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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

Weird. Most free market folks say the problem with air quality is no one owns it, so there's no incentive to protect it. A tax like this is about as close as you can get to saying, ok, we collectively own the air, and there's a $1.50 fee/gallon of gas for use of the air in your combustion engine.

Collective ownership might be an uncomfortable topic, so i'll go further and say, you're using my air in your car, and I expect to be paid for it. I suspect any feasible plan would look a lot like some large organization charging use fees. But maybe there's some simpler structure I'm overlooking.

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While I think it's somewhat natural for society to talk about "collective ownership," since the ownership model is what we use for individual transactions, the idea of "public goods" implies that they are "owned/managed by the public" - and that degenerates into "stewardship" by the government "for the public good" (for my/our benefit, even if I disagree, for my part). I definitely don't enjoy the "for my own good"/parental logic - so I don't like the "collective ownership" language we seem to be working with.

I think it would be better if individuals (and governments, to the limited degree I can rationalize them) acted pro-actively/responsibly, rather than defensively (tax, tax, tax...). IMHO, a better model would be to grow (to "invest" not "subsidize") what the public deems worthwhile, driven by intelligence and creativity ("leadership"), rather than perpetually trying to put out fires through punitive intervention (tax, tax, tax...). (Why centralize decision-making if not to aid leadership?) Bringing something to the market through collective action doesn't diminish the market - it is the market. I'm not saying punitive measures are ever off the table, but they should be the last act of a desperate will.

This could be as simple as using approaches like Kickstarter more (instead of taxes), but that depends on people keeping the money they already have.

IMHO government is mostly the sum of our negative/fear-based responses (digging in our heals against "threats" leading us to tax, and inspect, and...). That governments are as large as they are - and that we are taxed as much as we are - reflects a culture of fear.

I have a working solution for getting to work - i drive my car. Over the life of that car, i expect to pay about 25 cents a mile.

The investment approach assumes there is some technology that either can be added to my car, or replace my car. This technology would need to lower the cost of ownership, and do so at a profit. In my specific case, you've only got about $10k left to work with over the remaining life of the car, and that's coming from gas, insurance, maintenance and repairs budgets.

I'm just skeptical that that much room for improvement exists. Cars are a very mature technology. They have an (unfair?) advantage that a whole bunch of infrastructure is in place to support them. I would guess at least a trillion dollars has been spent optimizing cars and car manufacture. An alternative would need to overcome some pretty big obstacles.

Self driving cars provide enormous potential for underutilization of existing cars, but it's really hard to get around the problem of requiring millions of cars from 8-9 AM and 5-6 PM. There are gains to be had, and all those incremental 1-2% improvements over a hundred years have improved efficiency greatly. The point here, you can use fewer self driving cars to serve the transportion needs - just as much gas would be used, but the environmental savings come from less metal and glass and energy to shape the materials.

I'm just skeptical of even a billion dollar kickstarter moving the needle very much. Your optimism is commendable, but the only solution available to us today is using that billion dollars to somehow discount the purchase of slightly more fuel efficient cars. Even that is only a few percent improvement. Cities like Huston need to move the needle a lot, if they want kids to be able to play outside.

What a tax on, say, pollution, would be called is "internalizing the externalities". It fits in quite well with free market principles.

I was specifically trying to counter "promoting a tax to get the most out of the market itself seems like doublespeak."

The parent is being Mr. weasel word with "seems like" but I'm guessing that's just sloppy writing.

Also, I agree with you. Tax on pollution is probably the best solution. I couldn't think of a way to put pollution tax into a short argument. Fee for "storing your waste" doesn't have quite the same punch as "using my air"

A tax on pollution has other advantages - it funds the government in a manner that does not discourage productive behavior.

> The parent is being Mr. weasel word with "seems like" but I'm guessing that's just sloppy writing.

Fixed. Thanks for the input.

Part of the issue here is that to describe such entities there needs to be a means of standardization.

We saw 'carbon credits' devolve in to specific-exchange linked, unique entities that were not interchangeable across borders. That made meaningfully adopting them as environmental units to stake a claim for the value of environment in the present-era systems very difficult. That situation perhaps evolved partly because nobody could otherwise agree on an appropriate level of auditing, and partly because .. well .. established interests. (Without nationalizing and centralizing these things, their potential for decentralized issue versus centralized government fiat issue poses a threat to both sovereign currencies worldwide and the vast profits of connected financial services industries.)

Historically, part of the control effected against change within the financial environment is that SIX in Switzerland on behalf of the ISO has controlled the major ISO4217 global currency and commodity registry, locking out innovation and essentially refusing to issue new codes. People have been avoiding that gridlock by making up unofficial codes like 'BTC' for Bitcoin and such. I recently proposed registry of these values via the IETF at https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-stanish-x-iso4217-a3/ however it's expired pending a new release at the moment (adding Litecoin, etc.)

(On the off chance anyone's hitting OHM2013 later this month in Holland, I'm planning to give a talk there on this subject and related matters at the intersection of politics, finance and technology.)

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