Re: Green party
- Original Message - From: Eubulides [EMAIL PROTECTED] One aspect of that nervousness can be seen in the attempts by the US Justice Dept. to stop any and all lawsuits using the Alien Tort Claims Act. They're terrified of the future of global environmental law and, as any social movements must come to terms with law as the institutionalization of the norms they hold dear, any critiques of current legal theory should be oriented towards transforming the relationships between national and global law. = http://www.iie.com/publications/bookstore/publication.cfm?Pub_ID=367 Awakening Monster: The Alien Tort Statute of 1789 by Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Nicholas K. Mitrokostas July 2003 . 104 pp. ISBN paper 0-88132-366-7 . $20.00 Within the next decade, 100,000 class action Chinese plaintiffs, organized by New York trial lawyers, could sue General Motors, Toyota, General Electric, Mitsubishi, and a host of other blue-chip corporations in a US federal court for abetting China's denial of political rights, for observing China's restrictions on trade unions, and for impairing the Chinese environment. These plaintiffs might claim actual damages of $6 billion and punitive damages of $20 billion. Similar blockbuster cases are already working their way through federal and state court systems. This nightmare scenario could become a reality because of a little-known, one-sentence law enacted in 1789-the Alien Tort Statute (ATS): The district courts shall have original jurisdiction of any civil action by an alien for a tort only, committed in violation of the law of nations or a treaty of the United States. In this policy analysis, Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Nicholas K. Mitrokostas examine the chilling impact the ATS could have on trade and foreign direct investment. They trace its history from the original intent to recent court interpretations, including a look at class action suits over asbestos and apartheid. They provide an economic picture of the potential scope of ATS litigation, cite the possible collateral damage, and review the impact that ATS rulings could have on global relations. The authors recommend measures Congress should take to limit expansive court interpretations. The study is a must-read for policymakers, international lawyers, and students. Globalization: Issues and Impact International Trade and Investment: Foreign Direct Investment PDF Chapters News Release Contents Entire Book 558.9KB Preface 1. Nightmare Scenario 2. Ancient and Recent History 3. Evolving Jurisprudence 4. Scope of ATS Litigation 5. Collateral Damage from ATS Suits 6. Judicial Imperialism 7. Patchwork Solutions 8. Conclusion: Congress Must Act Appendix A-B References
Re: Green party
- Original Message - From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] Ian, What do you consider the most compelling argument for Green-style politics, or do you have a ref for me ? Thanks J. = In terms of a sophomoric sound bite: Finance capitalism is a pathological institutionalized fetter on bringing forth the green technologies of the future--industrial ecology, factor 10 and the like. The output-exergy-effluent ratio is now far more important than the capital-output ratio, the captial-labor ratio or unit labor costs as a measure of macroeconomic 'health'; even as we barely know how to come up with accurate measurement techniques for the former-- ecological footprinting being just a start. Greenwashing is, ultimately imo, the lie that improving the first will lead to disastrous results for all the other measures. The labor process is an ecological process. Healthy, happy citizens make for healthy ecosystems [metaphorical politics aside]. Obviously such myopic Veblenian boilerplate would need further co-evolution with ecofeminist, environmental justice etc. theory/praxis/policy. A while back Doug H. had Tom Athanasiou and Paul Baer on his show. They asserted that any Kyoto/post-Kyoto enviro. treaty[ies] will constitute the largest economic treaties in the history of the world. *That* is why the present-future of international/global law is so important for us to understand and struggle for; it's the grundnorm of neoliberalism's Bretton Woods Institutions which are clearly failing the worlds peoples. The more law and economics attempts to come to terms with what ecology 'tells' us, the more they will be compelled to change. The Right's 'environmental security' paradigm, with its current paranoid control 'em all approach as exemplified by the Bushies has been thoroughly trashed on the plane of theory; it remains to be seen as to how it will play out on the streets and institutional fora in the years ahead. One aspect of that nervousness can be seen in the attempts by the US Justice Dept. to stop any and all lawsuits using the Alien Tort Claims Act. They're terrified of the future of global environmental law and, as any social movements must come to terms with law as the institutionalization of the norms they hold dear, any critiques of current legal theory should be oriented towards transforming the relationships between national and global law. In that sense the protests against the WTO/WB/IMF have only begun to peel a mighty big onion. Lets wipe the tears from our eyes and see if Cancun can shift the narrative politics of the 21st century away from the war against anybody not like us Cowboys of the Bushies and towards what many are calling the movement for global justice. I'll be happy to give a list of texts later if you want them. Happy to be wrong as usual, Ian Optimism has never come easily to me. But after three decades of teaching, my students have taught me the imperative of hope. It is not enough for critical practice to have as its primary aim the production of texts that fewer and fewer people read. I can no longer look into the eyes of my remarkable students and tell them that all they have to look forward to is the endless struggle to undo systems and structures that cannot be undone. They deserve more than being told repeatedly that nothing can be fundamentally changed...The most important legacy we can leave the next generation is the hope that creative change is still possible. [Mark Taylor]
Re: Green party
Well, it may have been a naive question, but you are really knowledgeable about this, and I thank you very much for your reply. Yes, if you have some refs, by all means post them. Jurriaan
Re: Green
Dear James and all, The this I refer to in the sentence, which James quoted below, is communism. I am part of that socialism from below tendency, as I think most class conscious workers were in the 19th Century, even many of them who labled themselves 'anarchists'. I think a case can be made that Marx was honestly of this opinion himself. His active participation in the First International demonstrates this. As for the social democrats, they gave up on the abolition of the wage system a long time ago. As far as I'm concerned, socialism and the wage system are mutually exclusive. On the other hand, I do think that the workers could potentially rise to a position of such power within a capitalist/wage system as to be able to lop off sections of their social product and redirect these sections toward serving their own needs--including raises in wages and shortening the working day. I also think that workers could come to dominate other classses within a State capitalist system and politically impose a transition toward ending wage-slavery and with it, commodity production/consumption. Let free-time ring, Mike B) --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: you write: I don't think that this can be accomplished by having others act for the proles. this is the basic principle of the socialism from below tendency on the left. It goes against the Marxist-Leninist tendency and the social-democratic tendency, in which condescending saviors are relied upon. I don't think it's useful to use the word anarchist to refer to anyone except those leftists who (1) believe that the abolition of the state is of the highest priority -- so that all good things can happen -- and/or (2) believe that practice without theory -- e.g., smashing Starbucks windows -- is a way of getting progress for humanity. So I wouldn't call you an anarchist. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Mike Ballard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 3:08 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green Thanks for the kind response, Jim. I'd like to see common ownership of the means of production/consumption under the democratic control of the producers. Also on my agenda is production for use and need, the abolition of the wages-system and by extension the commodity. I don't think that this can be accomplished by having others act for the proles. They have to make their revolution themselves, although some will be conscious of this before others in their ranks. If some want to call my position anarchist, it's ok by me. I think that the degree which any such revolutionary society would be 'centralized' or 'decentralized' would vary depending on the needs of the time and circumstances under which the society gave birth to socialism. I call it communism and I call it socialism. For the works! Mike B) P.S. I agree that the Wobblies are and have been a good start on the project of moving toward class conscious social revolution www.iww.org/ After all, the class struggle over the social product of labour and the length of the working day is political. --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ken's response to this was good. I generally [*] agree with what both he and Mike say here. But I think it's good to avoid mushing socialism-from-below (what I favor) up with anarchism, so that basic principles can be discussed -- as long as it doesn't become a sectarian pissing match. [*] I always throw in this weasel word because I might have misread what they say. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Mike Ballard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 1:12 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the one thing that all anarchists seem to agree with is that centralized government (the state) should be abolished -- as soon as possible. The State is the governmental expression of class rule. I've never met anyone--anarchists included--who argued that that State could be abolished by decree. All socialists worth their salt (and most anarchists worth their salt are socialists e.g. Chomsky) realize that the State cannot be replaced with self-government until classes have ceased to exist. Classes cannot die out until the social revolution is made and that can't be done without its being an act of the class workers themselves. Wobbly greetings, Mike B) But without a centralized govt, how do people deal with issues that affect us all, e.g., global warming?
Re: Green
Thanks for the kind response, Jim. I'd like to see common ownership of the means of production/consumption under the democratic control of the producers. Also on my agenda is production for use and need, the abolition of the wages-system and by extension the commodity. I don't think that this can be accomplished by having others act for the proles. They have to make their revolution themselves, although some will be conscious of this before others in their ranks. If some want to call my position anarchist, it's ok by me. I think that the degree which any such revolutionary society would be 'centralized' or 'decentralized' would vary depending on the needs of the time and circumstances under which the society gave birth to socialism. I call it communism and I call it socialism. For the works! Mike B) P.S. I agree that the Wobblies are and have been a good start on the project of moving toward class conscious social revolution www.iww.org/ After all, the class struggle over the social product of labour and the length of the working day is political. --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ken's response to this was good. I generally [*] agree with what both he and Mike say here. But I think it's good to avoid mushing socialism-from-below (what I favor) up with anarchism, so that basic principles can be discussed -- as long as it doesn't become a sectarian pissing match. [*] I always throw in this weasel word because I might have misread what they say. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Mike Ballard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 1:12 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the one thing that all anarchists seem to agree with is that centralized government (the state) should be abolished -- as soon as possible. The State is the governmental expression of class rule. I've never met anyone--anarchists included--who argued that that State could be abolished by decree. All socialists worth their salt (and most anarchists worth their salt are socialists e.g. Chomsky) realize that the State cannot be replaced with self-government until classes have ceased to exist. Classes cannot die out until the social revolution is made and that can't be done without its being an act of the class workers themselves. Wobbly greetings, Mike B) But without a centralized govt, how do people deal with issues that affect us all, e.g., global warming? how do we prevent the neighboring anarchist collective from building nukes? I prefer Marx, whose vision of the withering away of the state (as I understand it) refers to the _subodination_ of the state to the people, so that the _distinction_ between the state and society withers away. That's a long-term goal, one that can't be achieved if one abolishes the state as soon as possible. Abolition of the state NOW simply unleashes the forces of Hobbesian havoc (anarchy in the worst sense of the word) that are present in actually-existing capitalist society. Instead, the state needs to be controlled. Some anarchists would say that delaying the withering away was opportunist or something, allowing a new class of state managers to arise. But abolishing the state right away allows rule by those with the most AK-47s. of course, it ain't bloody likely that the state will be abolished soon -- unless the system melts down. I doubt that an environmental crisis would produce a very attractive anarchy. The IWW (OBU) was great, as a first step in the development of a working-class movement. Politics are needed too. Jim -Original Message- From: Yoshie Furuhashi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 8/12/2003 7:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green is there a color which represents democracy? I'd prefer democracy to anarchism (which precludes democracy). Jim Anarchy, to me, means democracy, i.e., collective self-government, the very ideal to which Lenin spoke in _The State and Revolution. Not all those who call themselves anarchists agree with me on this interpretation, though. :- I also like the idea of One Big Union. Would you have freedom from wage slavery? Then come join the Grand Industrial Band! Would you from mis'ry and hunger be free? Come on, do your share, lend a hand! Listen to Utah Phillips sing the Joe Hill song There Is a Power in a Union at http://video.pbs.org:8080/ramgen/joehill/UPThereIsPowerInAUni on.rm?altplay=UPThereIsPowerInAUnion.rm.
Re: Green
you write: I don't think that this can be accomplished by having others act for the proles. this is the basic principle of the socialism from below tendency on the left. It goes against the Marxist-Leninist tendency and the social-democratic tendency, in which condescending saviors are relied upon. I don't think it's useful to use the word anarchist to refer to anyone except those leftists who (1) believe that the abolition of the state is of the highest priority -- so that all good things can happen -- and/or (2) believe that practice without theory -- e.g., smashing Starbucks windows -- is a way of getting progress for humanity. So I wouldn't call you an anarchist. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Mike Ballard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, August 15, 2003 3:08 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green Thanks for the kind response, Jim. I'd like to see common ownership of the means of production/consumption under the democratic control of the producers. Also on my agenda is production for use and need, the abolition of the wages-system and by extension the commodity. I don't think that this can be accomplished by having others act for the proles. They have to make their revolution themselves, although some will be conscious of this before others in their ranks. If some want to call my position anarchist, it's ok by me. I think that the degree which any such revolutionary society would be 'centralized' or 'decentralized' would vary depending on the needs of the time and circumstances under which the society gave birth to socialism. I call it communism and I call it socialism. For the works! Mike B) P.S. I agree that the Wobblies are and have been a good start on the project of moving toward class conscious social revolution www.iww.org/ After all, the class struggle over the social product of labour and the length of the working day is political. --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Ken's response to this was good. I generally [*] agree with what both he and Mike say here. But I think it's good to avoid mushing socialism-from-below (what I favor) up with anarchism, so that basic principles can be discussed -- as long as it doesn't become a sectarian pissing match. [*] I always throw in this weasel word because I might have misread what they say. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Mike Ballard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 1:12 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the one thing that all anarchists seem to agree with is that centralized government (the state) should be abolished -- as soon as possible. The State is the governmental expression of class rule. I've never met anyone--anarchists included--who argued that that State could be abolished by decree. All socialists worth their salt (and most anarchists worth their salt are socialists e.g. Chomsky) realize that the State cannot be replaced with self-government until classes have ceased to exist. Classes cannot die out until the social revolution is made and that can't be done without its being an act of the class workers themselves. Wobbly greetings, Mike B) But without a centralized govt, how do people deal with issues that affect us all, e.g., global warming? how do we prevent the neighboring anarchist collective from building nukes? I prefer Marx, whose vision of the withering away of the state (as I understand it) refers to the _subodination_ of the state to the people, so that the _distinction_ between the state and society withers away. That's a long-term goal, one that can't be achieved if one abolishes the state as soon as possible. Abolition of the state NOW simply unleashes the forces of Hobbesian havoc (anarchy in the worst sense of the word) that are present in actually-existing capitalist society. Instead, the state needs to be controlled. Some anarchists would say that delaying the withering away was opportunist or something, allowing a new class of state managers to arise. But abolishing the state right away allows rule by those with the most AK-47s. of course, it ain't bloody likely that the state will be abolished soon -- unless the system melts down. I doubt that an environmental crisis would produce a very attractive anarchy. The IWW (OBU) was great, as a first step in the development of a working-class movement. Politics are needed too. Jim
Re: Green
this is the basic principle of the socialism from below tendency on the left. It goes against the Marxist-Leninist tendency and the social-democratic tendency, in which condescending saviors are relied upon. In explaining simply about the meaning of a so-called vanguard party, Ernest Mandel once touched upon this theme as follows, with splendid rhetoric: It is not by accident that when Marx was called [by his daughter] to answer the question in the drawing room game What is your main life dictum? he gave as the answer, De omnibus est dubitandum (You have to doubt everything [or, you must be able to have your doubts about everything, or it must be possible to put anything into question anew] - JB). This is really the opposite attitude of the one which is so often stupidly and foolishly attributed to Marx, that he was building a new religion without God. The spirit to doubt everything and to put into question everything that you yourself have said is the very opposite of religion and of dogma. Marxists believe that there are no eternal truths, and no people who know everything. The second stanza of our common anthem, The Internationale, starts with the wonderful words, in French: Il n'y a pas de sauveur suprème Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun, Producteur sauvons - nous nous mêmes Decrétons le salut commun. (translation: there isn't some kind of supreme saviour a God, a Ceasar, or a tribune who will come to the rescue - we ourselves must decide upon our common salvation - JB) In German it is even clearer: Es rettet uns Kein hoh' res Wesen, Kein Gott, Kein Kaiser, Kein Tribun Uns aus dem Elend zu erlosen, Konnen wir nur selber tun. (translation : No supreme being will be able to save us Neither a God, a Ceasar nor a tribune To get ourselves out of the mess Is something we can only accomplish ourselves - JB) Only the whole mass of the producers can emancipate themselves. There is no God, no Caesar, no unfailing Central Committee, no unfailing Chairman, no unfailing General Secretary or First Secretary who can substitute for the collective efforts of the class. - from Ernest Mandel, Vanguard Parties ( http://www.geocities.com/youth4sa/theory.html and other sites) The popgroup The Beatles (who were they ?) had another inspiration about this however, must have been about 1967, and wrote this relatively modest, innnocent song: What would you think, if I sang out of tune, Would you stand up, and walk out on me. Lend me your ears, and I'll sing you a song, And I'll try not to sing out of key. I get by, with a little help from my friends, I get high, with a little help from my friends, Going to try, with a little help from my friends. What do I do, when my love is away. (Does it worry you, to be alone ?) How do I feel by the end of the day (Are you sad, because you're on your own ?) No, I get by with a little help from my friends, Do you need anybody ? I need somebody to love. Could it be anybody ? I want somebody to love. (Would you believe in a love at first sight ?) Yes I'm certain, that it happens all the time. (What do you see, when you turn out the light ?) I can't tell you, but I know it's mine. Oh I get by, with a little help from my friends, Do you need anybody, I just need somebody to love, Could it be anybody, I want somebody to love. I get by with a little help from my friends, Yes I get by with a little help from my friends, With a little help from my friends. But this is of course almost a half century ago, and meantime, the Dutch rock band Het Goede Doel (The Good Cause) penned this number, which relativises the goodnatured, generous, genuine but slight innocent (if not naive) love call by the Beatles (translated ad lib by yours truly): Friendship As a child I had a friend, with whom I did everything - When he began to fight, I fought together with him... If I jumped into the water, yes, he jumped in after me ! A more beautiful friendship could not be imagined, believe me ! Until... uhh, he shifted to another city ?! I believe I received a card from him There comes a time in your life, when you draw this conclusion: Friendship is an illusion, Friendship is a dream, It's a packet of scrap metal, with a thin layer of chrome I had a girlfriend subsequently, with whom I did everything together, I swear it ! When she began to kiss, then I would really respond to her, and make love with her ! If I began to cry, then she would come to me, and stand beside me - That is, until the moment that she spontaneously forgot my name ?!? And ach, it turned out, she had another boyfriend anyhow... So there comes a time in your life when you draw the conclusion: Friendship is an illusion, Friendship is a dream, A packet of scrap metal, with a thin layer of chrome on it. If there's money at stake... If it is about women If everything in the world that you hold dear, is being contested Who can you trust then ??? So once there is a time in your life, when you are shocked into the conclusion:
Re: Green
yup, you're right. But the point of any general principle is to fight another general principle, in this case the father knows best principle, in which self-styled leaders can decide what's good for the working people. Jim -Original Message- From: Carrol Cox [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Fri 8/15/2003 1:47 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green Devine, James wrote: you write: I don't think that this can be accomplished by having others act for the proles. this is the basic principle of the socialism from below tendency on the left. Though as with all other general formula, the devil, as they say, is in the details, and the details are bound to vary (often dramatically) over time place. Carrol
Re: Green
Jim writes: is there a color which represents democracy? I'd prefer democracy to anarchism (which precludes democracy). Democracy would be the color of the ruling cohort. Everyone is a democrat, even Hitler. Anarchism is okay... if you have the other two sides of the flag supporting it. Ken. -- Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow -- T.S. Elliot
Re: green pensions?
from BusinessWeek, Au. 18-25, 2003: The Greening of Pension Plans Cash-strapped U.S. steel (X ) may have hit on a solution for companies scrounging for the dough to pump up pension funds that were recently flattened by the stock market's slide. Just sign over some forests -- or other valuable assets. On Aug. 4, the steelmaker told analysts it was asking for government permission to transfer 170,000 acres of timberland, mostly in Alabama, to its pension funds. The company values the assets at $100 million. But the trees are young so the valuation will grow over time, Ian writes: So Paul Davidson is wrong and money does grow on trees? :-) Of course, Marx knew all about this, in a footnote in volume III of CAPITAL, chapter 22, note 7 (found at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch22.htm#n7): J G. Opdyke, for instance, in his Treatise on Political Economy (New York, 1851) makes a very unsuccessful attempt to explain the universality of a 5% rate of interest [the natural rate of interest -- JD] by eternal laws. Mr. Karl Arnd is still more naive It is stated there: In the natural course of goods production there is just one phenomenon, which, in the fully settled countries, seems in some measure to regulate the rate of interest; this is the proportion, in which the timber in European forests is augmented through their annual growth. This new growth occurs quite independently of their exchange-value, at the rate of 3 or 4 to 100. (How queer that trees should see to their new growth independently of their exchange-value!) According to this a drop in the rate of interest below its present level in the richest countries cannot be expected (p. 124). (He means, because the new growth of the trees is independent of their exchange-value, however much their exchange-value may depend on their new growth.) This deserves to be called the primordial forest rate of interest. Its discoverer makes a further laudable contribution in this work to our science as the philosopher of the dog tax. [Marx ironically calls K. Arnd the philosopher of the dog tax because in a special paragraph in his book (? 88, 5.420-24) he advocated that tax. -- Ed.] Jim Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Green
At 9:11 AM -0400 8/12/03, Kenneth Campbell wrote: the next unifying revolutionary force will be green, not red. I'd prefer Red, Black, and Green together (the colors of revolutionary socialism, anarchism, and environmentalism), also the colors of the pan-African Black Liberation Flag. At 9:11 AM -0400 8/12/03, Kenneth Campbell wrote: Everyone is immediately interested. There is no cause in which a numerical majority of the population -- not even a numerical majority of the proletariat -- will get immediately interested. A social movement always starts with a minority of organizers. Get one third of the population committed to the movement, and it will be literally revolutionary. -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://solidarity.igc.org/
Re: Green
I wrote: But in this particular battle of definitions, I agree with all the Yoshies out there. They call anarchism what Mr. Marx would call democracy. I think it's useful to avoid mushing concepts together that way. I don't see that as mushing. I see it as evolving language. But we can call it Fred if it helps the discussion along. I would distinguish between democracy from below (which I see Yoshie and I as advocating) and democracy from above (parliamentarism). Then we are in agreement. Anarchism is a word that means little in a formal sense. :) god, I wish I were. Los Angeles and mediocre Catholic academia are not good places for activism. Nor do the responsibilities of fatherhood encourage activism (at least with my kid). Brother, I know. I meant no offense. In any event, I was talking about democracy as a basic political principle. We need such principles to guide our visions for what we want, along with our strategy and tactics. I don't see anarchists as providing those. As a theory of meaning, anarchists are weak. As a theory for action, they are exemplar. Long life to them, Ken.
Re: Green
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the one thing that all anarchists seem to agree with is that centralized government (the state) should be abolished -- as soon as possible. The State is the governmental expression of class rule. I've never met anyone--anarchists included--who argued that that State could be abolished by decree. All socialists worth their salt (and most anarchists worth their salt are socialists e.g. Chomsky) realize that the State cannot be replaced with self-government until classes have ceased to exist. Classes cannot die out until the social revolution is made and that can't be done without its being an act of the class workers themselves. Wobbly greetings, Mike B) But without a centralized govt, how do people deal with issues that affect us all, e.g., global warming? how do we prevent the neighboring anarchist collective from building nukes? I prefer Marx, whose vision of the withering away of the state (as I understand it) refers to the _subodination_ of the state to the people, so that the _distinction_ between the state and society withers away. That's a long-term goal, one that can't be achieved if one abolishes the state as soon as possible. Abolition of the state NOW simply unleashes the forces of Hobbesian havoc (anarchy in the worst sense of the word) that are present in actually-existing capitalist society. Instead, the state needs to be controlled. Some anarchists would say that delaying the withering away was opportunist or something, allowing a new class of state managers to arise. But abolishing the state right away allows rule by those with the most AK-47s. of course, it ain't bloody likely that the state will be abolished soon -- unless the system melts down. I doubt that an environmental crisis would produce a very attractive anarchy. The IWW (OBU) was great, as a first step in the development of a working-class movement. Politics are needed too. Jim -Original Message- From: Yoshie Furuhashi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 8/12/2003 7:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green is there a color which represents democracy? I'd prefer democracy to anarchism (which precludes democracy). Jim Anarchy, to me, means democracy, i.e., collective self-government, the very ideal to which Lenin spoke in _The State and Revolution. Not all those who call themselves anarchists agree with me on this interpretation, though. :- I also like the idea of One Big Union. Would you have freedom from wage slavery? Then come join the Grand Industrial Band! Would you from mis'ry and hunger be free? Come on, do your share, lend a hand! Listen to Utah Phillips sing the Joe Hill song There Is a Power in a Union at http://video.pbs.org:8080/ramgen/joehill/UPThereIsPowerInAUnion.rm?altplay=UPThereIsPowerInAUnion.rm. I like the Black Cat log of the Industrial Workers of the World, too (I have a T-shirt with the logo on it), except that cats rarely go for collective actions. :-0 -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://solidarity.igc.org/ = * Cognitive dissonance is the inner conflict produced when long-standing beliefs are contradicted by new evidence. http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Green
is there a color which represents democracy? I'd prefer democracy to anarchism (which precludes democracy). Jim Anarchy, to me, means democracy, i.e., collective self-government, the very ideal to which Lenin spoke in _The State and Revolution. Not all those who call themselves anarchists agree with me on this interpretation, though. :- I also like the idea of One Big Union. Would you have freedom from wage slavery? Then come join the Grand Industrial Band! Would you from mis'ry and hunger be free? Come on, do your share, lend a hand! Listen to Utah Phillips sing the Joe Hill song There Is a Power in a Union at http://video.pbs.org:8080/ramgen/joehill/UPThereIsPowerInAUnion.rm?altplay=UPThereIsPowerInAUnion.rm. I like the Black Cat log of the Industrial Workers of the World, too (I have a T-shirt with the logo on it), except that cats rarely go for collective actions. :-0 -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://solidarity.igc.org/
Re: Green
Jim writes about the classic Marx v Bakunin battle of anarchism and intelligent socialism. I can never disagree with Karl, because he was just too damn smart. Never took a position based on his own interests and fudged the rest. But in this particular battle of definitions, I agree with all the Yoshies out there. They call anarchism what Mr. Marx would call democracy. And, more than that, they are energized to do something. My experiences, locally, have always been positive in terms of political action. They do things. Democrats never do things... Ken. -- Nature, when she formed man for society, endowed him with an original desire to please, and an original aversion to offend his brethren. She taught him to feel pleasure in their favorable, and pain in their unfavorable regard. -- Adam Smith Theory of Moral Sentiment
Re: Green
Ken writes: Democracy would be the color of the ruling cohort. Everyone is a democrat, even Hitler. everyone is a democrat _in theory_ or _in rhetoric_. The point is to be a democrat _in practice_, _in reality_. Jim
Re: Green
Ken's response to this was good. I generally [*] agree with what both he and Mike say here. But I think it's good to avoid mushing socialism-from-below (what I favor) up with anarchism, so that basic principles can be discussed -- as long as it doesn't become a sectarian pissing match. [*] I always throw in this weasel word because I might have misread what they say. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Mike Ballard [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2003 1:12 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the one thing that all anarchists seem to agree with is that centralized government (the state) should be abolished -- as soon as possible. The State is the governmental expression of class rule. I've never met anyone--anarchists included--who argued that that State could be abolished by decree. All socialists worth their salt (and most anarchists worth their salt are socialists e.g. Chomsky) realize that the State cannot be replaced with self-government until classes have ceased to exist. Classes cannot die out until the social revolution is made and that can't be done without its being an act of the class workers themselves. Wobbly greetings, Mike B) But without a centralized govt, how do people deal with issues that affect us all, e.g., global warming? how do we prevent the neighboring anarchist collective from building nukes? I prefer Marx, whose vision of the withering away of the state (as I understand it) refers to the _subodination_ of the state to the people, so that the _distinction_ between the state and society withers away. That's a long-term goal, one that can't be achieved if one abolishes the state as soon as possible. Abolition of the state NOW simply unleashes the forces of Hobbesian havoc (anarchy in the worst sense of the word) that are present in actually-existing capitalist society. Instead, the state needs to be controlled. Some anarchists would say that delaying the withering away was opportunist or something, allowing a new class of state managers to arise. But abolishing the state right away allows rule by those with the most AK-47s. of course, it ain't bloody likely that the state will be abolished soon -- unless the system melts down. I doubt that an environmental crisis would produce a very attractive anarchy. The IWW (OBU) was great, as a first step in the development of a working-class movement. Politics are needed too. Jim -Original Message- From: Yoshie Furuhashi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 8/12/2003 7:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green is there a color which represents democracy? I'd prefer democracy to anarchism (which precludes democracy). Jim Anarchy, to me, means democracy, i.e., collective self-government, the very ideal to which Lenin spoke in _The State and Revolution. Not all those who call themselves anarchists agree with me on this interpretation, though. :- I also like the idea of One Big Union. Would you have freedom from wage slavery? Then come join the Grand Industrial Band! Would you from mis'ry and hunger be free? Come on, do your share, lend a hand! Listen to Utah Phillips sing the Joe Hill song There Is a Power in a Union at http://video.pbs.org:8080/ramgen/joehill/UPThereIsPowerInAUni on.rm?altplay=UPThereIsPowerInAUnion.rm. I like the Black Cat log of the Industrial Workers of the World, too (I have a T-shirt with the logo on it), except that cats rarely go for collective actions. :-0 -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://solidarity.igc.org/ = * Cognitive dissonance is the inner conflict produced when long-standing beliefs are contradicted by new evidence. http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Green
Is this necessary? On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 06:05:38PM -0400, Kenneth Campbell wrote: If you can't sell it... well... languish in the warehouse with Lou's crew. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Green
Is this necessary? On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 06:05:38PM -0400, Kenneth Campbell wrote: If you can't sell it... well... languish in the warehouse with Lou's crew. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 I was referring to Lou Rukyser. God I hate that guy, and his whole damn warehouse. Sorry for the confusion. Ken. -- I was referring to Lou Rukyser. God I hate that guy, and his whole damn warehouse. Sorry for the confusion. -- Kenneth Campbell
Re: Green
Mike wrote: The State is the governmental expression of class rule. Fair enough. I've heard many descriptions of what the state is. That's a workable one. I've never met anyone--anarchists included--who argued that that State could be abolished by decree. I agree with that. (In terms of rational anarchists.) All socialists worth their salt (and most anarchists worth their salt are socialists e.g. Chomsky) realize that the State cannot be replaced with self-government until classes have ceased to exist. I agree with that. Classes cannot die out until the social revolution is made and that can't be done without its being an act of the class workers themselves. That is a real long range project. I think where the shadow falls between anarchists and socialists has been the length of time in making that happen. And how. Anarchists are usually too quick on the draw. Socialists are usually too slow. As long as they play nice and have nap time all will be well. Ken. P.S. Mike B) is about as cheerful a proponent of his position as I have ever met. (His future is so bright he has to wear B) shades.) Cheerful counts, too. Just like hope counts. You have to sell it. If you can't sell it... well... languish in the warehouse with Lou's crew.
Re: Green
Jim writes about the classic Marx v Bakunin battle of anarchism and intelligent socialism. right. Though I prefer to use my own words rather than quoting any Master. I can never disagree with Karl, because he was just too damn smart. Never took a position based on his own interests and fudged the rest. of course, he was wrong on some things (as are, I am sure, some of my interpretations of his work). But in this particular battle of definitions, I agree with all the Yoshies out there. They call anarchism what Mr. Marx would call democracy. I think it's useful to avoid mushing concepts together that way. I would distinguish between democracy from below (which I see Yoshie and I as advocating) and democracy from above (parliamentarism). And, more than that, they are energized to do something. god, I wish I were. Los Angeles and mediocre Catholic academia are not good places for activism. Nor do the responsibilities of fatherhood encourage activism (at least with my kid). My experiences, locally, have always been positive in terms of political action. They do things. Democrats never do things... Leading Democrats aren't democrats. They're opportunists, careerists. Oh, I see: Democrats is capitalized because it's at the start of a sentence. Grass-roots small-d democrats do a lot of things. Pro-democracy movements (sometimes called progressive populism) are a major strain in left-of-center US politics (e.g., ACORN). In any event, I was talking about democracy as a basic political principle. We need such principles to guide our visions for what we want, along with our strategy and tactics. I don't see anarchists as providing those. Jim
Re: Green
the one thing that all anarchists seem to agree with is that centralized government (the state) should be abolished -- as soon as possible. But without a centralized govt, how do people deal with issues that affect us all, e.g., global warming? how do we prevent the neighboring anarchist collective from building nukes? I prefer Marx, whose vision of the withering away of the state (as I understand it) refers to the _subodination_ of the state to the people, so that the _distinction_ between the state and society withers away. That's a long-term goal, one that can't be achieved if one abolishes the state as soon as possible. Abolition of the state NOW simply unleashes the forces of Hobbesian havoc (anarchy in the worst sense of the word) that are present in actually-existing capitalist society. Instead, the state needs to be controlled. Some anarchists would say that delaying the withering away was opportunist or something, allowing a new class of state managers to arise. But abolishing the state right away allows rule by those with the most AK-47s. of course, it ain't bloody likely that the state will be abolished soon -- unless the system melts down. I doubt that an environmental crisis would produce a very attractive anarchy. The IWW (OBU) was great, as a first step in the development of a working-class movement. Politics are needed too. Jim -Original Message- From: Yoshie Furuhashi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 8/12/2003 7:31 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Green is there a color which represents democracy? I'd prefer democracy to anarchism (which precludes democracy). Jim Anarchy, to me, means democracy, i.e., collective self-government, the very ideal to which Lenin spoke in _The State and Revolution. Not all those who call themselves anarchists agree with me on this interpretation, though. :- I also like the idea of One Big Union. Would you have freedom from wage slavery? Then come join the Grand Industrial Band! Would you from mis'ry and hunger be free? Come on, do your share, lend a hand! Listen to Utah Phillips sing the Joe Hill song There Is a Power in a Union at http://video.pbs.org:8080/ramgen/joehill/UPThereIsPowerInAUnion.rm?altplay=UPThereIsPowerInAUnion.rm. I like the Black Cat log of the Industrial Workers of the World, too (I have a T-shirt with the logo on it), except that cats rarely go for collective actions. :-0 -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://solidarity.igc.org/
Re: Green
Yoshie wrote: I'd prefer Red, Black, and Green together (the colors of revolutionary socialism, anarchism, and environmentalism), also the colors of the pan-African Black Liberation Flag. Sounds good to me. I adopt that as my flag. But don't tell anyone I agree with you. I would hate to be labeled. Ken. -- Religion is a belief in a Supreme Being; Science is a belief in a Supreme Generalization. -- Charles H. Fort Wild Talents
Re: green pensions?
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 11, 2003 1:00 PM Subject: [PEN-L] green pensions? from BusinessWeek, Au. 18-25, 2003: The Greening of Pension Plans Cash-strapped U.S. steel (X ) may have hit on a solution for companies scrounging for the dough to pump up pension funds that were recently flattened by the stock market's slide. Just sign over some forests -- or other valuable assets. On Aug. 4, the steelmaker told analysts it was asking for government permission to transfer 170,000 acres of timberland, mostly in Alabama, to its pension funds. The company values the assets at $100 million. But the trees are young so the valuation will grow over time, == So Paul Davidson is wrong and money does grow on trees? :-) Ian
Re: Green
I wrote: I think it's useful to avoid mushing concepts together that way. Ken: I don't see that as mushing. I see it as evolving language. I don't think we should go with the linguistic flow. Instead, we should try to use language as clearly as possible (by being clear about our own definitions, for ourselves and for others). (NB: I am not saying that there exists a single hard-and-fast definition that's true for any given word.) god, I wish I were. Los Angeles and mediocre Catholic academia are not good places for activism. Nor do the responsibilities of fatherhood encourage activism (at least with my kid). Brother, I know. I meant no offense. none was taken. Jim
Re: Green Party vs. Natural Law Party
NLP are followers of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and as believe as he did that if we all do transcendental meditation, the world will be a better place. BTW, their university, located in scenic Fairfield, Iowa, has the best printed catalogs I have ever seen. for those more rooted in the material(ist) world: SpeechSmuggler. for the fans of the cult game Dopewars: SpeechSmuggler is the exciting game of inter-borough trading. You're an aspiring merchant with a few bucks and an even larger debt. You jet from borough to borough buying and selling dope. Based on the Palm Pilot application DopeWars by Matthew Lee. SpeechSmuggler can be reached toll free from the United States by calling 1.800.555.TELL. You will need to ask for extensions and then give it the extension number 1. - Original Message - From: Joshua Bragg [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 2:38 AM Subject: [PEN-L:22113] Green Party vs. Natural Law Party I just recieved my California voter information guide for the primary election. I had never heard about the Natural Law party, which looks like a party of scientists. They seem quite progressive in some respects (export know-how instead of weapons and national health care). Has anyone else come across this party? I also wonder what some of the Californians on this list do when election time comes around. I have not yet found an active social democratic party here and am debating between the Green party and this Natural Law party. www.natural-law.org www.cagreens.org Joshua _ Join the world's largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
RE: Green Party vs. Natural Law Party
Unnatural FAQs: Maharishi Natural Law Party and John Hagelin ... A series of articles by Justin Raimondo, (or try this cached copy) anti-war activist, on the alleged false face of the Natural Law Party. A web page by ... Description: An independent, critical resource on The Natural Law Party and John Hagelin. Insider secrets, scandals... Category: Regional North America ... Candidates Hagelin, John and Nat Goldhaber http://www.trancenet.org/nlp/index.shtml --- Original Message --- From: Joshua Bragg [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: 1/30/02 11:38:49 PM I just recieved my California voter information guide for the primary election. I had never heard about the Natural Law party, which looks like a party of scientists. They seem quite progressive in some respects (export know-how instead of weapons and national health care). Has anyone else come across this party? I also wonder what some of the Californians on this list do when election time comes around. I have not yet found an active social democratic party here and am debating between the Green party and this Natural Law party. www.natural-law.org www.cagreens.org Joshua _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
RE: Green Party vs. Natural Law Party
Transcendental Meditators, mate. Children of the Maharishi (not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that, apart from a slight tendency to draw ridicule). George Harrison was their big name in the UK, and they put out a full slate of candidates in our general elections. I don't really see them getting elected until they stop claiming that they can fly through meditation, which claim they seem wedded to. I also seem to remember that they have some entertaining views on the subject of our friends the gays. cheers dd -Original Message- From: Joshua Bragg [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: 31 January 2002 07:39 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L:22113] Green Party vs. Natural Law Party I just recieved my California voter information guide for the primary election. I had never heard about the Natural Law party, which looks like a party of scientists. They seem quite progressive in some respects (export know-how instead of weapons and national health care). Has anyone else come across this party? I also wonder what some of the Californians on this list do when election time comes around. I have not yet found an active social democratic party here and am debating between the Green party and this Natural Law party. www.natural-law.org www.cagreens.org Joshua _ Join the world's largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com ___ Email Disclaimer This communication is for the attention of the named recipient only and should not be passed on to any other person. Information relating to any company or security, is for information purposes only and should not be interpreted as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any security. The information on which this communication is based has been obtained from sources we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness. All expressions of opinion are subject to change without notice. All e-mail messages, and associated attachments, are subject to interception and monitoring for lawful business purposes. ___
Re: Green Alternatives to the MAI (fwd)
On Sat, 7 Mar 1998, valis wrote: Date: Wed, 04 Mar 1998 00:19:33 -0500 From: Brian Milani [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Green Alternatives to the MAI The alternative to globalism is not the old industrial Welfare State, I don't know a single idiot-child who imagines that it is. I know one: the best-seller author William Greider who also happened to be very critical of globalization... but something completely new---more participatory, egalitarian, ecological, self-regulatory, and grounded in a radically different, more QUALITATIVE, notion of wealth." Of course I'll read your proposal; I'm grateful for any sign of life. valis (a contributing lurker on pen-l) ahmet tonak
Re: Green Alternatives to the MAI (fwd)
Date: Wed, 04 Mar 1998 00:19:33 -0500 From: Brian Milani [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Green Alternatives to the MAI The alternative to globalism is not the old industrial Welfare State, I don't know a single idiot-child who imagines that it is. but something completely new---more participatory, egalitarian, ecological, self-regulatory, and grounded in a radically different, more QUALITATIVE, notion of wealth." Of course I'll read your proposal; I'm grateful for any sign of life. valis (a contributing lurker on pen-l)
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Robin Hahnel wrote: So you want to auction off the permits. Great. That's better than giving them away for free since it makes the polluters pay and gains the victims some form of compensation in the form of more tax reveunes. And I like the idea of a minimum price equal to the marginal social cost of the pollutant. But why don't you want to let the original buyers resell permits if they wish to? And why don't you want to let polluters who didn't buy as many as they now want at the original auction buy them from polluters who bought more than they now decide they want/need? Admittedly, if all polluters had their acts figured out perfectly at the time of the original auction none would want to participate in a re-sell market, but perfect knowledge is hard to come by, and where's the harm in allowing resales -- otherwise known as making the permits "tradable?" Because there would be a temptation for a corp. to buy unnecessary permits, corner the market and make a profit. Maybe they should be allowed refunds-- provided someone is willing to buy the ration or permit for the same or more than the original purchaser paid. . I'm really trying to make it a green tax -- but a green tax that includes a ceiling on what pollution is allowed. I am trying to structure the thing to avoid the type of corporate giveaways you criticize. All I'm really trying to figure out is how to build a ceiling into green taxes. straw man snipped No -- singing, dancing, talking, scarecrow snipped If you mean: SINCE IN THIS WORLD NO MATTER HOW MUCH WE TRIED TO REDUCEPOLLUTION WE COULD NOT EVEN COME CLOSE TO REDUCING IT BY AN AMOUNT THAT WOULD BE OPTIMAL, OUR GOAL SHOULD BE SIMPLY TO STRIVE FOR THE GREATEST EDUCTIONS WE CAN POSSIBLY ACHIEVE, I completely agree with you. Yup, that's what I mean. But Iagree because our power is so small and the polluters power is so great right now that we can't go wrong using this rule of action. No matter how much reduction we won, it wouldn't be as much as would be optimal. exactly. But if you mean that it is always better to reduce pollution, no matter how much we have already reduced -- if you mean zero is the best level of pollution, I disagree and suggest you don't mean this. You are right. I don't mean this No, it seems to me that you have to know how much pollution you want to allow BEFORE you begin to figure out the social cost of unit of pollution. And just how do you figure out how much pollution you want to allow? This is the question too few greens ever ask themselves. The reason is because as long as we are pretty powerless we don't need to know the answer. We just need to scratch and claw for as much reduction as we can get. But likewise, we just need to scratch and claw for the highest pollution taxes we can get. If we ever get powerful enough to get close to the optimal level of pollution reduction, we're going to need an answer to the question how much pollution do we want. I submit that you can't answer that question without estimating the marginal social benefits of pollution reduction FIRST. Since only then will you know how much pollution you want to tolerate. However, given that certain levels of certain pollutants have catastrophic effects, we will know what we do not want before we know what we do want. That is, we do not know what the right level of fossil fuel carbon is. (I can make a very good argument for it being greater than zero.) But most greens can give you a level it has to be reduced below to avoid greenhouse catastrophe. . If greens should happen to achieve a strong position of influence without being dominant, I suspect that is the degree of reduction they will be able to win. If greens gain so much influence they can reduce pollution to or near optimal then you are right -- marginal social costs and benefits of pollution become essential to deermine. What about that long term ? Even in a better society, I suspect that -- at least in the transition stages -- some equivalent of ceilings will have to supplement true social pricing. I think that what it comes down to is distrust. All right, in economic theory, you need the same information to determine true social cost of pollution and optimum level of pollution. In economic theory, if you price a pollutant at this true social cost, pollution will be reduced to the optimum level. In economic theory the previous sentence was redundant, saying the same thing twice; the definition of optimum level pollution is the amount of pollution produced when priced at true social cost. Given the basic human ability to screw up, I'd suspect that in real life major problems in this regard are possible regardless of economic theory. I cannot believe that it is impossible that a price determined to be optimum could not in some exceptional case reduce pollution so little that it approached catastrophic level I certainly cannot believe it impossible that in some cases such a
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Mark Jones wrote: Robin Hahnel wrote: Minimizing pollution, taken literally, means zero pollution, which means not moving and not farting. That hardly seems optimal. and What's wrong with capitalism is no matter how hard we try to achieve the optimal level of pollution reduction, we're doomed to fall WAY, WAY short. and I doubt you would want to make a polluter pay $10 million dollars per gram of pollution emitted if the damage of the gram of pollution was only $10 and the $10 million tax would prevent the polluter from being able to produce a medical vaccine that yields billions of dollars worth of benefits. That sort of sums up the A-Z of our political impotence. If we are so ineffective at changing how things are it might be better starting the discussion from where we want to get to and working backwards. What would a sustainable, equitable human lifeworld look like, one which maximised the benefits of science to the majority? If you know what you are trying to achieve then you have a better chance of working out how to get there. Meanwhile, 'optimising' pollution v. welfare actually only reaffirms an abstract right to pollute, when the real problem is that greenhouse emissions are killing the planet. I couldn't agree more. Since any reasonable person should conclude that capitalism will inevitably overexploit and overpollute the natural environment -- that is, far surpass the optimal level of exploitation and pollution, and fall way short of the optimal level of pollution reduction -- we need to figure out how to organize and manage our economic affairs in a qualitatively different manner. Nobody has argued more strenuously than I for this view. However, we will suffer under capitalism for some time, as will the environment. In this context asking which band aids will stop the most blood is also (without attatching relative importance) a question worth addressing. Pollution taxes, pollution permits (auctioned or given away for free), regulation (a.k.a. "command and controll" which now has been accepted as "politically incorrect" usage)? I would also add: besides which band aid will stop the most blood, we should ask which band aid will be most conducive to building a movement capable of bringing about the necessary economic system change.
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Robin Hahnel wrote: Minimizing pollution, taken literally, means zero pollution, which means not moving and not farting. That hardly seems optimal. and What's wrong with capitalism is no matter how hard we try to achieve the optimal level of pollution reduction, we're doomed to fall WAY, WAY short. and I doubt you would want to make a polluter pay $10 million dollars per gram of pollution emitted if the damage of the gram of pollution was only $10 and the $10 million tax would prevent the polluter from being able to produce a medical vaccine that yields billions of dollars worth of benefits. That sort of sums up the A-Z of our political impotence. If we are so ineffective at changing how things are it might be better starting the discussion from where we want to get to and working backwards. What would a sustainable, equitable human lifeworld look like, one which maximised the benefits of science to the majority? If you know what you are trying to achieve then you have a better chance of working out how to get there. Meanwhile, 'optimising' pollution v. welfare actually only reaffirms an abstract right to pollute, when the real problem is that greenhouse emissions are killing the planet. Mark
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Robin Hahnel wrote: So you want to auction off the permits. Great. That's better than giving them away for free since it makes the polluters pay and gains the victims some form of compensation in the form of more tax reveunes. is there is only one way to answer either of these questions. One Comment: Only if the tax revenues are actually used to benefit those who suffer from the pollution. What guarantee is there of that? Why would not those who suffer the pollution be given ownership of the permits and then they would be compensated directly? If optimal means polluting as long as the social benefits that accompany the pollution are greater than the social costs of pollution, but not polluting once the social costs outweigh the social benefits, then I think that is exactly what the objective of rational citizens -- and environmentalists should be. If optimal degree of pollution reduction means cutting back on pollution as long as the social costs of cutting back are smaller than the social benefits that come from the reductions, but not continuing to cut back on pollution once the social costs of reduction are greater than the social benefits that the reductions bring,then I think that is exactly what we should strive for. Comment: The whole concept of optimizing in terms of costs and benefits ignores questions of justice and rights. Wouldn't orthodox economic analysis produce the World Bank memo view of optimum pollution levels-- that there is too much in the developed world and too little in many third world countries. Even if one had a less biased mode of measuring costs and benefits than that of welfare economics the problems of rights and justice remain. If a neighbouring plant's pollution is seriously hazardous to my health then I don't want to be compensated with a gas mask and annual payments awarded according to some person's estimate of the cost of my discomfort ---and traditional welfare economics doesn't even require this much just that I COULD be compensated not that I am. I want the damn plant closed not taxed or given a permit. Coase has to be one of the most absolutely clueless writers on the issue of rights but quite typical. In efficiency terms it matters not one hoot whether the polluter is given the right to pollute or the victim the right not to be polluted. Just give either the right and efficient trades result in a free market. Consider a situation where a union bargains for the reduction of a carcinogen in the workplace to a certain level that is quite expensive for the company to achieve. A cost-benefit analysis might very well show that the total social costs of such a policy outweigh the benefits to the workers. Are we to say that such a contract should be null and void, that it is against rational public policy? If you used cost-benefit analysis or tried to measure the social costs as against the social benefits of saving certain endangered species it is not at all clear that saving the endangered species would be rational. I would think that the social costs of keeping someone with advanced alzheimer's alive might be greater than the social benefits. Of course according to traditional welfare economics it would seem that there is no way spending funds on the poor and friendless and dying is Pareto efficient. I have just rejoined so perhaps I have missed relevant parts of the discussion. Cheers, Ken Hanly
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Ken Hanly wrote: Why would not those who suffer the pollution be given ownership of the permits and then they would be compensated directly? Do you give each citizen the same number of permits? If so, this will come out the same as giving each citizen his/er proportionate share of the green pollution taxes I would collect. If you are planning on giving some people more permits than others -- on the grounds that some are more damaged than others (those living closer to the plant, the elderly, the asthmatic, the chemically sensitive, the aesthetically sensitive, etc.) -- how are you going to go about deciding who gets how many? But I agree with your point that collecting taxes from polluters does not guarantee that those who are damaged get payment that exactly compensates them for their degree of individual damage. Unfortunately that's just hard to arrange. But notice, if you could figure out how many permits to give to different people, I could award people the exact same size green pollution tax dividend. If optimal means polluting as long as the social benefits that accompany the pollution are greater than the social costs of pollution, but not polluting once the social costs outweigh the social benefits, then I think that is exactly what the objective of rational citizens -- and environmentalists should be. If optimal degree of pollution reduction means cutting back on pollution as long as the social costs of cutting back are smaller than the social benefits that come from the reductions, but not continuing to cut back on pollution once the social costs of reduction are greater than the social benefits that the reductions bring,then I think that is exactly what we should strive for. Comment: The whole concept of optimizing in terms of costs and benefits ignores questions of justice and rights. I agree with this entirely, and have said already that I do not limit the criteria I think we should use to efficiency alone, but consider equity as well. Of course there is environmental justice to consider, and I'd be in favor of prioritizing it over the criterion of efficiency. But in the above, I was debating with Gar Lipow about what was or was not the most reasonable conceptualization of efficiency. Wouldn't orthodox economic analysis produce the World Bank memo view of optimum pollution levels-- that there is too much in the developed world and too little in many third world countries. Yes, the famous Larry Summers memo, right? I agree entirely with your rejection of decision making based exclusively on the efficiency criterion when it flies in the face of justice. When the costs are born by those who already bear too much of the costs, and the benefits are enjoyed by those who already enjoy too much of the benefits of world economic activity, the results are unacceptable on grounds if further aggravating economic injustice -- even if the aggregate benefits outweigh the aggregate costs. So we should say "nyet." If a neighbouring plant's pollution is seriously hazardous to my health then I don't want to be compensated with a gas mask and annual payments awarded according to some person's estimate of the cost of my discomfort ---and traditional welfare economics doesn't even require this much just that I COULD be compensated not that I am. I want the damn plant closed not taxed or given a permit. Agreed. But a better solution might be not letting the plant move into your neighborhood, or not letting you move near the plant. There is a policy tool called zoning. If musical chair geography can't solve the problem, then you are presenting a case where the social cost of the pollution is so high that no conceivable benefits could justify the costs. Coase has to be one of the most absolutely clueless writers on the issue of rights but quite typical. In efficiency terms it matters not one hoot whether the polluter is given the right to pollute or the victim the right not to be polluted. Just give either the right and efficient trades result in a free market. I could give you a 4 part critique of the usual interpretation of the Coase theorem. For starters, there is no market since in his theorem there is a single polluter and a single pollution victim. If there are more than one of either his theorem does not hold -- and Coase said so. Consider a situation where a union bargains for the reduction of a carcinogen in the workplace to a certain level that is quite expensive for the company to achieve. A cost-benefit analysis might very well show that the total social costs of such a policy outweigh the benefits to the workers. Are we to say that such a contract should be null and void, that it is against rational public policy? If you used cost-benefit analysis or tried to measure the social costs as against the social benefits of saving certain endangered species it is not at all clear that saving the endangered species would be rational. I
Re: green permits and taxes
At 06:25 PM 3/2/98 -0500, you wrote: Louis P., Well, as a matter of fact this sort of case in Rochester is exactly the sort that says that there needs to be some very specific quantity controls. This is the kind of case I had in mind with my mumbling about risky situations and how social cost curves can suddenly go up, that is that there are critical threshold levels that one may not know about beyond which very unpleasant things can happen, catastrophes. This is one of the things I don't understand about using tradable permits. Barkley, don't tradable permits essentially mean that companies get to decide which residents are poisoned? If so, this isn't this an incredibly unjust system? If we had permits, then Kodak, not the people who live near its factories, would decide whether more kids would die, right? Incidentally, I agree that the permits vs. taxes approach doesn't get at the more fundamental issues, particularly the issues of democracy and accountability. Anders Schneiderman
Re: green permits and taxes
Anders, Whether you have taxes, permits, quantity controls, or whatever, if someone is poisoning someone else and that can be shown (not always an easy if, as the Kodak situation indicates), then the poisonees ought to be able to take the poisoners to court, period. This is quite beyond any of these systems. There are some pollutants, if sufficiently dangerous, that should be simply outlawed, period. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 03 Mar 1998 08:49:40 -0800 "R. Anders Schneiderman" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 06:25 PM 3/2/98 -0500, you wrote: Louis P., Well, as a matter of fact this sort of case in Rochester is exactly the sort that says that there needs to be some very specific quantity controls. This is the kind of case I had in mind with my mumbling about risky situations and how social cost curves can suddenly go up, that is that there are critical threshold levels that one may not know about beyond which very unpleasant things can happen, catastrophes. This is one of the things I don't understand about using tradable permits. Barkley, don't tradable permits essentially mean that companies get to decide which residents are poisoned? If so, this isn't this an incredibly unjust system? If we had permits, then Kodak, not the people who live near its factories, would decide whether more kids would die, right? Incidentally, I agree that the permits vs. taxes approach doesn't get at the more fundamental issues, particularly the issues of democracy and accountability. Anders Schneiderman -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: green permits and taxes
Barkely and Robin, Correct me if I am off track here, but if permits are distributed free (based on some past pattern), or if they are initially priced below social cost, and then a tradeable permit market created, does this not act as a barrier to the entry of new firms who must buy up permits at full market price in order to produce? Of course, if permits had to be bought up every 6 mos or year, that would tend to equalize the capital cost in subsequent periods but it would still be an extra entry cost for new firms. This would not be the case for taxes. Does this make sense? Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba
Re: green permits and taxes
The problem I still have with taxing pollution, let alone with trading permits which is the moral equivalent of trading in human beings or worse, is that I keep asking myself how we got here in the first place? A century and a half of similar well-meant social reforms which collectively managed to keep the capitalist show on the road, is how. Meliorism has always deployed 'socialist' ideas from the time of the first Factory Acts, and where has it got us? To discussing 'thresholds below catatsrophe', when the truth is we are already cooking the planet. Sorry to seem rebarbative, but what is going to happen is that, WHATEVER anyone says or does, in Kyoto or IPCC or anywhere, ALL the economically-extractable fossil hydrocarbon is going to be burnt as soon as possible. Nothin actually can stop it; therefore CO2 will at least double, and quicker than anyone expects. The latest thinking seems to be that rate of increase is almost as destabilising as the amount of carbon released (800 bn tonnes since 1750). The warming effects are already more serious than many people imagine. There is no 'threshold below catastrophe' that is not just Russian roulette. So all this discussion (sorry if this seems boorish) is doing is legitimising deck-chair rearanging. Oh, and forget sequestration. The carbon cannot be sequestrated. I know, I've checked. We need to be thinking about the alternatives to industrial society, since industrialism based on renewables is a chimera. Either we will provide the alternative, or Nature will do it for us. Mark Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: Since by now we have been around on this quite a bit, just three points: 1) The French and German and Dutch subsidies paid for by pollution taxes are to cover the installation of pollution control equipment, not for sequestration per se. 2) I think Robin's right that firms don't know other firms' costs of reduction. But they do know their own, at least in the short run. 3) I am not for setting the quantity limits "just" below the level of where catastrophe can happen, lower, definitely much lower. And I agree that more generally we face severe info problems that need to be resolved on many fronts. Barkley Rosser -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Gar W. Lipow wrote: Robin Hahnel wrote: I doubt you mean "non-tradable" in the above, since non tradable permits are the equivalent of regulations (that most now call "command and control." No, I mean non-tradeable. Non-tradeable permits are not the same as regulation if they are sold to the highest bidder. If in a given area you allow a thousand units of a certain type of pollutant this month, then anyone in the area can bid for each of those thousand units at the beginning of the one month period. The thousand highest bids gain the right to pollute. No trades, no transfers, no refunds. (Actually the highest thousand bids above a floor set to equal the best estimate of what the proper pollution tax should be. Any permit not salable at at least that rate will not be sold.) So you want to auction off the permits. Great. That's better than giving them away for free since it makes the polluters pay and gains the victims some form of compensation in the form of more tax reveunes. And I like the idea of a minimum price equal to the marginal social cost of the pollutant. But why don't you want to let the original buyers resell permits if they wish to? And why don't you want to let polluters who didn't buy as many as they now want at the original auction buy them from polluters who bought more than they now decide they want/need? Admittedly, if all polluters had their acts figured out perfectly at the time of the original auction none would want to participate in a re-sell market, but perfect knowledge is hard to come by, and where's the harm in allowing resales -- otherwise known as making the permits "tradable?" The efficiency issue that is usually never mentioned, is how many pollution permits are "efficient" to issue? The analagous question for pollution taxes is, how high a pollution tax is "efficient"? The truth is there is only one way to answer either of these questions. One must come up with an estimate of the social costs of pollution. There are a host of procedures used to do this -- none of them very good. One thing that should be remembered is that none of the so-called "market based" methods such as hedonic regression and travel cost studies can possibly capture what are called the "existence value" or "option value" people place on the environment. So "market based" methodologies for estimating the social costs of pollution (and therefore the social benefits of pollution reduction) will inherently underestimate those costs and benefits. Once we have the best estimate of the social cost of the pollution we can come up with, we simply set the pollution tax equal to the marginal social cost of pollution. That will yield the efficient overall level of pollution reduction, and achieve that reduction at the lowest social cost. With permits, one has to use trial and error. You issue some number of permits and wait to see what price they sell at. If the price is lower than your best estimate of the marginal social cost of pollution, then you issued too many permits and need to issue fewer. If the market price for permits is higher than your estimate of the social cost of pollution, you have issued too few permits and need to issue more. Once you have got the right number of permits out there so the market price of permits is equal to your estimate of the marginal social cost of pollution, your permit program will yield the efficient overall level of pollution reduction, and achieve that reduction at the lowest social cost ASSUMING NO MALFUNCTIONING IN THE PERMIT MARKET. I think you are relying too much on theoretical models here. In real capitalism, greens can estimate much more easily what level of pollution reduction they wish to achieve (in the case where the goal is not zero) than they can determine what price will result in reductions to that level. Greens only THINK they can do this. Actually, when they pick a level of reduction they want they are whistling in the dark if they don't have any idea what the social cost of the pollution is. Where do they get a number like 20% reduction -- except by multiplying the corporate target figure by a factor of 10? Why not multiply what the corporations recommend by a factor of 20 instead? Knowing how much to reduce involves knowing what the social benefits of reduction are, which is the same as knowing what the social costs of continuing to pollute are. Once one knows that the tax policy is the simple one -- set the tax equal to the marginal social cost of pollution. It is the permit policy that is more complicated since you have to guess how many to issue and then adjust up or down until the permit price is equal to the tax you could have set in the first place. The object, at least under capitalism , is not to achieve some optimum level of pollution. Whose object? Capitalists? Environmentalists? Rational citizens? Of course it is not capitalists'
Re: green permits and taxes
Paul, Of course. But then I and most on this list who have defended permits have done so not on the basis of free distribution or sale at below social cost. Again, I would appreciate equivalent plans being compared, not an ideal non-existent tax plan with an actually-existing permit plan with all its flaws. For such a comparison of course Robin is right and ideal taxes look better. Probably the bottom line on why permits might be better, even when flawed (the big challenge Robin issued) is indeed the catastrophe issue of a sudden increase in social cost. Taxes can really mess up where permits might not. Of course Robin simply dismissed this as "99% bull" and some kind of theoretical abstraction, but that is mere assertion, and given the existence of lots of nonlinearities and discontinuities in our ecological-economic system, one that is not easily defended. Of course knowing where those cutoffs are is a problem under any system, social/political/economic, no matter what. We need more information. Barkley Rosser On Tue, 03 Mar 98 09:08 CST [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Barkely and Robin, Correct me if I am off track here, but if permits are distributed free (based on some past pattern), or if they are initially priced below social cost, and then a tradeable permit market created, does this not act as a barrier to the entry of new firms who must buy up permits at full market price in order to produce? Of course, if permits had to be bought up every 6 mos or year, that would tend to equalize the capital cost in subsequent periods but it would still be an extra entry cost for new firms. This would not be the case for taxes. Does this make sense? Paul Phillips, Economics, University of Manitoba -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: green permits and taxes
Barkley, Whether you have taxes, permits, quantity controls, or whatever, if someone is poisoning someone else and that can be shown (not always an easy if, as the Kodak situation indicates), then the poisonees ought to be able to take the poisoners to court, period. This is quite beyond any of these systems. Absolutely. The problem is, proving that you're being poisoned is often incredibly difficult if not impossible. That's why I have qualms about permits. Permits set a limit beyond which no one is allowed to pollute--usually a level which is still fairly high. The question of who'll be bombarded w/ pollutants at that level and who will be subjected to a considerably lower level of pollutants is then left up to corporations, not the community. It seems to me that the end result is inherently undemocratic, even by a wimpy liberal definition of democracy. Anders Schneiderman P.S. If it hasn't been clear in my posts, I am not in any way challenging the sincerity of folks who prefer permits over taxes as a way to clean the environment; I just think the end result is much more likely to be less fair.
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Robin Hahnel wrote: I doubt you mean "non-tradable" in the above, since non tradable permits are the equivalent of regulations (that most now call "command and control." No, I mean non-tradeable. Non-tradeable permits are not the same as regulation if they are sold to the highest bidder. If in a given area you allow a thousand units of a certain type of pollutant this month, then anyone in the area can bid for each of those thousand units at the beginning of the one month period. The thousand highest bids gain the right to pollute. No trades, no transfers, no refunds. (Actually the highest thousand bids above a floor set to equal the best estimate of what the proper pollution tax should be. Any permit not salable at at least that rate will not be sold.) The efficiency issue that is usually never mentioned, is how many pollution permits are "efficient" to issue? The analagous question for pollution taxes is, how high a pollution tax is "efficient"? The truth is there is only one way to answer either of these questions. One must come up with an estimate of the social costs of pollution. There are a host of procedures used to do this -- none of them very good. One thing that should be remembered is that none of the so-called "market based" methods such as hedonic regression and travel cost studies can possibly capture what are called the "existence value" or "option value" people place on the environment. So "market based" methodologies for estimating the social costs of pollution (and therefore the social benefits of pollution reduction) will inherently underestimate those costs and benefits. Once we have the best estimate of the social cost of the pollution we can come up with, we simply set the pollution tax equal to the marginal social cost of pollution. That will yield the efficient overall level of pollution reduction, and achieve that reduction at the lowest social cost. With permits, one has to use trial and error. You issue some number of permits and wait to see what price they sell at. If the price is lower than your best estimate of the marginal social cost of pollution, then you issued too many permits and need to issue fewer. If the market price for permits is higher than your estimate of the social cost of pollution, you have issued too few permits and need to issue more. Once you have got the right number of permits out there so the market price of permits is equal to your estimate of the marginal social cost of pollution, your permit program will yield the efficient overall level of pollution reduction, and achieve that reduction at the lowest social cost ASSUMING NO MALFUNCTIONING IN THE PERMIT MARKET. I think you are relying too much on theoretical models here. In real capitalism, greens can estimate much more easily what level of pollution reduction they wish to achieve (in the case where the goal is not zero) than they can determine what price will result in reductions to that level. The object, at least under capitalism , is not to achieve some optimum level of pollution. (As you say, the level of pollution is almost certain to be too high, and the price paid by polluters is almost certain to be too small.) The goal is to reduce pollution as much as possible, and make polluters pay as dearly per unit of pollution as possible. This yields an answer to both the question of the proper level of a pollution tax under capitalism (as high as possible) and the proper number of Nontradeable permits (as low as possible). In a good society, no doubt your green taxes would be the ideal -- though even there I would like to see some sort of built in bias to ensure lower levels of pollution than might be considered economically optimum. Regarding equity: Pollution taxes make polluters pay for the damage they inflict on the rest of us. How that payment is distributed between producers and consumers will depend on the elasticities of supply and demand for the products whose production and/or consumption cause the pollution. How the cost is distributed between employers and employees on the producers' side will depend on how much of the cost to producers comes out of wages and how much comes out of profits -- which I prefer to think of in terms of bargaining power and mainstreamers reduce to relative elasticities of the supply of and demand for labor. No doubt the distributive effects of pollution taxes are not optimal from the perspective of equity. Hence the need to combine pollution taxes with changes in other parts of the tax system that will make the overall outcome more equitable -- i.e. progressive. For an "equivalent" permit program, IF THE PERMITS ARE AUCTIONED OFF BY THE GOVERNMENT THE EQUITY RESULTS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME AS FOR THE POLLUTION TAX. But if the permits are given away for free, in addition to all the above equity implications, there is a one-time windfall benefit awarded to polluters. If effect, the polluters are
Re: green permits and taxes
Again, I have a feeling that this taxes versus permits debate as we have been debating it has a "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" air about it. None of this really deals with more deeply rooted ecological questions that get buried in that nice fuzzy rubric of "measuring social costs of pollution"... Barkley Rosser Good point, Barkley. (Sorry we didn't hook up, by the way. I just couldn't get out of bed on Sunday morning, if you gather my drift.) The discussion started out of a Wallerstein post that rejected the notion that capitalism could resolve these sorts of crises, either through punitive taxes or permits. Something that would place this into the sort of urgency it deserves is this article on Kodak, pollution and cancer that appeared in today's NY Times. Read it and ask yourselves whether outfits like this will ever clean up their act. Two other things to note. The federal government helps in the cover-up. And there is no proof that the pollution is causing the cancers. This is a particulary insidious defense, since cancer intrinsically can not be "proved" to be caused by any particular substance. There is only circumstantial evidence, which will get you off in a bourgeois court. We need worker's justice, don't we? With good old-fashioned firing-squads. March 2, 1998 Mother Seeks Answers as Rare Cancers Appear ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- When Debbie Cusenz gets together with neighbors, she catches up on the activities of their children. Not just Little League and school plays, but brain scans, chemotherapy and surgery. Mrs. Cusenz, 40, keeps track of the children with a map in the living room of her home. She marks cancer cases with multicolored stars and angels. Red angels represent leukemia, and blue angels, lymphoma. But it is the green angels, marking children with rare cancers of the brain and central nervous system, that have caused the most concern; there have been 68 such cases in Monroe County since 1976. Many parents here believe that the cases are a cancer cluster related to environmental pollutants, and some have sued the Eastman Kodak Co., the county's biggest employer. Some environmental groups have said that it is also the state's largest polluter. Mrs. Cusenz, whose husband works at Eastman Kodak, thinks the problem is bigger than any one company. She said that although she believes that Kodak is not blameless, she thinks pollution by all companies, both large and small, should be examined. Kodak officials say there is no scientific evidence of a link between film manufacturing and cancer. At a public hearing on Wednesday, experts in epidemiology from the Federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said they had determined that past local studies, which had found no evidence of a link, were scientifically sound, but they called for further review. The problem may be part of a national trend, they said. Brain cancer in children up to 4 years old has increased by a per capita rate of 47 percent in the last 20 years, said Dr. Wendy Kaye, chief epidemiologist for the federal agency, which is based in Atlanta. She wants to include Rochester in a $500,000 study of the occurrence of brain cancer in three states. Mrs. Cusenz (pronounced like cousins), whose cancer maps drew the interest of the federal experts last fall, said she would keep pressing them for more studies. She has been involved in the effort since 1995, when the oldest of her two sons became her first green angel. She had taken her son Christopher, now 21, to the doctor to follow up on his complaint that two fingers on his right hand were becoming numb. His illness was diagnosed as cancer of the spinal cord, one of just 150 cases seen worldwide each year. Four days later, the family flew to New York City, where the tumor was surgically removed. Although Christopher Cusenz lost some motor control and had to learn to walk and feed himself again, doctors were optimistic about his recovery. But eight months later the tumor was back. During a second visit to New York for surgery, Mrs. Cusenz met Sandra Schneider, whose daughter was being treated for cancer of the central nervous system. Mrs. Cusenz said, "We got to talking and comparing where we lived," which turned out to be within a few miles of each other. In Rochester, they started an informal support group named Brainstormers that grew from 2 families to 11 in a year. "It just seemed too coincidental," Mrs. Cusenz said. "Evelyn started saying, 'Gee, is there a chance Kodak is to blame or this?"' Concerns about the company's emissions peaked in 1988, when Kodak acknowledged that it had released 20 million pounds of toxic chemicals into the air the previous year. About half the material released was methylene chloride, a toxic solvent used to make film base. The Environmental Protection Agency suspects methylene chloride to be a carcinogen, but medical experts have never proved that it is. In the years since, Kodak has
Re: green permits and taxes
I've already said I prefer auctions to handouts. Robin challenges us to say when were there auctions (they were proposed in Wisconsin, but not carried out). I knew about the Wisconsin case, and must say I'm not surprised that although auctions were proposed (obviously only by some) they were not the method of distribution actually chosen. I don't know of any actual permit program where the permits were auctioned off so the government collected revenue. I'm asking if anyone knows of one. I'll turn it around. He insists on comparing an "ideal" tax system to an actually existing permit system. I did not insist on anything like this. I already stipulated that actual pollution taxes are almost always too low. Just like actual permit programs almost always issue too few permits. I simply said that I don't know of any situation in which an equivalent tax would not be better than an equivalent permit program -- where equivalent means yielding the same aggregate pollution reduction. But in the real world, as I have now already mentioned twice, tax systems are generally combined with subsidies to industry. Is this fine with you, Robin? Do you mean the same companies paying pollution taxes are then given some kind of compensatory reduction in their profits taxes, or some other business taxes they pay? In this case it's not fine with me at all since I can think of no reason to support corporate tax relief. Or do you mean that companies that sequester pollutants are paid sequestration subsidies just like companies that emit the pollutants are charged pollution taxes? I do support this kind of subsidy. As a matter of fact I have been talking up the idea of paying sequestration subsidies to countries that are net carbon sequesterers [these are all third world countries with rain forests] to go along with charging carbon taxes to combat global warming. Another broader question has to do with uncertainty, of which there is humongous amounts on all sides on this issue. Robin presents us with the neoclassical textbook story about equating social MC and social MB, nice and neat, although recognizing that estimating the social costs of pollution is difficult. Indeed. For that matter, governments don't know the costs of cleanup, although the private sector does. I don't want to dispute this point, but the private sector is sometimes as clueless about their own marginal costs of pollution reduction as the government is. Witness the amazing "no action" in the sulfur dioxide permit market the government opened up -- which investigators attributed to private utilities not knowing where they stood visa vis other utilities in the cost reduction hierarchy. If there is a broad band of riskiness regarding the social costs, with a threat of a sharp upward turn, then one would prefer to fix the quantity rather than the price that is controlled in order to guard against a catastrophe. Tradeable permits do that and taxes don't. I've read this argument before. I think its 99% bull. I think its high priced economic theoreticians who have over invested in statistical human capital coming up with theoretical possibilities that serve the corporate agenda -- getting people to buy into permits on supposed "technical efficiency grounds." There is a lot of uncertainty predicting the borderline between more normal pollution and a catastrophe. That is the major uncertainty problem and is just as big a problem for setting the number of permits just below catastrophe -- a lousy policy goal in any case -- as it is setting the tax rate so that the amount of emissions ends up just below catastrophe. But why am I preaching catastrophe (chaos) theory to Professor Rosser?! Also, although the corpps don't like further quantity cutbacks, at least in the US right now there is strong public sentiment in favor of that. There is little-to-no public support for any tax increases. Indeed that is why we here probably have a mostly c and c system rather than a tax one. I remind everyone that for global warming a major needed tax would be a big hike on gasoline. But two years ago we saw the spectacle of Clinton and Dole competing to lower already ridiculously low gasoline taxes. Forget it. I have suggested making pollution taxes attractive to the non-polluting public by cutting regressive taxes, dollar for dollar, for every dollar raised through pollution taxes precisely to make it more politically viable. Clinton competing with Dole to lower gas taxes is certainly a sign of the incredibly bankrupt political times in which we live. Just as conceding the necessity of bribing polluting corporations to pollute us a little less by giving them pollution permits for free is! BTW, one other argument for taxes not put forward by Robin is due to a colleague (Scott Milliman) and a former colleague and co-author of mine (Ray Prince) who argued in a much-cited JEEM 1989 paper that taxes will lead to
Re: green permits and taxes
Louis P., Well, as a matter of fact this sort of case in Rochester is exactly the sort that says that there needs to be some very specific quantity controls. This is the kind of case I had in mind with my mumbling about risky situations and how social cost curves can suddenly go up, that is that there are critical threshold levels that one may not know about beyond which very unpleasant things can happen, catastrophes. It may be that some kind of democratized central planning is what is needed to set those limits. (But then the mkt soc in me says, let them trade permits within those limits to min costs of achieving that after that...). (Glad alternative breakfast worked out. Another time.) BTW, hey Doug, what's with going to hear Bertell Ollman and skipping out on me? I know, I'm just one of those crummy math types who doesn't know alienation from a hole in the ground, :-). Barkley Rosser On Mon, 02 Mar 1998 15:17:13 -0500 Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Again, I have a feeling that this taxes versus permits debate as we have been debating it has a "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic" air about it. None of this really deals with more deeply rooted ecological questions that get buried in that nice fuzzy rubric of "measuring social costs of pollution"... Barkley Rosser Good point, Barkley. (Sorry we didn't hook up, by the way. I just couldn't get out of bed on Sunday morning, if you gather my drift.) The discussion started out of a Wallerstein post that rejected the notion that capitalism could resolve these sorts of crises, either through punitive taxes or permits. Something that would place this into the sort of urgency it deserves is this article on Kodak, pollution and cancer that appeared in today's NY Times. Read it and ask yourselves whether outfits like this will ever clean up their act. Two other things to note. The federal government helps in the cover-up. And there is no proof that the pollution is causing the cancers. This is a particulary insidious defense, since cancer intrinsically can not be "proved" to be caused by any particular substance. There is only circumstantial evidence, which will get you off in a bourgeois court. We need worker's justice, don't we? With good old-fashioned firing-squads. March 2, 1998 Mother Seeks Answers as Rare Cancers Appear ROCHESTER, N.Y. -- When Debbie Cusenz gets together with neighbors, she catches up on the activities of their children. Not just Little League and school plays, but brain scans, chemotherapy and surgery. Mrs. Cusenz, 40, keeps track of the children with a map in the living room of her home. She marks cancer cases with multicolored stars and angels. Red angels represent leukemia, and blue angels, lymphoma. But it is the green angels, marking children with rare cancers of the brain and central nervous system, that have caused the most concern; there have been 68 such cases in Monroe County since 1976. Many parents here believe that the cases are a cancer cluster related to environmental pollutants, and some have sued the Eastman Kodak Co., the county's biggest employer. Some environmental groups have said that it is also the state's largest polluter. Mrs. Cusenz, whose husband works at Eastman Kodak, thinks the problem is bigger than any one company. She said that although she believes that Kodak is not blameless, she thinks pollution by all companies, both large and small, should be examined. Kodak officials say there is no scientific evidence of a link between film manufacturing and cancer. At a public hearing on Wednesday, experts in epidemiology from the Federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry said they had determined that past local studies, which had found no evidence of a link, were scientifically sound, but they called for further review. The problem may be part of a national trend, they said. Brain cancer in children up to 4 years old has increased by a per capita rate of 47 percent in the last 20 years, said Dr. Wendy Kaye, chief epidemiologist for the federal agency, which is based in Atlanta. She wants to include Rochester in a $500,000 study of the occurrence of brain cancer in three states. Mrs. Cusenz (pronounced like cousins), whose cancer maps drew the interest of the federal experts last fall, said she would keep pressing them for more studies. She has been involved in the effort since 1995, when the oldest of her two sons became her first green angel. She had taken her son Christopher, now 21, to the doctor to follow up on his complaint that two fingers on his right hand were becoming numb. His illness was diagnosed as cancer of the spinal cord, one of just 150 cases seen worldwide each year. Four days later, the family flew to New York City, where the tumor was surgically removed. Although Christopher Cusenz lost some motor control and had
Re: green permits and taxes
Concerning Eastman Kodak, it is interesting that they worked closely with the Atomic Energy Commission in the 50s regarding fallout. The AEC was worried that fallout, while benign to the human organism, might degrate Eastman's film. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 916-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Gar W. Lipow wrote: Granted that parecon would generate full social and ecological price signals, I still don't understand why in capitalism non-tradable, auctioned, permits with a floor are not superior. I doubt you mean "non-tradable" in the above, since non tradable permits are the equivalent of regulations (that most now call "command and control." There are efficiency, equity, ideological, and practical criteria to consider when choosing environmental policies in capitalism. On efficiency grounds, if one issues any number of tradable permits, the exact same results can be achieved with a pollution tax equal to the market price that results for the permits. And visa versa. There is a particular number of tradable permits that will end up selling for the same price as any pollution tax you set. THIS CONCLUSION ASSUMES THERE ARE NO MALFUNCTIONS IN THE PERMIT MARKET SUCH AS 1) non-competitive market structures, 2) market disequilibria, or 3) disfunctional speculative behavior (this is not a concept in mainstream market theory, but you only have to look at the financial markets in Asia to see that it sure does operate in the real world! SINCE MARKET MALFUNCTIONS DO NOT REDUCE THE EFFICIENCY OF POLLUTION TAXES, BUT ONLY TRADABLE PERMIT PROGRAMS, POLLUTION TAXES WOULD APPEAR TO BE EITHER EXACTLY AS GOOD, OR BETTER THAN TRADABLE PERMITS ON PURELY EFFICIENCY GROUNDS. The efficiency issue that is usually never mentioned, is how many pollution permits are "efficient" to issue? The analagous question for pollution taxes is, how high a pollution tax is "efficient"? The truth is there is only one way to answer either of these questions. One must come up with an estimate of the social costs of pollution. There are a host of procedures used to do this -- none of them very good. One thing that should be remembered is that none of the so-called "market based" methods such as hedonic regression and travel cost studies can possibly capture what are called the "existence value" or "option value" people place on the environment. So "market based" methodologies for estimating the social costs of pollution (and therefore the social benefits of pollution reduction) will inherently underestimate those costs and benefits. Once we have the best estimate of the social cost of the pollution we can come up with, we simply set the pollution tax equal to the marginal social cost of pollution. That will yield the efficient overall level of pollution reduction, and achieve that reduction at the lowest social cost. With permits, one has to use trial and error. You issue some number of permits and wait to see what price they sell at. If the price is lower than your best estimate of the marginal social cost of pollution, then you issued too many permits and need to issue fewer. If the market price for permits is higher than your estimate of the social cost of pollution, you have issued too few permits and need to issue more. Once you have got the right number of permits out there so the market price of permits is equal to your estimate of the marginal social cost of pollution, your permit program will yield the efficient overall level of pollution reduction, and achieve that reduction at the lowest social cost ASSUMING NO MALFUNCTIONING IN THE PERMIT MARKET. Regarding equity: Pollution taxes make polluters pay for the damage they inflict on the rest of us. How that payment is distributed between producers and consumers will depend on the elasticities of supply and demand for the products whose production and/or consumption cause the pollution. How the cost is distributed between employers and employees on the producers' side will depend on how much of the cost to producers comes out of wages and how much comes out of profits -- which I prefer to think of in terms of bargaining power and mainstreamers reduce to relative elasticities of the supply of and demand for labor. No doubt the distributive effects of pollution taxes are not optimal from the perspective of equity. Hence the need to combine pollution taxes with changes in other parts of the tax system that will make the overall outcome more equitable -- i.e. progressive. For an "equivalent" permit program, IF THE PERMITS ARE AUCTIONED OFF BY THE GOVERNMENT THE EQUITY RESULTS ARE EXACTLY THE SAME AS FOR THE POLLUTION TAX. But if the permits are given away for free, in addition to all the above equity implications, there is a one-time windfall benefit awarded to polluters. If effect, the polluters are awarded the market value of the environment! Then, after this massive corporate rip-off, the exact same costs of reducing pollution are distributed in the exact same way among producers, consumers, employers and employees as in the case of a tax or auctioned permit policy. Since no permit program to date [that is a challenge to the pen-l information system!] has auctioned off permits, but instead every permit program to date has handed them out mostly free, on some sort of
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Robin Hahnel wrote: I have been campaigning on this theme recently because the mainstream of the profession has generated an intellectual stampede in favor of permits and has ignored taxes completely. I think the entire reason is permits can be part of a massive corporate boondoggle -- and pollution taxes cannot. As evidence of a stampede without real intellectual content, witness the effects on Wally Oates and Max Sawicky! So, I have been giving talks challening anyone to come up with a situation in which permits are superior to taxes -- in an attempt to even the debating playing field as much as one radical can. So far my I'm not getting very bloodied in my version of a John L. Sullivan, challenge-all-comers in boxing tour. Granted that parecon would generate full social and ecological price signals, I still don't understand why in capitalism non-tradable, auctioned, permits with a floor are not superior. Suppose greens won enough influence in the U.S. to force a ten percent reduction in fossil fuel consumption. Undoubtedly there is a carbon tax that would create such a reduction. But under the distorted price structure of capitalism I don't know how to find out -- in advance -- what it is. Perhaps for professional economists this is a simple problem. If the tax was too high , no problem from my point of view. I want more than a ten percent reduction anyway. But given the wiggle room the question leaves, it seems likely to me that the tax is far more likely to be set too low. Now look at non-tradeable permits auctioned, with a floor. The floor is of course a guess as to what the carbon tax should be. ( I'm leaving aside the possibility that markets will work well in the auctioning process, since corporations would probably manage to rig them, and assuming that essentially permits are sold at the floor). BTW the auctioning is not on a multi-year basis. New permits must be bought every year or every month, and prior purchase give you no special rights for current one. In short, what I am trying to propose is not really a permit process as normally described, but green taxes with rationing as a precaution against excessively low rates If fewer permits sold than were offered, then your price was right or perhaps too high . If all permits sold then the price would automatically rise until some permits went unsold. The advantage over green taxes without rationing in this context is if a green tax is set too low, pollution goes above the target, while with a permit process, pollution stays at target even before the price is raised sufficiently. On the other hand if both prices are right or are too high, then the results are identical -- even given market rigging in the auction process. In short leaving the assumption of perfect markets, and assuming highly imperfect information, and a highly politicized process it does seem that green taxes with rationing would work better. Given the political effort required to achieve green taxes, it seems that it might be worth while to include such a rationing process in the demands.
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Rosser Jr, John Barkley wrote: Robin, Well, it is your judgment that all the other arguments besides the one you cite are "hot air." Maybe, maybe not. Fair enough. That's why I gave the full reference for Oates' article so people wouldn't have to take my word for it. Personally I am not all that against taxes. I just happen to think you have overstated the argument for their superiority over tradeable permits in general. I have been campaigning on this theme recently because the mainstream of the profession has generated an intellectual stampede in favor of permits and has ignored taxes completely. I think the entire reason is permits can be part of a massive corporate boondoggle -- and pollution taxes cannot. As evidence of a stampede without real intellectual content, witness the effects on Wally Oates and Max Sawicky! So, I have been giving talks challening anyone to come up with a situation in which permits are superior to taxes -- in an attempt to even the debating playing field as much as one radical can. So far my I'm not getting very bloodied in my version of a John L. Sullivan, challenge-all-comers in boxing tour. BTW I agree with your characterization of the history of policy: Economists recommended pigouvian pollution taxes in the 60s and early 70s, and at least in the US they were rejected for regulations [I refuse to use the reactionary label "command and control" for regulation, and suggest that others thing about adopting this new piece of mainstream semantic ideological hegemony!] My understanding is that in Europe pollution taxes were and are still more prevalent. But just as the US is pushing our more barbarian version of capitalism on Asia and Europe, it looks to me like we are pushing on Europe to abandon pollution taxes for permit programs as well. I think it's another case of: You can make book on the fact that if Uncle Sam is pushing it, it ought to be illegal! All of these are within-system amelioriations anyway. I agree completely -- and AT BEST they will only slightly slow the rape of the environment. How would things work in a Hahnel-Albert society? I don't have time to post an answer immediately, but there is a reason left greens have been particularly interested in our version of participatory planning. It was designed to generate full environmental effect social cost price signals to any and all users. More on this when time allows.
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Note to Robin: I wonder if non-tradable permits auctioned with a floor aren't really pollution taxes. Permits and taxes are not the same. The only thing that is "the same" is that IN THEORY -- if there are no market failures in the permit markets -- auctioning off a particular number of permits achieves the exact same outcome as charging a pollution tax equal to the market price of a permit.
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
MScoleman wrote: In a message dated 98-02-25 21:27:27 EST, Barkley Rosser asks: Maggie, What about when there are both taxes and subsidies as we see in France and Germany? Actually when the major US environmental laws were put in place in the early 70s most of the profession advocated taxes, an idea dating back at least to Pigou. This was rejected in favor of what are essentially command and control systems. The politics was that pollution is "sin" and taxes would let people pay for sin, rather than outlawing it. Of course the c and c system didn't outlaw it either, just dealt with it in a very arbitrary way. This predated the push for tradeable permits. Barkley Rosser In short, I have no real idea -- however, off the top of my head (the grey haired part which is smarter than the other) I would say that a combination of taxes and subsidies would cancel each other out because they have an opposite effect. The government would be collecting a tax, then turning around and paying it back as a subsidy. I think that this debate over taxes, subsidies, restrictions and pollution credits which can be sold is interesting but also missing out on the main point of what needs to be done. The responsibility of business TOWARDS the community needs to become part of the public debate, not the responsibility of the community to coddle businesses into being less polluting. Pollution as a cost of doing business needs to be raised in such a way that the public demands that private businesses spend their own money cleaning up waste. The only reason we debate the best way to institute green taxes and permits is because business does not accept the responsibility to clean up after itself. Most places have laws against littering -- and yet businesses are allowed to litter the world with impunity. maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] For things like plutonium where any reasonable person wants to allow zero pollution, no green taxes or permits are neccesary. But you can't avoid usage of natural sinks and sources (though you can confine their use to well below what is sustainable). Not even traditional societies used zero natural resources -- and I doubt whatever wisdom we learn (if we learn any before it is too late) will involve perpetual motion. Note that very low levels of pollutions and resource consumption (10% or 1% but some percent of what we use now) are sustainable. So how do you allocate allowable pollution? 1) Command and control. Allow x to pollute y, and r to pollute q. At first glance this may seem tough on polluters. But,. note that this regulatory approach is still a give away of natural reasources -- in our current society to corporation, in some future society to whatever form of entereprise may occur (including worker owned firms, parecon worker councils, state owned firms or whatever). 2) You can have tradeable free permits -- still a giveaway. 3) You can auction off tradeable or non-tradeable permits -- with or without a floor. 4) You can charge pollution taxes. I'm not even mentioning subsidies. Paying people not to pollute is absurd. Note to Robin: I wonder if non-tradable permits auctioned with a floor aren't really pollution taxes.
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
In a message dated 98-02-25 21:27:27 EST, Barkley Rosser asks: Maggie, What about when there are both taxes and subsidies as we see in France and Germany? Actually when the major US environmental laws were put in place in the early 70s most of the profession advocated taxes, an idea dating back at least to Pigou. This was rejected in favor of what are essentially command and control systems. The politics was that pollution is "sin" and taxes would let people pay for sin, rather than outlawing it. Of course the c and c system didn't outlaw it either, just dealt with it in a very arbitrary way. This predated the push for tradeable permits. Barkley Rosser In short, I have no real idea -- however, off the top of my head (the grey haired part which is smarter than the other) I would say that a combination of taxes and subsidies would cancel each other out because they have an opposite effect. The government would be collecting a tax, then turning around and paying it back as a subsidy. I think that this debate over taxes, subsidies, restrictions and pollution credits which can be sold is interesting but also missing out on the main point of what needs to be done. The responsibility of business TOWARDS the community needs to become part of the public debate, not the responsibility of the community to coddle businesses into being less polluting. Pollution as a cost of doing business needs to be raised in such a way that the public demands that private businesses spend their own money cleaning up waste. The only reason we debate the best way to institute green taxes and permits is because business does not accept the responsibility to clean up after itself. Most places have laws against littering -- and yet businesses are allowed to litter the world with impunity. maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Robin, Well, it is your judgment that all the other arguments besides the one you cite are "hot air." Maybe, maybe not. I completely agree that the initial setup is very important and am no particular fan of this particular form of initial distribution. Let them buy them from the government in an initial auction, which was what we proposed up in Wisconsin. This whole business is one where the details really do matter a lot. Personally I am not all that against taxes. I just happen to think you have overstated the argument for their superiority over tradeable permits in general. All of these are within-system amelioriations anyway. How would things work in a Hahnel-Albert society? BTW, I am out of here until Monday. Off to the Eastern Econ meetings in New York where the International Working Group on Value Theory, URPE, and the Post Keynesians are having a lot of sessions (I am in four total). Hope to see some of you there! Another btw, we really need to do more than letter writing about this AEA thing. Need to embarrass the bastards royally. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 25 Feb 1998 17:15:49 -0500 Robin Hahnel [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now please remind me why my eco-guru Wally Oates said permits are more efficient than taxes? First late me quote Professor Oates. (Cropper and Oates: Environmental Economics, JEL June 1992, p. 687) "Some interesting issues arise in the choice between systems of effluent fees and marketable emissions permits... There is, of course, a basic sense in which they are equivalent: the environmental authority can, in principle, set price (i.e. the level of the effluent charge) and then adjust it until emissions are reduced sufficiently to achieve the prescribed environmental standard, or, alternatively, issue the requisite number of permits directly and allow the bidding of polluters to determine the market-clearing price." Strictly speaking, this is all I wanted to point out. However, when I read Cropper and Oates (1992) I noticed that they went on to argue for various practical advantages for permits over taxes -- which struck me as odd since Oates had been a strong supporter of taxes before permits became so popular. So I read their arguments quite carefully. Every argument for pollution permits over taxes they offered except one was totally vacuous, and I mean amounted to absolutely nothing at all except hot air. The one substantive argument was the following: "Polluters (that is, existing polluters), as well as regulators, are likely to lprefer the permit approach becasue it can involve lower levels of comopliance costs. If the permits are auctioned off, then of course polluters must pay directly for the right to emit wastes as they would under a feww system. But rather than allocating the permits by auction, the environmental authority can initiate the system with a one-time distribution of permits to existing sources [polluters] -- free of charge. Some form of 'grandfathering' can be used to allocate permits based on historical performance [i.e., the worse polluter you were in the past, the more free pollution permits you receive!] Once again, this is all I wanted to point out: The only real difference between free permits and pollution taxes is that with free permits the public gives the polluting corporations a large present. Since this makes the polluters happier campers, it also makes the regulators job easier so they like it too. My entire attitude can be summed up as: Well that's just fine and dandy for them -- polluters and regulators! But it sure as hell doesn't best serve the interests of any constituency I've ever cared about. I suspect Oates was in danger of dropping down in the academic guru for high price hire lecture circuit since he was burdened by the weight of his earlier reputation as a proponent of pollution taxes. Since the big money wanted to hear that permits were preferable to taxes, Wally had to get with the program -- which he did quite nicely in the prominent JEL piece I'm quoting from. But what it reduces to is: BS + corporate interest politics. There is no SUBSTANCE he offers to recommend permits over pollution taxes. Aren't you presuming that firms can freely adjust their production methods so that pollution can be precisely calibrated, and hence on the margin taxes and permits are both perfectly voluntary? What about lumpiness and other non-neoclassical production functions? Sorry, this doesn't extricate you from the hole you've dug for yourself either. If marginal cost of pollution reduction schedules for firms are not smooth and continuous, they will not make smooth or continuous adjustments to changes EITHER in the pollution tax rate OR the price of pollution permits. But that is really of no concern in any case. Take the other extreme: firms with diverse capacities to rejigger their production techniques.
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Maggie, What about when there are both taxes and subsidies as we see in France and Germany? Actually when the major US environmental laws were put in place in the early 70s most of the profession advocated taxes, an idea dating back at least to Pigou. This was rejected in favor of what are essentially command and control systems. The politics was that pollution is "sin" and taxes would let people pay for sin, rather than outlawing it. Of course the c and c system didn't outlaw it either, just dealt with it in a very arbitrary way. This predated the push for tradeable permits. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 25 Feb 1998 17:40:25 EST MScoleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: well, i WAS going to ignore this topic -- but, since I AM teaching micro (in addition to my technical work at that large utility) According to Baumol and Blinder, taxing pollution cuts pollution more than subsidies or credits. The NEOCLASSICAL solution they propose is that subsidies increase the economic profits to firms and encourages them to produce more. So even though they cut their emissions for the original production, they are all producing more and therefore producing more pollution throughout the entire industry. Taxing, on the otherhand, decreases the budget with which the firm produces (shrinks the production possibilities curve). Production per firm, and hence industry wide decreases, and so does pollution. o.k. i didn't say i agreed with this analysis. this was just the first time i ever say a neoclassical solution which recommended taxation. maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] p.s. I think stringent state controls, up to and including jail time is the only method to stop pollution. -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
well, i WAS going to ignore this topic -- but, since I AM teaching micro (in addition to my technical work at that large utility) According to Baumol and Blinder, taxing pollution cuts pollution more than subsidies or credits. The NEOCLASSICAL solution they propose is that subsidies increase the economic profits to firms and encourages them to produce more. So even though they cut their emissions for the original production, they are all producing more and therefore producing more pollution throughout the entire industry. Taxing, on the otherhand, decreases the budget with which the firm produces (shrinks the production possibilities curve). Production per firm, and hence industry wide decreases, and so does pollution. o.k. i didn't say i agreed with this analysis. this was just the first time i ever say a neoclassical solution which recommended taxation. maggie coleman [EMAIL PROTECTED] p.s. I think stringent state controls, up to and including jail time is the only method to stop pollution.
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Now please remind me why my eco-guru Wally Oates said permits are more efficient than taxes? First late me quote Professor Oates. (Cropper and Oates: Environmental Economics, JEL June 1992, p. 687) "Some interesting issues arise in the choice between systems of effluent fees and marketable emissions permits... There is, of course, a basic sense in which they are equivalent: the environmental authority can, in principle, set price (i.e. the level of the effluent charge) and then adjust it until emissions are reduced sufficiently to achieve the prescribed environmental standard, or, alternatively, issue the requisite number of permits directly and allow the bidding of polluters to determine the market-clearing price." Strictly speaking, this is all I wanted to point out. However, when I read Cropper and Oates (1992) I noticed that they went on to argue for various practical advantages for permits over taxes -- which struck me as odd since Oates had been a strong supporter of taxes before permits became so popular. So I read their arguments quite carefully. Every argument for pollution permits over taxes they offered except one was totally vacuous, and I mean amounted to absolutely nothing at all except hot air. The one substantive argument was the following: "Polluters (that is, existing polluters), as well as regulators, are likely to lprefer the permit approach becasue it can involve lower levels of comopliance costs. If the permits are auctioned off, then of course polluters must pay directly for the right to emit wastes as they would under a feww system. But rather than allocating the permits by auction, the environmental authority can initiate the system with a one-time distribution of permits to existing sources [polluters] -- free of charge. Some form of 'grandfathering' can be used to allocate permits based on historical performance [i.e., the worse polluter you were in the past, the more free pollution permits you receive!] Once again, this is all I wanted to point out: The only real difference between free permits and pollution taxes is that with free permits the public gives the polluting corporations a large present. Since this makes the polluters happier campers, it also makes the regulators job easier so they like it too. My entire attitude can be summed up as: Well that's just fine and dandy for them -- polluters and regulators! But it sure as hell doesn't best serve the interests of any constituency I've ever cared about. I suspect Oates was in danger of dropping down in the academic guru for high price hire lecture circuit since he was burdened by the weight of his earlier reputation as a proponent of pollution taxes. Since the big money wanted to hear that permits were preferable to taxes, Wally had to get with the program -- which he did quite nicely in the prominent JEL piece I'm quoting from. But what it reduces to is: BS + corporate interest politics. There is no SUBSTANCE he offers to recommend permits over pollution taxes. Aren't you presuming that firms can freely adjust their production methods so that pollution can be precisely calibrated, and hence on the margin taxes and permits are both perfectly voluntary? What about lumpiness and other non-neoclassical production functions? Sorry, this doesn't extricate you from the hole you've dug for yourself either. If marginal cost of pollution reduction schedules for firms are not smooth and continuous, they will not make smooth or continuous adjustments to changes EITHER in the pollution tax rate OR the price of pollution permits. But that is really of no concern in any case. Take the other extreme: firms with diverse capacities to rejigger their production techniques. Where the nunmber of permits issued is less than the extent of pollution, won't the permits be traded towards a distribution which reduces the costs of reducing the implied level of pollution? A program that issues more permits than the extent of pollution has wasted the money used to print up the permits since there will be no change in any polluters behavior. All permit programs issue fewer permits than current emissions -- which is why the market price of the permits ends up higher than zero. Such a program minimizes the cost of achieving the given level of overall reduction. But a pollution tax eqaual to the market price of the permit also minimizes the cost of achieving the same level of overall reduction. IT IS EXACTLY EQUIVALENT. Now, turning your point inside out, suppose we let you set the floor price at which the government will auction off permits in the quantity you or your favorite decision-making body specifies. I don't want the government to set a floor price. (I don't want them to issue permits at all.) But if they do issue permits I just want them to auction them off to the highest bidders. LET THE FREE MARKET REIGN! [Did I say that??] At least that way the government will collect revenue from the polluters in exchange
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Michael, True, but this really relates to the broader question of the employment impacts of more stringent environmental controls (assuming that alternative schemes that are being compared are reasonably put together, not a comparison with "ideal taxes" versus some scam-ridden permit scheme or vice versa). There is a lot of evidence both internationally and at the state level that overall there is a positive relationship between economic performance, including employment, and strict environmental policies. I even testified before a committee of the Virginia legislature on this very point (our recent governor, George Allen, was an environmental abomination, and "doing it to helpe business") and have some sources on this, although former pen-ler (possibly still current) Eban Goodstein is much more up on this than I am for anybody who wants a follow-through. Barkley Rosser On Wed, 25 Feb 1998 08:39:06 -0800 Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Max B. Sawicky wrote: A tax on profits or pollution that reduces employment is also a partial tax on labor. I respond that it can also induce more employment engaged in pollution control. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 916-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Rosser Jr, John Barkley [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Green Permits and Taxes
Max B. Sawicky wrote: A tax on profits or pollution that reduces employment is also a partial tax on labor. I respond that it can also induce more employment engaged in pollution control. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 916-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:7112] Re: Green Revolution
Oh, how I hate mechanistic, "machinic" (used just to upset the anti-pomos) definitions of the failure and success of the Green Revolution like the reasons given in the forwarded message below. Village relations in interlinked markets did not change. That's part of problem of "green revolution" and high yield variety failures. While those "in the know", hooked to networks of information and credit, were able to make the transition to new technologies, others couldn't even with government-sponsored credit and seed programs. The result had little to do with "market inefficenies" or the unwillingness of traditional farmers to utilize new technologies. The work of Terry Byres at the School of Oriental Studies and the Journal of Peasant Studies is a good place to start looking at radical criticism of the Green Revolution. Gina Neff [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, 30 Oct 1996 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have a question I would like to address to the members of the list. I raised this question in another list (REMI-L for REMI Economic and Demographic Models) and received one interesting response. But the other members of the list do not seem interested in the question. If you are wondering, I am *not* asking pen-l to "write a research paper" for me. The Head of my Department is on this list, and I would not dare. Also, this can give pen-l something to talk about that is not a U.S. topic. Zaiton Ibrahim, Newcastle, Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, 16 Oct 1996 14:19:20 +1000, I (Zaiton Ibrahim, [EMAIL PROTECTED], asked REMI-L: Dear to any one whom may concern, I would like to ask your opinion regarding to Green Revolution. Green Revolution seems to be an alternative solution in resolving some problems regarding to the issue of Sustainable Rural Development or SRD. It was found successful in some countries, but not some others. It could be some thing went wrong or it needs some modification in certain countries. There should be some factors involved and may be some reliable examples can help to explain them. Michael Alexander [EMAIL PROTECTED] on REMI-L answered: My understanding (and this is not my field) is that the Green Revolution was a textbook example of a technological fix which did not consider the sociological problems simultaneously. Green Revolution crops required rectangular planting in reasonable density in order to cross fertilize themselves. Traditional agricultural techniques call for a different configuration, longer rows with more separation (my memory is weak on the details, but that was the gist of it, as I recall). Therefore, without changes in planting configurations, Green Revolution crops are not particularly fertile, and don't solve the problem they were intended to. The crops were, as I recall, distributed without adequate descriptions of the new planting configurations. In many cases where the descriptions were adequate, local farmers where simply resistant enough to change to refuse to change the configurations, and therefore the new crops failed. I understand that the Green Revolution can, indirectly, be called responsible for the current anti-Siek (my apologies for my misspelling of the term) feeling in India. Most non-Siek Indian farmers refused to change the planting configuration of the crops for the Green Revolution crops, but the Sieks did change to the correct configuration, and therefore, their relative wealth rose disproportionately, which engendered a great deal of resentment. Since the Sieks used their newfound wealth to procure education, and with it an advantage in government jobs, the problem escalated. Another problem with technological solutions, although I do not know if it was a problem at all for the Green Revolution, is that production is not the only agricultural problem. Many countries can produce enough food, but their distribution system and infrastructure are inadequate. The result is more grain for the rats to eat in the warehouses, but not more food on people's tables. In addition, most agricultural countries heavily tax farmers and subsidize industry (the exact reverse of the pattern in industrial nations). This creates serious market inefficiencies, which increasing agricultural production can only exacerbate. Does anyone have a different perspective on this question?
[PEN-L:7058] Re: Green Revolution
I have a question I would like to address to the members of the list. I raised this question in another list (REMI-L for REMI Economic and Demographic Models) and received one interesting response. But the other members of the list do not seem interested in the question. If you are wondering, I am *not* asking pen-l to "write a research paper" for me. The Head of my Department is on this list, and I would not dare. Also, this can give pen-l something to talk about that is not a U.S. topic. Zaiton Ibrahim, Newcastle, Australia [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Wed, 16 Oct 1996 14:19:20 +1000, I (Zaiton Ibrahim, [EMAIL PROTECTED], asked REMI-L: Dear to any one whom may concern, I would like to ask your opinion regarding to Green Revolution. Green Revolution seems to be an alternative solution in resolving some problems regarding to the issue of Sustainable Rural Development or SRD. It was found successful in some countries, but not some others. It could be some thing went wrong or it needs some modification in certain countries. There should be some factors involved and may be some reliable examples can help to explain them. Michael Alexander [EMAIL PROTECTED] on REMI-L answered: My understanding (and this is not my field) is that the Green Revolution was a textbook example of a technological fix which did not consider the sociological problems simultaneously. Green Revolution crops required rectangular planting in reasonable density in order to cross fertilize themselves. Traditional agricultural techniques call for a different configuration, longer rows with more separation (my memory is weak on the details, but that was the gist of it, as I recall). Therefore, without changes in planting configurations, Green Revolution crops are not particularly fertile, and don't solve the problem they were intended to. The crops were, as I recall, distributed without adequate descriptions of the new planting configurations. In many cases where the descriptions were adequate, local farmers where simply resistant enough to change to refuse to change the configurations, and therefore the new crops failed. I understand that the Green Revolution can, indirectly, be called responsible for the current anti-Siek (my apologies for my misspelling of the term) feeling in India. Most non-Siek Indian farmers refused to change the planting configuration of the crops for the Green Revolution crops, but the Sieks did change to the correct configuration, and therefore, their relative wealth rose disproportionately, which engendered a great deal of resentment. Since the Sieks used their newfound wealth to procure education, and with it an advantage in government jobs, the problem escalated. Another problem with technological solutions, although I do not know if it was a problem at all for the Green Revolution, is that production is not the only agricultural problem. Many countries can produce enough food, but their distribution system and infrastructure are inadequate. The result is more grain for the rats to eat in the warehouses, but not more food on people's tables. In addition, most agricultural countries heavily tax farmers and subsidize industry (the exact reverse of the pattern in industrial nations). This creates serious market inefficiencies, which increasing agricultural production can only exacerbate. Does anyone have a different perspective on this question?
[PEN-L:2111] Re: Green Capitalist Production
Doug wrote: B. Mitchell (whose posts, except for those on France, I generally agree with, responded to glevy's post with a list of mechanism that would force a capitalist economy to function in a more Green friendly manner, by reducing the profitability on less-Green production. Many of these mechanisms might work, IF they were implemented on a global scale. Other wise, they would just lead to more capital flight. But more importantly, on the political level, it is about as likely that these measures could be implemented under capitalist controlled govts as it would be to overthrow captialism itself. So the latter strategy would be preferable. well you can't win them all (posts being agreed with that is!). i did make the point that it had to be the a population motivated trend. that is that the govts had to be taken over by the populace, preferably via the ballot box. but on the capital flight question. this is often raised when governments do anything to tinker with the distribution of income. we get told that unless the world financial moguls agree they will vote on the policy with a withdrawal of capital. i have no doubt that there is some truth in the claim. but i also think it is grossly overrated and somewhat of a bluff. 1) even large scale capital is embodied if it is actually doing something more than speculation. 2) but a lot of environmental damage in OZ is done by small scale business which is not necessarily part of a MN conglomerate. it is simply not an option for them to pack up and go to the phillipines or wherever. they might close down but then that would be preferable although clearly it would impinge on the tax base to fund the transition. kind regards bill -- ##William F. Mitchell ### Head of Economics Department # University of Newcastle New South Wales, Australia ###*E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ### Phone: +61 49 215065 # ## ### +61 49 215027 Fax: +61 49 216919 ## WWW Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/~bill/billyhp.html
[PEN-L:2094] Re: Green Capitalist Production
Mason Clark wrote: How about this discussion: the green revolution will demand a great deal of work. For example, planting forests; developing green agriculture, saving soil, saving forests, preserving genetic variety, reducing use of chemicals of all kinds; rebuilding housing; replacing pollutional, fossil-based transportation; and on and on - restoring rivers, moving off of flood plains, moving out of earthquake zones, there's no end --- renewable energy sources --- These productions, social in nature, need to be done. Some simply MUST be done. Is there to be surplus value? Who cares? Get the work done. There's too much the impression that green means "shut it down". Stop cutting the redwoods in California is an example. Stop cutting means more, not less jobs. What's needed is replanting and nurturing of forests. Not trees by the millions. Trees by the billions. Check the numbers. Lot's of work. Even profits for nasty capitalism. Or let the govt do it if you prefer. Either way its employment, employment, employment. No more idle hands for the devil. __ Again, M Clark exibits a basic misunderstanding of Capitalism. The ONLY goal capitalist production is to make profits. It is NOT to create employment. No one on this list (or off it for that matter) would disagree that there are lots of necessary JOBS to be done in the world. Adding a list of Green jobs just expands the list. The only problem, which glevy alluded to in his short post, is that very few of these, esp. the green jobs, are profitable. So the concept of Green Capitalism is an oxymoron. B. Mitchell (whose posts, except for those on France, I generally agree with, responded to glevy's post with a list of mechanism that would force a capitalist economy to function in a more Green friendly manner, by reducing the profitability on less-Green production. Many of these mechanisms might work, IF they were implemented on a global scale. Other wise, they would just lead to more capital flight. But more importantly, on the political level, it is about as likely that these measures could be implemented under capitalist controlled govts as it would be to overthrow captialism itself. So the latter strategy would be preferable. Doug Orr [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2103] Re: Green Capitalist Production
In response to a qestion from Jerry: Mason: How are all of these jobs going to be financed? Who is going to pay? Jerry Bill Mitchell replies, in part: (i) stop all assistance to meat producing farming and farms that use chemicals and pesticides and farms that practise environmentally unsound techniques. tax their products highly (until they cease to exist). In that case, surely, it won't provide much revenue This is an old problem, and one that I think some of Bill's other suggested sources of revenue share, but this was the one that stuck out most. Nick Gomersall Luther College e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:2108] Re: Green Capitalist Production
"the concept of Green Capitalism is an oxymoron" Doug (Orr), you might want to read my article in Rethinking Marxism 7.2 on Marxist theories of capitalism and environment for a critique of this simplistic and inaccurate view. Blair Sandler
