I was checking a few cap-and-trade, and cap-and-dividend websites.
They call their legislative solutions market-based. Apparently, since their proposals involve drawing out carbon dioxide limits and carbon dioxide rights, pollution limits and pollution rights, production limits and production rights, and then allowing sale of these rights to increase limits, it’s a market solution.
I guess it is, since it involves buying and selling.
But free trade in limits on property rights is like free trade in swindling.
Somehow, governments only believe in business freedom when it involves freedom to steal or to extort from others.
Yes, apparently a simple carbon tax wouldn’t afford the politically connected with as many opportunities to cash in on the manufactured hoax of MMGW as this crap and trade scheme would.
The term market-based is used to denote anything resembling market activity, ie exchanging money for something.
The irony is that the government is trying to put this market into place, which is thus no longer a free market. Carbon trading programs do exist in the free market, and IMHO, that is fine granted that government is not running it. (The challenge is in exchanging property rights to something that is difficult to homestead and account for.)
Alexander Cockburn brilliantly made fun of this scam by saying that it’s like selling indulgences. We must pay the government for our sins against the environment by buying carbon credits for them.
This is the most horrifying government-sponsored mockery of the capitalist system - where a sale of carbon credits would ensure that German workers lose their jobs in order to save Swedish ones, because arbiters of carbon credits bought from German factories and sold it to factories in Sweden.
I don’t think environmentalists and climatologists should ever have supported a legislation that is purely a greedy money-making scheme meant to serve close private interests at the expense of thousands of businesses, workers, families, and jobs. This has absolutely nothing to do with saving the planet. Let’s not even pretend.
It’s just as repulsive that leftists and fighters of the working class actually think that they can achieve their “social and developmental justice” by trading in factory hours for upper class carbon-selling schemes.
I agree Emissions Trading Schemes (cap & trade) are a perversion of the term “market”. But can someone point me to a proper scholarly article making the points raised in this thread? I’m writing a paper on environmental law from an Austrolibertarian perspective and need a citation to make this exact point.