Is this actually saying anything other than that government should get out of the way?
Compare this to progressives, who want to protect the environment but have no metric or process for measuring how much environment to protect and how/why, other than what appeals to their emotions, so they deal with everything case-by-case and inconsistently. In general, this leads to broad, draconian regulations in some domains (like not allowing people to create ponds on their property) and a lack of progress in other domains (CO2 emissions and waste disposal, for example).
And yes, the carbon tax is a libertarian concept.
Actually, it's not.
Pretty much everything I've read by the libertarians (Rothbardians really) about carbon taxes either call it a wealth redistribution scheme (which the original inventor[0] intended it to be) or a case illustrating how the true tragedy of the commons is the fact that the commons exist at all.
So, for your mercury example, the libertarian solution would be for the owner of the polluted water supply to hunt down the source of the contamination and seek restitution for the damaged caused.
As far as I can tell No True Libertarian has ever conceded that The State has the legal or ethical right to tax or outlaw anything (other than theft, fraud and coercion), ever.
[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/08/09/the-unsung-inve...
No True Scotsman! Just like you are closely aligned with Fidel Castro and other autocrats on all issues, because you probably believe in socializing certain things, right? :)
Libertarians are extremely intellectually diverse in their politics -- anecdotally, much more so than conservatives and progressives combined (population size adjusted). Old school Libertarians -- the ones often associated with the birth of the movement (and the ones quoted by Democrats to avoid intellectual debate) -- tend to lean heavily conservative and have an oversimplified view of either the non-aggression principle, the imperfect nature of the world, or both. Milton Friedman is an example of one of the first prominent libertarians to start considering alternative approaches for externalities.
Do I care who first coined the term carbon tax? Nope; it's not about scoring points for your team. The fact of the matter is that the idea of a carbon/pollution/externality-offsetting tax arises naturally from the non-aggression principle, as I described.
> So, for your mercury example, the libertarian solution would be for the owner of the polluted water supply to hunt down the source of the contamination and seek restitution for the damaged caused.
I didn't realize you spoke on behalf of true libertarians!
Tell me, what would you do today if someone dumped mercury in your yard? The same thing -- just because there are laws, does not mean you don't have to deal with people breaking them. And regardless, no, mercury has non-localized and criminal effects (poisoning is a form of assault). If someone threw a couch or some other localized non-poisonous pollution in their neighbor's yard, then yes, that is generally a matter for the civil courts. As it is now, even though littering is illegal.
Which begs the question on how one collects taxes without aggression?
> And regardless, no, mercury has non-localized and criminal effects (poisoning is a form of assault).
So you criminalize the "assault" then you don't need gov't watchdogs tracking all uses of mercury to ensure it doesn't end up on some poor sap's lawn because once you give them the power to outlaw one thing you give them the power to outlaw whatever they want.
The Road to Serfdom as they say...
That is what the Rothbardians do not understand -- there is always aggression in the world. What you do not understand is that even though there is aggression in the world (i.e. we don't live in a perfect world where people don't game the system), that does not mean we should not seek to minimize it. To minimize aggression (and thereby maximize freedom) is a non-trivial and ever-changing optimization exercise.
For example, if by levying a tariff or property tax, a freedom-maximizing society's government is able to fund a standing army to prevent other governments from conquering a society, it is presumed that net aggression is minimized (i.e., from the standpoint of the citizenry who are being aggressed upon by their government in the form on involuntary taxes, because otherwise we can assume a different government would take its place, which would most likely not be a freedom maximizing government (or it wouldn't have been forming empires in the first place)).
> So you criminalize the "assault" then you don't need gov't watchdogs tracking all uses of mercury to ensure it doesn't end up on some poor sap's lawn because once you give them the power to outlaw one thing you give them the power to outlaw whatever they want.
Not sure what you're getting at here, if anything. I see no connection between 'lack of government watchdog employing mass surveillance to track all thermometers in the country' and society falling apart. Nor do I see the converse as an actual solution to mercury pollution -- do you?? So they track it, then what? How? What happens when thrown-out thermometers break and run off into the storm drain? What happens when somebody throws out mercury on some poor sap's lawn anyway? This is the second time you've made this invalid point -- people will break the law sometimes. There is punishment for that in both of these proposed systems. How is yours any more effective?
There will always be littering, and I whole-heartedly support generic clean-up efforts to counteract the summation of small, non-enforceable aggressions, that are not already assumed in externality taxes along the supply chain (like people dropping gum on the sidewalk, etc.) On the topic of those externality taxes, here's an example: purchaser of a combustible manufacturing fuel used to create cigarettes is charged an externality tax for the inherent environmental cost of using the fuel. Then the smoker pays a different tax to pay for the externality inherent in using the cigarette. Such a thing would not be fair for gum, though, because most people do not drop gum on the ground -- it isn't inherent so why should the Sean Spicer's of the world bear an outsized burden of the cost for cleanup?
Not really. His plan calls for the proceeds of the taxes to be returned to every adult in equal portions. The "redistribution" is from people who pollute more to people who pollute less, not from the rich to the poor.
Meanwhile, so-called environmentalists and social justice advocates helped to defeat a proposed carbon tax in Washington state, specifically because it returned the revenue to the public (specifically targeting the poor) rather than spending it on their preferred government programs: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09112016/washington-state...
These are two different philosophies, in the same way that communism is completely different from Bernie sanders style "democratic socialism".
A libertarian generally opposes government involvement because it creates inefficient pricing errors in the economy, such as subsidies. The argument for a carbon tax is that, for those who believe in climate change, it will actually minimize the current pricing error by taking into account the externalities that the carbon will create.
The only question is then what the tax should be priced at, and by whom, in order to accurately reflect the damage.
A Randian objectivist is also not the same thing as a Libertarian.
Who determines what the damage is and who pays for the people who make the determination?
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/switzerland-giant-new...
At some point, the government either needs to generate bids for a contract in the free market (subject to the cronyism of government officials) or do it in-house (inefficient). We need a government, so every implementation of any policy you can think of can potentially suffer from a combination of these two factors -- I hardly see that as a hole in this approach.
> who pays for the people who make the determination?
China and the Fed, obviously -- same as now. If you are trying to shoot down these ideas because you don't think I believe in any taxation, you're really walking into a trap here. The quoted cost for undoing damage clearly takes into account bureaucratic / managerial overhead, as would any contract.
Instead of railing against solar power maybe he should also rail against the massive subsidies the oil industry gets through decades long military intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere. He also doesn't touch more complex areas such as nuclear energy for example. Is it OK for everybody to do "Permissionless Innovation" on reactor designs and from time to time one of them blows up? I hope the author will move close to one of these innovation paradises.
That was his point.
"Instead of railing against solar power..."
Irrelevant what-about-ism.
"Is it OK for everybody to do "Permissionless Innovation" on reactor designs ..."
I will tell you that you don't really understand what the author is saying. But you won't believe that. You will continue to believe the author must be stupid.
Twitter is just one valid example among many that have emerged in the internet era; the whole reason we've seen so much innovation in internet-related technologies in the past 20 years is that the innovation could be done without asking anyone's permission.
Concerns are now growing that with Google, Amazon, Facebook etc are becoming such powerful gatekeepers that the freedom to innovate is declining. You'd likely find he'd support government actions to reverse that trend.
There's no grand anti-government agenda in this or any other of Munger's work [1]. As an economist and political scientist, he repeatedly makes the sensible point that government should limit its activities to what helps society and avoid doing things that harm society. Obviously there's vast scope for debate about what that really means, which is why he writes articles like this one, to examine the issues in detail.
On this point:
Instead of railing against solar power maybe he should also rail against the massive subsidies the oil industry gets through decades long military intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere.
He's not railing, just commenting. And in his other work he's extremely critical of the US government's interventions in the Middle East. But this article isn't about that.
[1] He's highly critical of both the Republicans and the Democrats due to their corporate cronyism and militarism, but that's very different to being critical of government altogether.
For example: Innovation in self-driving cars would be much quicker if there was no regulation but how do you balance that against people not wanting to get run over by a car with buggy software? This would be an interesting discussion. Twitter is just a too easy example.
Go back. Read the article again. Multiple times. And TRY to do it fairly. TRY to recognise your biases and presumptions.
If you are incapable of doing that, then what chance would other people have of successfully explaining it?