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Comment by thysultan | Hacker News Reader

You tax carbon, country B now has an advantage over you. You loose!

Now all your products are produced in country B, you've changed nothing and country B is probably using coal so you're worse off from your initial goal.

You loose double!

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That's why a lot of carbon tax proposals also impose those taxes on imports.

(Also, you mean to use 'lose' here, not 'loose'.)

> You tax carbon, country B now has an advantage over you. You loose!

Tariff based on carbon expenditure.

It's pretty simple, this has been thought out - and it is pretty clearly a welfare enhancing policy.

Add Country C into the mix: It doesn't produce carbon but doesn't have tariff's on Country B.

>It's pretty simple, this has been thought out

You and others alike have clearly not thought this out as the scenario i have layered out is already happening with other tariff-able commodities.

Why do people think "enforcement is impossible" is such a strong argument against taxes?

If your argument is that tariffs don't disincentivize behaviors because the government is just that bad at collecting taxes, you're not really in step with reality.

But you can't enforce your taxes in other governments.

In fact other governments in a game theory like ploy to get ahead of your country may agree to international agreements that they know they can game to their advantage.

The fundamental assumptions are wrong. You're not in this together. All countries are in direct competition, and some a more cut-throat than others. If potential disaster B is coming irregardless, country B can position themselves to come-out on top of country A when it does.

If it imports carbon from Country B then it uses carbon, so treat it as such.

Why would it be country-based? Besides the obvious thing that Country of Origin rules apply anyway.

An argument could be made if we don't apply the Carbon Tax to poor or third-world countries it will help them develop faster... but those third-world countries shouldn't be shipping us resources in the first place!

Trade blocs and economic sanctions?

This is why you sign up for an international treaty that has teeth, ratify it, and back it up with penalties including carbon tariffs.

Name one international treaty that has ever had teeth where the benefits of non-conformance out weight the teeth.

Country B could tarrif country A in return and some countries cannot afford the cost of what that may do to them.

So you end up with an international treaty without international conformance or a treaty with no real teeth because the signee's have contributed to it what would allow "them" to game the treaty.

Banning CFCs globally via the Montreal Protocol.

To put it bluntly China still has CFC emissions.

And funnily enough, it's still lower than it would have been without the treaty. It's almost as if compliance doesn't have to be perfect to be effective, fancy that.

Nations agreed on laws for ocean and air travel. Countries that disobey them are ostracized or even subject to violence. Nations could in theory do the same for polluting the ocean and air. But that gets viewed as denying developing countries the benefits developed countries had.

You add tariffs to country B's products to make up the difference.

country B sells to country C that does the final packaging and then sells it to you.

This is happening right now if you haven't already noticed.

Country of origin rules still kick in that case. This is tour de force for rules around tariffs, know you nothing about how these work?

If it worked it wouldn't be happening, the fact that it is happening, and to well known country's proofs they don't work and is profitable for country B and C for it to continue to not work.

This not withstanding the obfuscation of country of origin that can happen If country B and C really wanted to work together.

You're describing someone evading the law, and your argument boils down to: "if laws worked, people wouldn't get away with breaking them."

We'll have to agree to disagree on that.

We're not talking about people, we're talking about governments, and other governments do not have to obey your governments tax law.

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