Tuesday Reading

My sister-in-law flies into town today, so blogging is certain to be rather light. Here’s some homework, though.

Read Lee’s post on the problems with using GDP as a measure of economic (let alone societal) well-being, and Jim Henley’s comments on the same, together with the very awesome RFK (no, really) quotation that AOTP’s Jackson comes up with. The only things I’d really like to add pertain to Lee’s discussion of the externality-taxing approach, of which I’m skeptical for reasons that outstrip my concerns about fairness, efficacy, and the potential for corporate abuse. Here is what Lee says:

Apart from obvious physical harms, distinguishing between beneficial and destructive activities is tricky, especially without a shared philosophical framework of some sort. This is the real strength of liberalism: it promises to deliver social peace without taking a stand on controversial questions about the purpose and higher ends of living. However, if unrestrained human desire begins to bump up against very real ecological limits, this kind of neutrality may no longer be possible. Can liberalism provide an argument for self-restraint?

Or could it be that liberalism doesn’t need to provide this kind of argument? All it needs to do, you might say, is put a price on those “externalities” generated by our economy–environmental, medical, etc.–and let the market do its thing. When it costs to pollute, people will pollute less. QED. This all assumes, of course, that we can put a non-arbitrary price on pollution, not to mention things like species extinction, destruction of wilderness, etc. And, anyway, is the worth of everything else ultimately a function of human preference, or does it have its own intrinsic, objective value? At this point we’re getting into questions that are downright philosophical, if not theological, and my skepticism that we can simply avoid the debate about ends and values returns.

First of all, and as Lee himself indicates, it’s worth emphasizing the extent to which the kind of technocratic, econometric approach to problems embodied in the externality-taxing approach is one that buys quite thoroughly into the reductive, mathematized, valueless approach to economics that Lee starts off by criticizing. This may, of course, be the only possible response to a (potentially) very serious problem like climate change, but the difficulty is that once it is realized in public policy it then cements the problematic mindsets that undergird the unhealthy lifestyles into place that much more firmly. Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy has once again got a lot to recommend it here: his call is for a bottom-up, and not primarily regulatory, approach that rebuilds community and restructures agriculture and economic exchange into more sustainable forms. That there are roles for government – e.g. in encouraging entrepreneurship and building better public transportation – in making this happen seems undeniable; it seems desirable, though, that the disembodied, taxation-driven, primarily negative approach embodied in such things as carbon taxes be turned to as a last resort rather than a first one. (Whether that last resort is already all we have left is of course open to discussion.)

The other big problem, and this is once again something Lee gestures at but which I think deserves a lot more attention than it tends to get, is that it’s hard to say exactly what is and isn’t a genuine “negative externality” (let alone determine how to price them!) unless we start doing quite a lot of serious thinking about ends and values. Even if we all agree that climate change is bad, and that carbon emissions contribute to climate change, what for instance are we to say about the “external” costs and benefits of, say, having children as opposed to remaining childless, or eating foods that rely on the torture of animals or the destruction of natural ecosystems, or – perhaps – engaging in behaviors that “pollute the moral ecology”? Determining which behavioral byproducts are and aren’t negative ones worthy of taxation, and indeed which forms of life are intrinsically good or evil, is a difficult task that (our) government may not be most definitely is not especially well-equipped to deal with. In any case, my point here is not simply to be contrarian about the regulatory approach to environmental issues, but just to point out some of the hurdles that lie in this direction.

Next up, also read Kevin Carson’s (quite lengthy but very worthwhile) AOTP post on realism, radicalism, and the relationships between economic and political decentralisms. Here the main thing I’d like to note relates to the Walmart discussion: I continue to believe that there is reason to hope (and perhaps it is just hope) that a system that got rid of the massive (and primarily federally-driven) regulatory apparatus that discourages entrepreneurship and small-business ownership, complicates the tax code, and creates all sorts of other burdens that are handled much more easily by bigger businesses than small ones and so tilts the playing field strongly in favor of the former would be one where the world’s Walmarts would hold a lot less sway. Would they still be around, and be abusive and disproportionately powerful? Surely yes. But this situation is greatly worsened when smaller (and so less politically influential) sellers and producers are made to meet the same standards as the huge ones – hence lifting some of these restrictions would go at least some way toward encouraging what I have called “economies of place” (and cf. the sociologist Melanie DuPuis on “civic markets”). Once again, this would not be a perfect solution, but it would be a major step in the right direction, and this is why the whole left-libertarian alliance thing gets my traditionalist self so excited.

Finally, and in a similar vein, read Reihan Salam, responding to Rush Limbaugh with characteristic calm and charity (the first words into my mind when I read about what Limbaugh had said were “Big. Fat. Idiot.”), and explaining why sometimes the best way to tame the beast is not to starve it. Money quote:

The important thing is to target the hidden subsidies that make up the hidden welfare state. Yes, we absolutely need to cut wasteful spending. But we also want to increase freedom. That means freeing our labor markets, loosening regulations, tilting government policies in favor of giving families more flexibility rather than less. To do that, though, we have to make what has been invisible — a social policy built on corvées that are tying the hands of American entrepreneurs — and make it visible. That will cause short-term expenditure increases. That has not been the policy of the Bush White House or the Clinton White House, which were only too happy to use budgetary flim-flam to hide the true cost of their goals. (Remember when we thought we could fight the Iraq War on the cheap?)

I would like to say more about this, but mostly it reminds me that I really ought to go ahead and read Reihan’s book. I do hope that some of the left-lib types will take the time to do the same, and report back on their thoughts – the Douthat-Salam agenda is, of course, one that could be co-opted by other political coalitions than the Republican one, and perhaps to better ends.

[ADDENDUM: For a smile, you might also check out Henley on why Washington doesn't do it for him.]

Filed under: conservatism, economics, environment, government/law, politics, taxation