The EPA already has the means for on site tests of emissions, industrial discharge, etc. They are also capable of monitoring and investigating to locate the source of problems.
> Its just in practice to implent this, the state has to become an autocracy at the same level of a dictatorship.
What are you even talking about? The government already knows everyone who gets welfare benefits. They also already know who employs those people and how much money they were paid. If a company pays so little that their employee still needs food stamps, the government knows how much it cost taxpayers to subsidize the labor expense of the employer.
> isnt that already the case?
No. It isn't. Same with data breeches and security incidents. Some small percentage of the people who are harmed might join a class action, but most people won't get any compensation for their losses (which may include death) and those that do get something don't typically get anything close to fair compensation, just a few bucks and/or coupons. DuPont poisoned you. Knowingly. How much money did they compensate you for that? People should be directly compensated when possible, but often there are harms that impact everybody, even if not directly. Sometimes it's not possible to track everyone down. It'd be better to invest that money into the society that was harmed than allow companies to profit from it. It's not just about compensation, but also giving an incentive to avoid or limit the harmful behavior. Crowdstrike's fuck up in 2024 cost the economy tens of billions. Do you think they paid that all back? Even the shareholders got screwed (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/14/crowdstrike-defeats-sharehol...). It sure didn't take "a backdoor into every company" to figure out who was responsible for that.
The idea that companies should pay for the harms they cause isn't "socialist inspired" and doesn't require turning into "China" or the "USSR". It's something that any sane person would want. There are lots of ways to get that result. A Pigouvian tax is only one of them, better suited in some situations than others.