me: >> yup. But he showed unusual intelligence and integrity compared to his >> normal standards. That was my only point in the original missive in >> this thread.
Joseph Green (a.k.a. Giuseppe Verdi?) writes: > ... But one > should be very careful about assuming that Mankiw is going against his > general economic presumptions. yes. He's a very conservative guy. Luckily for us, he usually seems to be an idiot, too. me: >> well, don't you think that bringing in socialism would also "upset the >> economy"? Which is more likely to happen before global warming hits in >> a big way, socialism or a carbon tax? > Ahem, you just evaded the point that one can't just raise the carbon tax > as high as necessary to get the result one wants. okay, but that's a matter of practicalities that can't be settled here. Why not try the carbon tax and see how it works? It might have _some_ positive impact compared to the status quo and cap'n trade. > That aside, you do raise an important issue. It seems to me that you > are dismissing the criticisms of the carbon tax because it seems to you to be > something useful, as opposed to waiting around for socialism. The point of talking about such reforms (at least for me) is not that of finding the best one; I am not a neoclassical economist. Rather, it's useful to know what our rulers' options are in order to get some idea of what may happen in the future and (after the fact) which factions are winning. > But the > question which I would raise is, and the question which I think is raised by > Mankiw's views, is *not* that we should replace the carbon tax with just > twiddling our thumbs waiting for socialism. It's whether there has to be a > class struggle now, today, over what type of measures should be taken to > deal with the environment. The question is whether we should take > Mankiw's views as a warning, about what the "intelligent" neo-liberal > opposition to serious measures to deal with the environment is like. that makes sense. By the way, I never said anything about _replacing_ the carbon tax with waiting for socialism. > In my opinion, to believe that the carbon tax or other marketplace > measures are the main things we can advocate > is like saying that it's private > health insurance or nothing -- forgetting about single-payer and national > health services; or charter schools or nothing, forgetting about public > schools; toll roads or nothing, abandoning public roads; etc. who said anything about carbon taxes being the "main thing"? not I. (BTW, I never _endorsed_ Mankiw's point of view.) > Neoliberal environmentalism developed as a reaction against > environmental > regulations that had been implemented under capitalism in the late 60s and > 70s, and against the fear of additional such regulations. That's the origin > of cap and trade and carbon tax schemes. To forget that there is another > way > of carrying out environmental protection aside from creating artificial death > markets means to leave oneself trapped inside free-market economics. right. Of course, we should also be conscious of the limits of command-and-control methods for dealing with pollution and global warming, especially in a society that emphasizes aggressive profit-seeking über alles. > True, we can't simply go back to the old regulations of the past. > Dealing effectively with the environmental crisis today would involve major > changes in production; it would involve more than just limiting carbon > emissions, but dealing with a number of environmental challenges; there is > also the prospect of having to deal with large numbers of environmental > refugees; there are going to be major changes to deal with preserving > agriculture, sources of fresh waters, etc. in a period of climactic change. > Thus regulation and a certain type of planning will be forced on capitalist > governments -- as it has been during, say, serious wars: if the governments > don't do it before we reach climactic disaster, then they will be forced to > it afterwards to deal with the horrible consequences of climactic disaster. That sounds right. > But for now the bourgeoisie is still marking time with marketplace > solutions. It's a mistake to talk about the bourgeoisie as some sort of monolith. Competition within the class is important: establishing "cap'n trade" may be a major method of what neoclassicals call "rent seeking" (looking for special competitive advantage via political means, litigation, and the like). That is, it's quite possible that cap'n trade isn't a matter of good programs being gutted by political compromise (as Mankiw presents it) as much as a program specifically pushed by "special interests" in order to have valuable permits to pollute given to them for free. Other, more far-sighted, members of the bourgeoisie may oppose this (e.g., Soros perhaps). > This is a real and current danger, and Mankiw is part of this. > And there has to be a fight, now, against this policy. right. His "solution," by the way, is less of a free-market solution than is cap'n trade. > The naturalist Timothy Flannery, when he became convinced of the > reality of the threat of global warming, wrote a useful book, "The Weather > Makers". In it, he points out that such planning might be forced on > governments. But, burdened with the current fashionable market > conceptions, he is scared of this. He has the nightmare of a "carbon > dictatorship", and instead promotes what he describes as "in some ways ... > an ultrademocratic variant of the Kyoto Protocol". sounds plausible. I'll have to look for what the details of this possible dictatorship are. > The grain of truth in Flannery's worries about the frightful "carbon > dictatorship" is that capitalist planning is planning that is designed for > capitalist profit and to keep the masses down. (And never is this seen as > sharply as during war-time planning!) At this point, the masses seem pretty repressed and disorganized, so their mass political activity doesn't seem to be a threat to the bourgeois order. Of course, that could change. (The non-repressed "masses" at this point are GOPster protesters at DP "town hall meetings. But who wants them?) > It would be a gigantic mistake to call > capitalist planning and regulation "socialism". absolutely! you are right, sir! > No doubt "Newsweek", which > blathered "we're all socialists now" because of the provision of trillions of > dollars to the banks, will shout that such planning is socialism. But it is > not.socialism. As the old socialist slogan goes, it's socialization of capitalist risks (and other costs) and privatization of profits. The state bails out capitalists -- or rewards those already on top. > Thus workers will have to be suspicious of what the governments do... so what's new? me: >> I don't believe that the Invisible Hand works all the time, but if the >> government has the power and willingness to tax something, it almost >> always discourages its purchase and/or it manufacture. Look at the >> taxing of cigarettes, for example. It's true that its encouraged the >> nicotine purveyors to go global, but it has encouraged young people in >> the US to avoid getting addicted. By making others more sensitive to >> the smell of the smoke (as smoking became rarer), it's helped build up >> political support for stronger strictures, at least here in California. > That's your model of how to deal with carbon emissions? Oh please! It's called an analogy. Like other analogies, it's not perfect. In any event, I did not present it as "my model." It was simply an effort to debunk the idea (popular on the left) that the Invisible Hand _always_ drops the ball. When and if socialism comes, there will likely be some market mechanisms, so it's best to know how markets work rather than simply dismissing them. Even under capitalism, it's better to have knowledge of what markets can and cannot do rather than simply railing against them. Knowledge is power, though clearly not enough to make me Overlord of the Galaxy yet. ;-) -- Jim Devine / "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
