social.noyu.me

‪like fuck me i wish i could just vote for a fucking carbon tax. the market can solve things if you give it a fucking chance. the left is too attached to the fantasy of not having markets and the right either wants to never intervene or to only intervene for conservative causes‬

in theory maybe i would want to vote for the liberal centrist party (i live in a country where that is an explicit option! there's two even!) but in practice i extremely don't because they can't imagine what a functioning market would look like. leftists at least have a dream.

mainstream centrists will really look at a well-functioning state monopoly and decide that their next great political project will be replacing it with an absolutely dogshit public-private hybrid market. just the most awful market you've seen. and consider that an achievement

meanwhile you could really do more for liberalism by making some pointed interventions in the markets that are already “free”, because for every year you refuse to do anything about those unending sources of human misery, all your political enemies get stronger

if i seem like i have fundamental leftist sympathies but a pragmatic liberal/libertarian bent it's because the existence of a grey market for ___ has done more for _____ ______ than any amount of voting ever will

@hikari personally, I'm not attached to the idea of "never having markets", but under the current carbon tax scheme, the biggest polluters can buy "carbon credits" from organizations that claim they're sequestering carbon with theoretical forests that they're simultaneously chopping down, and it comes across as a huge greenwashing scam

something more concrete like, "you must retrofit your entire fleet to diesel-electric hybrid and solar by 2035" with strict definitions of what that means would still involve markets to a degree (buying/selling of those retrofits) and knock off 40% of emissions right off the top from the most polluting industries. instead we continue to let those industries waste fossil fuels and pay for indulgences to continue business as usual, which is what carbon taxes are for the most part

@hikari Yeah, I don't quite understand how this is not a thing yet. A carbon tax that increases progressively over the years, with profits being used to subsidize carbon-neutral or carbon-positive alternatives, sounds like a great idea. It would encourage the market as well as consumers to consider alternatives that are better for the environment.

@hikari Unfortunately, "but good" is all in the details.

A lot of cryptocurrency-positive libertarians have an idea of "but good" that most of us are against, for instance.

I *do* with that "capitalism, but done like Sweden or Finland" was something you could vote for without moving to Sweden or Finland.

@codefolio i have bad news about sweden

@hikari Fair. I've never actually been there, I just know they're well known for being willing to do "capitalism, but with significant levels of taxation and social services."

Which, given that I was born in the US, is already a large step up. These days I'm in Scotland, which isn't Finland but also isn't the US.