Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

It seems that there are many benefits flowing to people who live in societies that value and encourage economic freedom  (lid dip to  Glenn Reynolds ).  A carbon tax seems inimical to more economic freedom. It raises the cost of energy. It requires a large and intrusive bureaucracy to collect and administer it. Business has more red tape to comply with. There are redistributions and reallocations of wealth that are susceptible to gaming. How can the risk of taking such backward steps in our economic freedoms be considered worth it for the seemingly very remote possibility that taxing carbon dioxide emissions might help slow global warming if other nations do it too? Especially whilst the rest of the world just looks on? Only people who put a nil or low value on economic freedom would be likely to treat such a trade-off as worthwhile. They do not seem to realise just what a valuable thing it is that they are imperilling with their fanciful hope of global climate salvation by intr

If your objective is to save the planet, then this tax will  not help . If your objective is to create prosperity, then this tax  will help to impoverish us . Though if your objective is to increase the size and power of government, then this tax would have to be a winner. Here we are, yet again, accidentally having some easily accessible stuff that other nations are prepared to pay up for, and we decide it would be nice, in the name of helping Mother Earth, to deliberately make it more expensive for industries to set up or continue here. And we are going to make it more expensive now, before the rest of the world has done it too, to show the world how morally sophisticated we are, even when such sacrifice won't actually help the planet stay cool. Brave? Yes. Sensible? No. A carbon tax will inevitably cost us economically productive jobs. A carbon tax deliberately reduces our capacity to create wealth from using the most economically available resources to create goods a