wasn't one of them.
Maybe I'm insane, but I'm just not that scared of cops (or FBI agents). Most of them are reasonable people (yes, they're people!) and they aren't terribly eager to shoot someone without good cause.
The insane people are those who believe they will get shot and stand up for their rights--our rights--anyway. I want more of those guys around. I'd like to say I'd be one of them, but I haven't been put to the test yet.
Probably on the roads we'll obviously continue to maintain in addition to bike paths. And happily, they'll be using the gasoline that has become dirt cheap once demand dropped.
Actually, there isn't so much smog that the air is unbreathable.
In some places there is (or was--I many foreign cities would regulate when kids could go outside because the smog was so bad) because it's not taxed or regulated.
Everything is expensive as hell in Germany (if you have ever traveled there you would know).
I've been there twice, and when the dollar didn't completely suck, things were fine. When the dollar kind of sucked (a year and a half ago) things were still not ridiculous. With a weak dollar, it's bad for visiting Americans, but still all right for Europeans who don't have to deal with the exchange rate.
Well, first your assuming that the pig waste is being dumped and the chicken waste wouldn't be
Sorry, should have specified, these are with costs internalised. If the chicken raising costs, including the costs of pollution, etc. are lower than that of pigs, then we should go with chickens unless pigs just taste or nourish (or however you decide the value of your food) that much better.
I'm not arguing for chickens in the real world. I'm pulling random animals out of my hat for examples. Maybe we should eat more chicken and less pork.
BTW, I don't have a problem with regulation as long as it effect everyone.
And surely it should. I'm not saying only pig farmers should be prohibited from polluting. That was concrete example with made-up numbers to run some math demonstrating my position.
Taxation and regulation have the same effect in the end, assuming the tax revenue is put to proper use. The only change is where the surplus is transferred to: the government or the supplier, and I happen to prefer to send it to the government. But I don't want to start up a sub-debate.
It was over using taxes as a way to punish corporations and people who harm the environment and do so more then you do.
Not to punish. To make them shoulder all the costs, so they're bore entirely by the supplier and--through higher prices--the consumer of said product. If I were punishing them I'd make them bear more than the cost.
but I still don't believe taxes do anything other then increase the hardship to the consumers and it is a waste of resources that we will never see a benefit from.
Ugh. I really don't want a debate on the taxes != regulation thing, but if you draw the two supply-and-demand graphs, one using taxation and one using regulation, you'll see the same resulting quantity supplied, the same price, the same waste (assuming the government can tax as efficiently and honestly as it can regulate), and the same consumer surplus. The only difference is the producer surplus. Regulation = taxation with subsidation to the supplier, pretty much.
Wikipedia agrees that a pollution rights market--which is essentially regulation plus a market--are 'are not generally more efficient than Pigovian taxes' (which it turns out is the proper term for the taxes I'm advocating). Sadly, they don't discuss strict regulation.
Figure 2 (and 3) show taxation. I'm pretty sure if we regulated to Q2, the only difference is that the 'Tax revenue' portion of the surplus instead is added to the producer surplus (or possibly split between supplier and producer?), whereas I believe it should be used to offset the cost of the pollution that still results (since Q2, and therefore the pollution caused in producing Q2, is still non-zero).
The difference between regulation and taxation that I tend to gloss over, and related to one that I believe you pointed out early on, is that we can't really know the tax rate to set in order to achieve a given quantity supplied and the resulting pollution, whereas it's usually the resulting pollution level that we're trying to set.
On the other hand, maybe it's the cost of the resulting pollution we're trying to set, in which case I think taxation would be better, knowledge-wise.
If you support regulation, though, you're supporting limits on externalities, which is my main point. I think we're disagreeing more because I explain it poorly than because we actually disagree.
And that is a savings that you took advantage of by not paying more to live there.
Good point, but it seems like that would depend on constant externalities. Once I've bought my house, lower property values = lower property taxes will not offset the damage. Only if the pig farm is next door when I bought the place might this solution work.
Maybe the risk of pig farm development was factored into the initial cost, but the risk also varies greatly over time.
Besides, the "commons" aren't anyone's property. Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do with it.
I'm one of the people who should get an equal share of them. In my case, I want to use them by breathing the air, but can't because it's all filled with smog.
You either use it, or put up with someone else using it. It is just like a city park, you can't keep others from having a picnic there because you don't like what they are eating.
The issue isn't what they eat. The issue is when other people start dumping their household trash there. Once it becomes a de facto landfill, my legitimate use of it becomes essentially impossible. (Legitimate = not making it unusable for other people; not 'taking more than my fair share', essentially.)
An abuse of the commons that greatly harms its overall value. Solution: we don't let people dump their trash in the city park. An alternative would be to start charging for access and using that money to clean it up.
That's how city commons work right now, to some extent. We tax all citizens and use the money to provide trash cans and people to empty them, and to clean the streets.
Failure to regulate and dismissing complaints of a dirty city by 'Well, you should have used your share so other people couldn't pollute it' don't even make sense. Appropriate use of the commons doesn't stop other people from using it or abusing it. Seems like that's a good definition of appropriate use.
Actually, you are by neglecting facets of it and twisting the presentation to meet your own agenda.
I'm merely defending the premise of the Coase Theorem. I don't buy the simplistic form of the Coase Theorem, but you can't deny that it's economic orthodoxy.
Our economy would collapse if we did that.
Except we do do it to some extent. (Though I guess I can't argue that the economy isn't collapsing, but we've been doing it for a really long time.)
Besides, other differences like monetary values and labor costs would more then compesate for any tarrif we used base solely on the lines of equalizing externalities.
In that case, tariffs for equalising externalities wouldn't destroy the economy as they'd be trivial compared to the differences in labour costs, monetary values, etc.
Not to mention that we can't export now because everything it out of the reach of the cheaper markets that don't piss around with your ideas.
You keep making these dire predictions of what would happen if we followed my ideas, but we do tax and regulate pollution--there are controls on coal burning, ore smelting, fertiliser use, CFCs, pesticide use, and a world of other things, all for the correction of externalities. We do subsidise education, immunisation, lots of scientific research, and other. Home owner associations try to force us to keep our houses pretty.
The US (and pretty much all the western world) uses 'my' ideas pervasively in our economy. It's been this way since long before I was born. I'm defending the status quo (though I think we should go farther, as Europe has. (England's economy is screwed, but the rest of Europe seems to be doing pretty well.))
Nice try but.... as we already discussed, the tax on the environmental effect won't be going to you, you will still have the overhead and have to pay more.
The buyers will, yes.
Also, fred and kilroy will take the pig(s), make pig foods like ham and bacon and other things, then he will either sell them to you or someone else, or eat them freeing demand on other foods which keeps the price to you down.
Pigs might be fungible, but 'food' is not. If we can lower over-all food prices by X by spending $200 raising pigs or the same by spending $100 raising chickens, we should go the chicken route unless people consider the pigs $100 better than the pigs. With the pig-raising costs partially external, the market won't produce the optimal pig-to-chicken balance. Internalising the costs will cause inefficiencies/waste, but, unless the elasticity is crazy, the gains from full cost accounting will outweigh them.
the company responsible generally pays for all cleanup and monitoring. I have seen companies actually waste money cleaning their own messes up.
Because of taxation and regulation. They aren't spend that money because they recognise they're making a mess; they're doing it because the government says 'You can't pollute like that' or 'you have to pay to pollute like that'.
Your examples of things working aren't showing that we don't need things to be taxed/regulated. They're showing that taxation/regulation is working pretty darn well.
You showed no such thing. When I lived a mile or so from a hog farm, I had to smell the waste. That's a cost I bore, whether I ate pork or not, and while pork may be fungible, food as a whole certainly is not. How much would I pay to not smell it? Not much, but I'm sure many people in the area would have. That's a cost we all bore that most people consuming those pigs did not.
Your forgetting that any tax along these lines would be a tax on everything and everyone. It isn't like any one competitor of a product line would be immune to it.
You don't tax sale of pigs. You tax things that have value/cost (use of the commons, for the most part, whether it be air, water, roads, or anything else).
Also, your not teaching econ 101 to anyone. What you have done is latched onto something and perverted it to your own uses without the ability to take a real look at it.
Actual, this is Econ 101, and I didn't pervert it: the entire science of economics has, except they actually have demonstrated empirically that it's fairly accurate.
They also forget that any tax would favor imports from countries not in the same tax loop which means that more jobs go overseas and things get even worse in the US.
Yeah, it's a shame we can't put a tax on imported goods with externalities. A tariff, for example. But apparently that's impossible, and totally not exactly what we are doing.
Okay, I will try once more. You want the math, so I'll do it, using a simple example 'cause I can't draw graphs, and they require some background anyway.
Bob can raise delicious pigs for $100 in fixed costs and $100 each. A delicious pig is worth $200 to Fred. A delicious pig is worth $300 to Kilroy.
So Bob raises two delicious pigs and sells them for around $175 (anywhere from $150-$200 exclusive, really, assuming all are sold at the same price) each. Society is now better off: Bob spent $100+2*$100 = $300 and earned 2*$175 = $350. He's $50 better off. Fred spent $175 and got a pig he valued at $200. He's $25 better off. Kilroy spent $175 and got a pig he valued at $300. He's $125 better off. Total gains to society: $200. Yay!
But here's what we skipped: to raise these pigs so cheaply, Bob is dumping their faeces just upstream of my house. This pollution is costing me $150 per pig. Because I'm not a party to these pig transactions, my costs aren't being considered. I'm an external cost.
So the total gain to society is $350-$300 + $200-$175 + $300-$175 - $300 = -$100. The problem isn't that other people benefited and I didn't. It's that they got richer at my expense and, as a whole, society got poorer because no one looked at the full cost.
Now consider these possibilities: * Suppose Ben could have properly disposed of all his waste for $10 per pig, and did instead of polluting my yard. Now his cost is $100 fixed costs + $110 per pig. So the total gain to society is $350-$300 + $200-$175 + $300-$175 - 2*$10 = $180. Much better than -$100, and that I'm not the one paying that $20 is also desirable. Ben shouldn't get to just force me to pay his costs if I'm not buying anything from him. (NOT the main point.)
* Suppose Ben could properly have disposed of all his waste for $60 per pig, and did instead of polluting my yard. Now his cost is $100 fixed costs + $160 per pig. If he raises and sells two, the total gain to society is $350-$300 + $200-$175 + $300-$175 - 2*$60 = $80. Still positive, but -$50 for Ben. So he won't do that. So he'll only raise one, and raise the price to $250 (anything $200-$300 exclusive): $250-$200 + $300-$250 - $60 = $40. A small benefit, but a lot higher than the -$100 we started with.
Nothing in there about people getting rich while I remain the same being a problem. The problem is that I'm paying for other people's stuff and they (or the market) aren't taking that in consideration when deciding what to produce. Were the disposal costs $110 per pig, then cost of making a pig would be--at any quantity--over $210 and therefore costs more to produce than it's worth to the buyer (Fred). It doesn't take a genius to say 'Oh, then we shouldn't produce it'. We need to internalise the cost to get the market to say that.
A fuller explanation is easily seen with a couple quick supply and demand graphs.
What are you attempting to say here? Does it all boil down to stopping someone else from getting more then you? I could go into how wrong that is but who cares? The difference is that you will either pay more now or later....
Here is what we know besides you being afraid that someone might get more then you. If you attempt to quantify the pollution, especially in the respect of Co2 and so on, you are going to pay that price in purchasing the product regardless. And if it jacks the price up so high that pieces of product don't sell, your going to pay more.
*sigh* It's not that they got more than me. It's that they got more than me at my expense because I'm covering their costs. Your math does not address externalities, which is what this whole debate is about.
Okay, I'm hoping you're trolling, but maybe I'm just bad at explaining stuff. Either way, I'm done trying to teach Micro-Economics 101 to you. Consider reading an economics textbook and you'll find they all explain this stuff pretty clearly--unless you skip over the majority of what it says as you're doing with my posts--better than I do. The fact that waste is created by taxation does not completely offset the overall benefits of reasonable taxation to internalise externalities Try running the math on the issue at hand next time and you'll see.
I already addressed that with the over consumption and different choices of consumption. The impact is going to be ultimately broken down to a per unit basis. If your not paying for it in savings, then someone else will when they buy it instead
Um...right. The cost to me is offset by the benefit to the person buying the product which isn't always me. They're reaping the reward of lower prices at my expense of having the pollution dumped in my back yard (or, rather, next door, where it can leach into my groundwater). A given externality typically does not harm each person equally. That's what defines it as an externality: the cost is paid for by someone not involved in the transaction.
And the problem--other than the issue of me being screwed over--is that while the cost to me is X, the benefit to the purchaser needs only be greater than zero. It can still be far below X, since the person paying X isn't deciding whether the transaction is worthwhile and should take place.
Every one uses products from different manufacturers equally. There is a trade off. If you use 5 units of brand X and I use 5 units of brand Y we are equal. When I use 6, I have lessened your requirement to use 5 units.
No, we don't. I consume considerably less than many people I know. And some products have much lower external costs. And, um...you using six rolls of toilet paper doesn't mean I only need four instead of my usual five.
But your skipping the important step of determining what the impact is, how to measure it, and how to charge for it.
I don't know--we probably can't get it exactly right--but I know it's not zero. We can estimate the medical costs associated with pollution. We charge for it using taxes, obviously. That's how it's done right now, you know. I'm not proposing a new system. This is what we DO because economic theory says it's the most efficient way.
If you even remotely say that the people who share the environment get the payments then you have defeated your own argument because the payment can be made by reduced costs of the product.
Assuming every person uses every product equally (or at the same ratio that they share the environment), which they most assuredly do not.
The money goes to the agency responsible for clean-up and to general well-fare expenses.
Have you EVER voted? You CAN submit a BLANK ballot when you vote.
Numerous times. I, however, took your position of making it 'MANDATORY that EVERY citizen vote on EVERY issue' to mean something beyond 'requiring them to submit a ballot, even if it's blank'. Something, instead, akin to what ECU did with their online SGA voting.
And random idiots tend to exactly cancel each other out.
No. We'll always have a finite number of voters, and as that number increases relative to the number of informed people voting the results tend toward random chance. As a group, they cancel out every individual voter and every other set of voters, such as the set of voters who are informed about the issues. Suddenly our policy is now determined by a RNG. Some cancelling out.
Encouraging people to vote regardless of whether they're informed increases information entropy. Encouraging them to vote iff they're informed decreases it (and encouraging them to get informed does that). I fully support the latter. The first is harmful.
I think it should be MANDATORY that EVERY citizen vote on EVERY issue.
Terrible idea. This would send entropy through the roof on all but the very most popular issues. Bob and Alice understand economics, but not education. The opposite is true of Oscar and Eve. Ted knows nothing about either, but is the only one with a good understanding of technology. If we force them to all vote on obscure economic policy, Bob and Alice will vote according to reasoned argument, while the other three could go either way, polluting the vote and possibly resulting in a 3-2 win for the bad policy choice. Bob, Osca, and Eve didn't want to destroy out economy. They wanted to say 'I don't know', because they didn't know, and they recognised that ignorance. There are countless issues, many of them very complicated.
Personally, I don't know everything, and restricting me to choosing not voting, studying all policy, or choosing randomly when i don't know is bad for me and bad for everyone else.
At my school, when I voted in the Student Government elections online they actually did forc me to make a choice on every candidate (or not vote at all). I didn't know a thing about the vast majority of the offices, and didn't care. My best option (other than running around campus trying to find out what each person's position was and why I should care) was to vote randomly (because I should have my voice heard on the issues/offices I care about and know about) or not at all (because I shouldn't be contributing to entropy). Worst--and what a lot of people would likely do--is choose based on some irrelevant variable, such as always choosing the first name on the list.
Please, become an expert on an issue if you can/have the interest, but if you don't then you should defer to trusted experts, not just hazard a guess.
To expand on the idea a bit, from reading the Telecoms debate, it would appear that the going rate for a politician is around $40,000. So lets say you get 100,000 people on board with this idea, thats $10 million or 200-odd politicians you are buying after expenses.
Keep in mind that what you're buying is probably not a politician, usually, but rather you a politician's position on one issue (or possibly even one vote). And the broader the issue, more bidders for the position/vote, or further from their own (or their constituency's, to be optimistic) position, the more expensive.
Slashdot Mirror
China, I want to buy your rockets!
Of course, there's no middle ground, such as going over and asking 'What are you guys doing?' and upon being told, replying 'Cool, have fun!' and then continuing along the way.
I don't have a problem with police not bothering them (and the article doesn't say trusting is bad), but nor do I have a problem with police (or anyone) saying 'What's up?' in a non-hostile manner. You present a very absurd, and obviously false, dichotomy.
This article isn't about the invasion. It's about the Google News error in reporting it. If you can handle jokes with any connection to serious issues then you'd do well to avoid Slashdot, along with most every other aspect of the Internet and real life alike.
Inter-Missile Continental Ballistic, of course. *fails epically*
From TFA:
That's a bit like something is on par with spears and IMCBs. Can't be on par with both of them.
You're missing a second major issue thst the article, for some reason, decided to ignore: Arnold is trying to lower their salaries for these Californian workers to BELOW the California minimum wage ($8.00/hr), all the way down the the FEDERAL minimum wage ($6.55/hr). Is it any wonder the system wouldn't be designed to allow wages to be set before the minimum wage? Maybe the programmers, unlike Arnold, were actually sane.
(No, wait: they used COBOL.)
FBI agencies have a government-backed authority to shoot people in some circumstances. This wasn't one of them.
Maybe I'm insane, but I'm just not that scared of cops (or FBI agents). Most of them are reasonable people (yes, they're people!) and they aren't terribly eager to shoot someone without good cause.
The insane people are those who believe they will get shot and stand up for their rights--our rights--anyway. I want more of those guys around. I'd like to say I'd be one of them, but I haven't been put to the test yet.
Probably on the roads we'll obviously continue to maintain in addition to bike paths. And happily, they'll be using the gasoline that has become dirt cheap once demand dropped.
It wouldn't be, but these weren't. This is a Street View case. RTF Summary.
Good question, albeit not really relevant in this case. Other posts seem to think it's usually 500-1000 feet in the US.
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...because sometimes additional statements will be added later.
I don't really follow it, but it's a pretty standard rule.
In some places there is (or was--I many foreign cities would regulate when kids could go outside because the smog was so bad) because it's not taxed or regulated.
I've been there twice, and when the dollar didn't completely suck, things were fine. When the dollar kind of sucked (a year and a half ago) things were still not ridiculous. With a weak dollar, it's bad for visiting Americans, but still all right for Europeans who don't have to deal with the exchange rate.
Sorry, should have specified, these are with costs internalised. If the chicken raising costs, including the costs of pollution, etc. are lower than that of pigs, then we should go with chickens unless pigs just taste or nourish (or however you decide the value of your food) that much better.
I'm not arguing for chickens in the real world. I'm pulling random animals out of my hat for examples. Maybe we should eat more chicken and less pork.
And surely it should. I'm not saying only pig farmers should be prohibited from polluting. That was concrete example with made-up numbers to run some math demonstrating my position.
Taxation and regulation have the same effect in the end, assuming the tax revenue is put to proper use. The only change is where the surplus is transferred to: the government or the supplier, and I happen to prefer to send it to the government. But I don't want to start up a sub-debate.
Not to punish. To make them shoulder all the costs, so they're bore entirely by the supplier and--through higher prices--the consumer of said product. If I were punishing them I'd make them bear more than the cost.
Ugh. I really don't want a debate on the taxes != regulation thing, but if you draw the two supply-and-demand graphs, one using taxation and one using regulation, you'll see the same resulting quantity supplied, the same price, the same waste (assuming the government can tax as efficiently and honestly as it can regulate), and the same consumer surplus. The only difference is the producer surplus. Regulation = taxation with subsidation to the supplier, pretty much.
Wikipedia agrees that a pollution rights market--which is essentially regulation plus a market--are 'are not generally more efficient than Pigovian taxes' (which it turns out is the proper term for the taxes I'm advocating). Sadly, they don't discuss strict regulation.
Figure 2 (and 3) show taxation. I'm pretty sure if we regulated to Q2, the only difference is that the 'Tax revenue' portion of the surplus instead is added to the producer surplus (or possibly split between supplier and producer?), whereas I believe it should be used to offset the cost of the pollution that still results (since Q2, and therefore the pollution caused in producing Q2, is still non-zero).
The difference between regulation and taxation that I tend to gloss over, and related to one that I believe you pointed out early on, is that we can't really know the tax rate to set in order to achieve a given quantity supplied and the resulting pollution, whereas it's usually the resulting pollution level that we're trying to set.
On the other hand, maybe it's the cost of the resulting pollution we're trying to set, in which case I think taxation would be better, knowledge-wise.
If you support regulation, though, you're supporting limits on externalities, which is my main point. I think we're disagreeing more because I explain it poorly than because we actually disagree.
Good point, but it seems like that would depend on constant externalities. Once I've bought my house, lower property values = lower property taxes will not offset the damage. Only if the pig farm is next door when I bought the place might this solution work.
Maybe the risk of pig farm development was factored into the initial cost, but the risk also varies greatly over time.
I'm one of the people who should get an equal share of them. In my case, I want to use them by breathing the air, but can't because it's all filled with smog.
The issue isn't what they eat. The issue is when other people start dumping their household trash there. Once it becomes a de facto landfill, my legitimate use of it becomes essentially impossible. (Legitimate = not making it unusable for other people; not 'taking more than my fair share', essentially.)
An abuse of the commons that greatly harms its overall value. Solution: we don't let people dump their trash in the city park. An alternative would be to start charging for access and using that money to clean it up.
That's how city commons work right now, to some extent. We tax all citizens and use the money to provide trash cans and people to empty them, and to clean the streets.
Failure to regulate and dismissing complaints of a dirty city by 'Well, you should have used your share so other people couldn't pollute it' don't even make sense. Appropriate use of the commons doesn't stop other people from using it or abusing it. Seems like that's a good definition of appropriate use.
I'm merely defending the premise of the Coase Theorem. I don't buy the simplistic form of the Coase Theorem, but you can't deny that it's economic orthodoxy.
Except we do do it to some extent. (Though I guess I can't argue that the economy isn't collapsing, but we've been doing it for a really long time.)
In that case, tariffs for equalising externalities wouldn't destroy the economy as they'd be trivial compared to the differences in labour costs, monetary values, etc.
Not to mention that we can't export now because everything it out of the reach of the cheaper markets that don't piss around with your ideas.
You keep making these dire predictions of what would happen if we followed my ideas, but we do tax and regulate pollution--there are controls on coal burning, ore smelting, fertiliser use, CFCs, pesticide use, and a world of other things, all for the correction of externalities. We do subsidise education, immunisation, lots of scientific research, and other. Home owner associations try to force us to keep our houses pretty.
The US (and pretty much all the western world) uses 'my' ideas pervasively in our economy. It's been this way since long before I was born. I'm defending the status quo (though I think we should go farther, as Europe has. (England's economy is screwed, but the rest of Europe seems to be doing pretty well.))
The buyers will, yes.
Pigs might be fungible, but 'food' is not. If we can lower over-all food prices by X by spending $200 raising pigs or the same by spending $100 raising chickens, we should go the chicken route unless people consider the pigs $100 better than the pigs. With the pig-raising costs partially external, the market won't produce the optimal pig-to-chicken balance. Internalising the costs will cause inefficiencies/waste, but, unless the elasticity is crazy, the gains from full cost accounting will outweigh them.
Because of taxation and regulation. They aren't spend that money because they recognise they're making a mess; they're doing it because the government says 'You can't pollute like that' or 'you have to pay to pollute like that'.
Your examples of things working aren't showing that we don't need things to be taxed/regulated. They're showing that taxation/regulation is working pretty darn well.
You showed no such thing. When I lived a mile or so from a hog farm, I had to smell the waste. That's a cost I bore, whether I ate pork or not, and while pork may be fungible, food as a whole certainly is not. How much would I pay to not smell it? Not much, but I'm sure many people in the area would have. That's a cost we all bore that most people consuming those pigs did not.
You don't tax sale of pigs. You tax things that have value/cost (use of the commons, for the most part, whether it be air, water, roads, or anything else).
Actual, this is Econ 101, and I didn't pervert it: the entire science of economics has, except they actually have demonstrated empirically that it's fairly accurate.
Yeah, it's a shame we can't put a tax on imported goods with externalities. A tariff, for example. But apparently that's impossible, and totally not exactly what we are doing.
Okay, I will try once more. You want the math, so I'll do it, using a simple example 'cause I can't draw graphs, and they require some background anyway.
Bob can raise delicious pigs for $100 in fixed costs and $100 each.
A delicious pig is worth $200 to Fred.
A delicious pig is worth $300 to Kilroy.
So Bob raises two delicious pigs and sells them for around $175 (anywhere from $150-$200 exclusive, really, assuming all are sold at the same price) each. Society is now better off:
Bob spent $100+2*$100 = $300 and earned 2*$175 = $350. He's $50 better off.
Fred spent $175 and got a pig he valued at $200. He's $25 better off.
Kilroy spent $175 and got a pig he valued at $300. He's $125 better off.
Total gains to society: $200. Yay!
But here's what we skipped: to raise these pigs so cheaply, Bob is dumping their faeces just upstream of my house. This pollution is costing me $150 per pig. Because I'm not a party to these pig transactions, my costs aren't being considered. I'm an external cost.
So the total gain to society is $350-$300 + $200-$175 + $300-$175 - $300 = -$100.
The problem isn't that other people benefited and I didn't. It's that they got richer at my expense and, as a whole, society got poorer because no one looked at the full cost.
Now consider these possibilities:
* Suppose Ben could have properly disposed of all his waste for $10 per pig, and did instead of polluting my yard. Now his cost is $100 fixed costs + $110 per pig.
So the total gain to society is $350-$300 + $200-$175 + $300-$175 - 2*$10 = $180. Much better than -$100, and that I'm not the one paying that $20 is also desirable. Ben shouldn't get to just force me to pay his costs if I'm not buying anything from him. (NOT the main point.)
* Suppose Ben could properly have disposed of all his waste for $60 per pig, and did instead of polluting my yard. Now his cost is $100 fixed costs + $160 per pig.
If he raises and sells two, the total gain to society is $350-$300 + $200-$175 + $300-$175 - 2*$60 = $80. Still positive, but -$50 for Ben. So he won't do that.
So he'll only raise one, and raise the price to $250 (anything $200-$300 exclusive): $250-$200 + $300-$250 - $60 = $40. A small benefit, but a lot higher than the -$100 we started with.
Nothing in there about people getting rich while I remain the same being a problem. The problem is that I'm paying for other people's stuff and they (or the market) aren't taking that in consideration when deciding what to produce. Were the disposal costs $110 per pig, then cost of making a pig would be--at any quantity--over $210 and therefore costs more to produce than it's worth to the buyer (Fred). It doesn't take a genius to say 'Oh, then we shouldn't produce it'. We need to internalise the cost to get the market to say that.
A fuller explanation is easily seen with a couple quick supply and demand graphs.
*sigh* It's not that they got more than me. It's that they got more than me at my expense because I'm covering their costs. Your math does not address externalities, which is what this whole debate is about.
Okay, I'm hoping you're trolling, but maybe I'm just bad at explaining stuff. Either way, I'm done trying to teach Micro-Economics 101 to you. Consider reading an economics textbook and you'll find they all explain this stuff pretty clearly--unless you skip over the majority of what it says as you're doing with my posts--better than I do. The fact that waste is created by taxation does not completely offset the overall benefits of reasonable taxation to internalise externalities Try running the math on the issue at hand next time and you'll see.
Um...right. The cost to me is offset by the benefit to the person buying the product which isn't always me. They're reaping the reward of lower prices at my expense of having the pollution dumped in my back yard (or, rather, next door, where it can leach into my groundwater). A given externality typically does not harm each person equally. That's what defines it as an externality: the cost is paid for by someone not involved in the transaction.
And the problem--other than the issue of me being screwed over--is that while the cost to me is X, the benefit to the purchaser needs only be greater than zero. It can still be far below X, since the person paying X isn't deciding whether the transaction is worthwhile and should take place.
No, we don't. I consume considerably less than many people I know. And some products have much lower external costs. And, um...you using six rolls of toilet paper doesn't mean I only need four instead of my usual five.
Assuming every person uses every product equally (or at the same ratio that they share the environment), which they most assuredly do not.
The money goes to the agency responsible for clean-up and to general well-fare expenses.
I think there's a bureaucracy responsible for internalising externalities, such as environmental costs, economic stability, and the like.
Terrible idea. This would send entropy through the roof on all but the very most popular issues. Bob and Alice understand economics, but not education. The opposite is true of Oscar and Eve. Ted knows nothing about either, but is the only one with a good understanding of technology. If we force them to all vote on obscure economic policy, Bob and Alice will vote according to reasoned argument, while the other three could go either way, polluting the vote and possibly resulting in a 3-2 win for the bad policy choice. Bob, Osca, and Eve didn't want to destroy out economy. They wanted to say 'I don't know', because they didn't know, and they recognised that ignorance. There are countless issues, many of them very complicated.
Personally, I don't know everything, and restricting me to choosing not voting, studying all policy, or choosing randomly when i don't know is bad for me and bad for everyone else.
At my school, when I voted in the Student Government elections online they actually did forc me to make a choice on every candidate (or not vote at all). I didn't know a thing about the vast majority of the offices, and didn't care. My best option (other than running around campus trying to find out what each person's position was and why I should care) was to vote randomly (because I should have my voice heard on the issues/offices I care about and know about) or not at all (because I shouldn't be contributing to entropy). Worst--and what a lot of people would likely do--is choose based on some irrelevant variable, such as always choosing the first name on the list.
Please, become an expert on an issue if you can/have the interest, but if you don't then you should defer to trusted experts, not just hazard a guess.
Keep in mind that what you're buying is probably not a politician, usually, but rather you a politician's position on one issue (or possibly even one vote). And the broader the issue, more bidders for the position/vote, or further from their own (or their constituency's, to be optimistic) position, the more expensive.