George Rebane
OK boys and girls, time for a little review of an arcane notion of economics that is the darling of socialists cooking up ever more ways to make our lives miserable. An externality of some good or service traded at market price is the attributed added cost to society that the consumption of such a good or service entails. For example, consider the hamburger you had for lunch. The progressive sees that hamburger as being the source of all kinds of additional costs that are not reflected in the price you paid for it, costs like treating diseases resulting from national obesity to costs of manmade global warming resulting from all the cow farts collecting in the upper atmosphere.
As you might guess, the progressives’ solution to this ‘problem’ is to increase the hamburger’s price by a tax levied to pay for fixing all the subsequent externalities that might arise due to the consumption of hamburgers. In their enlightened brave new world, such additional costs would be added to the trade of every item in an economy onto which they can pile some externalities. According to their thinking, this type of accounting would pay for itself by finally making the purchase of goods and services ‘externalities neutral’. Light thinkers at this point begin to feel fuzzy and warm all over – why didn’t they think of that?
The problem, of course, with charging for externalities at the point of purchase is that no one with a solid 3-digit IQ has been able to come up with a reasonable way to 1) identify attributable externalities to any given good or service or GoS, 2) determine the cost of the GoS’s externalities, 3) allocate that GoS’s share of each externality’s cost, 4) set up an inter-jurisdictional system to administer, collect, and manage such taxes, and 5) distribute appropriate sums of such collected monies to certified programs set up to mitigate and/or eliminate the attributed externalities. There’s more, but you get the idea.
But such factors never penetrate the brain bones of progressives, be they of the environmentalist or national nutrition police variety. Their solution to charging for externalities is the same approach they have to global warming science - use brown numbers and make it up as you go along. (Everyone knows from which orifice brown numbers are pulled.) Since their ends justify the means, tell all necessary lies at all levels to calm the sheeple.
Imposing externalities taxes on all of America’s goods and services is just another part of the collectivists’ bag of social engineering tricks to improve our lives (you know like what AB32 has done to California, and what Obamacare is doing to America’s healthcare – stay tuned for more on that). Professor Jayson Lusk, an agricultural economist at Oklahoma State, goes into much more detail about externalities taxes applied to our food markets, especially meat consumption, and the current momentum of such efforts at various levels of the federal government. In ‘Cheeseburgers Won’t Melt the Polar Ice Caps’ he makes clear that “the next targets of climate change enforcers will be livestock and all Americans who eat meat.”
To put a bow on it, the externality of dealing with such externalities is that every nostrum proposed by our indigenous socialists today straightens America’s path to a Soviet style economy.
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