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Comment by andy_ppp | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking about a more interesting policy around this; let’s give everyone a meat quota (at some sustainable level) and allow them to trade their quota for cash or buy more. This would make meat very expensive but would also mean if you are going to bother it had better be good meat and additionally might be a way to supplement the income of poorer families and people... just a thought.

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Ignoring transaction costs, that system is equivalent to a tax where the revenue is dispersed on a per capita basis.

All it does is increases transaction costs for no benefit (that I see). Also, it's pointless to care about the distribution effects of individual policies rather than overall government transfers.

There is a reflexive anti-tax “starve the beast” mentally among many. A common argument is “they claim the purpose of the tax is to [achieve goal X], but really they just want more revenue.”

Even if a cap and trade system is economically equivalent to a carbon tax, it might be more politically palatable because it doesn’t use the tax mechanism.

I mean, if you can trade your meat coupons for cash, why not just use cash in the first place?

Because it allows everybody access to the same quantity, while rewarding those who abstain.

That sounds like UBI.

You're just giving an equal handout (that's equivalent to cash) to everybody.

You're glossing over the additional nuance, I think, of the proposed solution giving everybody equal access to a limited meat ration.

Is meat so different than other carbon producers like air travel, electronics manufacturing, or others? I think what you are proposing boils down to basic income and carbon taxes if you take it far enough.

Meat is at least more complex/interesting in that it can also directly affect things like human health. I see where you're going with this and, yes, reductio ad absurdum it boils down to basic income and carbon taxes, but meat rationing would seem to have a behavior modification component as well that the other two producers you listed don't really have beyond a superficial level.

I have not yet formed an opinion for better or for worse, but thought it key to point out a potential argumentative difference.

It's the difference between a carbon tax on meat and carbon permits (cap and trade) on meat.

Ahh, yeah it would be more comparable. Though I think a sin tax is more workable that getting a cap on meat legislated.

I was reading an article earlier today about hunters in Australia and the fact that more and more women are taking up the practice. The interesting thing is that they are hunting deer which is considered a feral animal here.

So, as a benefit to removing the feral animal problem, should they not then get a tax reduction for eating meat as they are removing a feral animal from the environment?

> let’s give everyone a meat quota (at some sustainable level) and allow them to trade their quota for cash or buy more

That's not a very good policy. If the point is to reduce carbon emissions and not to get people to eat less meat, then why would you effectively ban technologies that make meat production more carbon efficient?

The point is to make poor people better off, both physically and financially. I’d say a bigger problem here would be the meat black market that would pop up run by criminals...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationing

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