Transparency: what it’s all about
Thursday, February 26th, 2009 By Mike MaurerThere is a surfeit of most-important issues right now, but among them is the idea of cap and trade on pollution.
As a means of pollution control, this is actually a free market idea. It avoids command and control and sets prices. However, such a scheme depends on honestly setting prices and there is next to no chance of doing that by government.
Moreover, when one explicitly ties the price structure, not to pollution, but to social programs, then it’s no longer cap and trade at all. It’s just a tax, and the worst kind of tax at that. Once again it is the opposite of transparency, and there is zero chance it will be effective for either revenue or pollution control. (As a means of advancing the socialist cause, it will be quite effective.)
If free marketers don’t grasp this and soon, there is nothing but poverty ahead for all of us. Well, all of us except a few hundred thousand people who will have Daschle dachas and drivers. That probably sounds like a lot of people, but in a society of 300 million, suffice to say, it’s not you.
Tags: cap, pollution, Trade, Transparency
