Jesus, I believe in global warming. I do NOT believe in carbon taxes on cows.

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Makes sense to me. The only way things are going to get cleaned up is if people pay the price for the damage they do.

Imagine I wanted to start a hydroponics farm out of my apartment with shared water and electricity bills, I use 20x as much of each as anyone else in the building but I share an equal amount of the bill with everyone, I'm rolling in cash, my costs are only 20% of what my competitors have!

Is that fair? Does that make sense? Should one person be allowed to profit by destroying something which is needed by all and everyone else has to foot the bill to fix the problem later? Without a carbon tax on cows you're just passing the problem on from the farmer (who is creating the problem) to the public at large, a public which is too stupid to change it's ways without incentive (like more expensive meat!).

Taxes gotta come from somewhere.... best to tax things that have a hidden cost to everybody. You can make great arguments cattle have hidden costs. Why not exempt family farmers of a certain size to make everybody happy?

Counter argument: They took our jaorbs!!

Taxes are not means of social change, they pay for government...that is their function. Trying to motivate or punish via taxes is wholly immoral. Such should be considered "bill of attainder". The precedent that best reflects most of the original intention of the mandates is from Cummings v. Missouri. It states:

A bill of attainder, is a legislative act which inflicts punishment without judicial trial and includes any legislative act which takes away the life, liberty or property of a particular named or easily ascertainable person or group of persons because the legislature thinks them guilty of conduct which deserves punishment.

The United States Constitution forbids bills of attainder under Article I, Section 9. You might as well punish people for drinking soda via taxes, or who don't take showers, or take to many. Such are not the role of taxes, or a legislature.

Taxes have been successfully used to reduce smoking and alcohol consumption in Canada and fuel consumption in many parts of the world.

I have no idea where you come up with a, "moral", argument Gee, you seem to have just thrown that in there at random without any actual thought. Without any other weight of evidence on your side on the moral issue I'd say the Tax 'em side wins due to improved outcomes (better health from tobacco and alcohol taxes for instance).

Taxing someone for damage they do to the environment is not punishment, you're reading the laws wrong (or you've had them incorrectly read to you more likely). By your reading of the rules nobody could EVER be singled out for higher taxes and that's just obviously not the case.

On the whole your arguments are completely flat, make no sense at all and simply serve to show that you have no real understanding of the subject.

First of all, I doubt the claim can be verified that taxes reduce consumption. I would challenge you to find any study that supports taxes have slowed smoking adoption among teens rather than increasing dissemination of health facts of smoking, or it just going out of style.

But that is a more technocratic argument. Why is the government singling out smokers, why not people who don't take an afternoon jog? Surly the government should encourage jogging with fines right? Jogging is healthy, not jogging is not, so why not tax not jogging? That is what it means to live in a free society, or in this case, not live in one.

Sin taxes are not taxes at all, but fines. Fines for expressing freedoms are immoral and reprehensible and have no place in a free society. That is why I raise the moral argument. To manipulate government imposed fines to enforce moral agendas is no better than any other form of tyranny of majority will. If that be the case, there is no defense against religious right coming to power and demanding a fine for people who don't pray, after all, that affects their spiritual health.

You assume that just because it relates to better health then it is ok for the government to get involved in, but health isn't the governments job, it's yours and mine. If I don't want to jog, and I want to smoke, you have no right to fine me. That is what it is, it isn't a tax, its a fine. Taxes are something we all pay for mutual benefit, like cops, roads, schools, ect. A tax on a substance to provide a dis-insensitive is legislating morality, and shouldn't be tolerated in any form. I don't argue against the objective however, just the means. I find smoking pretty gross, and would teach my kids to stay away from it as my parents taught me, but legislation is just wrong.

In America, we have ways of handling environmental damage through the courts. And I think there is something to be said about redefining laws to take into consideration property rights of air and water run off. Local communities that are affected by the consequences of local pollution are in a better place to demand reparations than arbitrary taxes that the local affections will never see. That is the real crime. These EPA taxes go to Washington and never come back to the communities they were extracted from, its highway robbery.

On the whole your arguments are completely flat, make no sense at all and simply serve to show that you have no real understanding of the subject. ( you see, name calling isn't very nice or constructive)

(BTW, the US CDC says that one of the major factors in teen, and preteen smoking is being from a low socioeconomic status. In effect, you are fining the most vulnerable in a society. The government is hardly being a white knight by taking from the poor, and giving to the not so poor. It is more of a tragedy (or a Shakespearean comedy!) than a victory.)

>> ^GeeSussFreeK:

...but health isn't the governments job, it's yours and mine...


If you'd take that thought to it's logical conclusion, you'd see that ALL functions performed by government are "our job". Government is merely delegation of existing powers inherent in a person. If it's not lawful for one person to do, it cannot be lawful for a group of people (or government) to do. And when a government is so blatantly and flagrantly performing functions which are against it's design and purpose, it's time to walk away and start a new country. It's not that hard. Just study what the essential elements of a nation are, and reproduce those. War and violence are totally unnecessary in this process by the way, if performed with the requisite wisdom. I'll give you a hint: it's all about the spatial land rights. In America, the highest title to those rights (among other rights) are described in a Land Patent. See www.teamlaw.org for more information.

So basically, I'm agreeing with you. Just take it farther.

I have had some problems with establishing my own logical base for property rights myself. I think we are reading pages from the same book though

I have a certain problem with ownership defined simply by proximity to resources. For instance, I have problems with someone owning a mineral under the soil because they have a title to the land that says they own everything in and under it. This tilts the scales in favor of those who have capital to buy up huge tracks of land and hire others to dig it for them. IE, it is undercutting those who want to do work for those who have money. While this situation might be unavoidable, I am trying to come up with a more work ethic minded idea of land ownership instead of the model we currently have with has many of the same problems as intellectual property has developed. The basic idea I propose is that no person owns land outright, but only what they produce from it. That way, someone can't say they own gold in the ground and hire someone at some low rate to come get it for them. The person who wants to own that gold would have to work to get it because he doesn't have unilateral claim. He could hire others to help, but they would all have equal claim to all the gold. The result is the person who found it still gets more money than he would alone because many hands do more work more quickly, but the others also greatly benefit as they have ownership of that gold as well and have more bargaining power as a result. This puts power back in the hands of blue collars, which is where I think it should be. Anyway, I rant on.

I am not an anarchist however. Government has a very important role, and one of the most important is us all getting together as a group and decide how private property is going to work. There is no objective idea of private property, it is something we make up; as such democracy is really the best engine to tackle that problem. Other problems, like veto power over how you spend your time and money has no place in a free society. Defining what money and property, however, are essential.