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Comment by abdullahkhalids | Hacker News Reader

Individual people would also happily buy cheap cars that are gas guzzlers - yet, governments have made laws mandating car efficiency.

This is point of governments. To change the incentives for individuals so markets optimize for global good. This is not a hard concept.

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That's an excellent example of bad governance though. The government instead should have priced in the externalities of gasoline directly into the gas and then allowed consumers to decide if they wanted to spend money on better gas mileage. Customers would give a significant amount of demand for better gas mileage themselves if gas was $7/gallon.

The reason the current approach is a failure is that everyone who doesn't care about efficiency can skirt the whole mandate by buying a truck/suv that gets a whopping 15mpg in town[1]. The popularity of trucks in the US speaks to how bone-headed the approach of mandating efficiency in cars is.

The even worse part about not correctly taxing the actual externality is that people think they are doing good things for the environment by buying new high gas mileage cars and then unwinding that whole thing with a cheap flight to Paris or by constantly having things shipped across the country for them.

>To change the incentives for individuals so markets optimize for global good. This is not a hard concept.

Yep, not a hard concept but the implementation is where everything went completely to shit.

1. https://fueleconomy.gov/feg/bymodel/2017_Ram_1500_Pickup.sht...

> allowed consumers to decide if they wanted to spend money

This makes assumptions about one's ability to even make such a decision given their environment/situation. There's a theoretical vs practical difference in taxing consumers for otherwise cheap yet harmful products. Theoretically you'd be right, but practically it's regressive.

No, altering incentives is not the point of government, at least by a reading of the US constitution, history, or probably polling. Admittedly it is a method desired currently in the Democratic party.

The thing is the markets don't optimise for global good, this is a sticking plaster ('band-aid') to inhibit the worst of the harm. The combative, capitalistic, market-led system is the problem.

>This is point of governments. To change the incentives for individuals so markets optimize for global good. This is not a hard concept.

Huh, this whole time I thought the point of governments was to protect individual rights. TIL /s

Yes it is. And they do that by imposing responsibilities on the same individuals they are protecting. Also there are more rights to be protected than what is trivially obvious from an individual point of view - like the right of our children to breathe air without gas masks (exaggeration intended for emphasis)

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