[luciusdomitius]

Yes, externalities must indeed be settled. However, leaded petrol (same chap also invented freon (!) btw - talk about being unlucky :D) cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.

Freon would be a much more interesting example as it hurts societies in the long-term and not individuals in the short.

[KptMarchewa]

Unfortunately governments can also fail in settling externalities. For example, making it hard to extract oil domestically only shifts production to other countries, which are often bad authoritarian states.

Better way is to tax consumption, but that has never been popular in US.

[galangalalgol]

The US is a "low trust" society. We don't trust our government. Our entire system was in fact designed assuming the axiom that people in power cannot be trusted. People are not confident those tax dollars would be used to offset the externality, as opposed to a pet project. Sadly, our history would seem to make that lack of confidence rational. But, denying our government the power to govern isn't the solution, demanding (and getting) transparency and personal accountability that is meaningfully severe is.

[SkyMarshal]

Technically the US is a “high trust” society. Meaning we have institutions like rule of law, independent courts, and elections that are trusted by society to facilitate commercial and legal relations between people, rather than personal relationships and kinships.

Yes we complain a lot and criticize the government and don’t fully trust our polarized politicians, but a real “low trust” society is a far cry from what we have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_trust_and_low_trust_socie...

[luciusdomitius]

This might have been true 10 years ago, but now (just from the wiki examples):

1. More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jan/05/america-bide...

2. US tax system is not voluntary, but extremely coercive - the IRS is legendary in its blood-houndness and the US is probably the only country in the world that taxes non-resident citizens.

3. Abortion-Rights Protest Targets Homes of Kavanaugh, Roberts https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-08/abortion-...

I am not sure if the US could already be classified as a low-trust society (probably not yet), but a strong negative trend is definitely present.

[throwaway894345]

The US can have lower levels of trust than it previously had while still having levels of trust that significantly exceed the median. This seems to be a popular misunderstanding in the last decade.

I'm not sure if this is the parent's intent, but there's a whole lot of sincere "the US is a third world country" sort of argumentation going around, predicated entirely on observations that the US falls short of certain utopian ideals). "The US should continue to improve" doesn't depend on pretense that the US lags the median for a given category, and I strongly suspect that this sort of rhetoric gives way to the sort of fatalism that prevents societies from progressing ("we can't progress, we're stuck in this miserable system, etc").

[galangalalgol]

Is this getting downvotes because it doesn't speak to or support the question of the level of trust in the US government? Or is it getting downvotes because the politics of the poster are evident, and people are disagreeing with those politics? I am pretty sure the poster and I would disagree very strongly and on many things, but this post would seem to relate directly on the matter discussed. We do have a decreasing level of trust in our government, and it is beginning to have the sorts of impacts mentioned in the wiki article. Our relatively high standard of living compared to those other low trust countries hides them to some degree by making uprisings less inviting.

[throwaway894345]

I can't actually tell what the parent's politics are. "40% of Americans don't believe Biden won the election" seems like a left-leaning talking point while "protests at Kavenaugh's house" seems like a right-leaning talking point. I think it's a good thing that he wasn't transparently political.

I downvoted because the apparent argument ("the US has these imperfections, thus it follows that it ranks low among countries") is a specific incarnation of the enumeration fallacy that is both obvious and frequently employed. If this isn't what the parent intended to communicate, then he can take my downvote as a cue to be clearer in the future. My downvotes are intended as (albeit very low-resolution) constructive criticism, not ill-will or petty disagreement.

[peteradio]

I'd be willing to bet that its viewed as "low-effort" because quotes like these generally turn out to be misleading to the actual study (or the study itself has fatal structure), pretty much without fail:

> More than 40% in US do not believe Biden legitimately won election – poll

Political polling is seen by some as more of a driver of opinion than an extraction of one.

[danaris]

Taxing consumption is inherently regressive. By its nature, it places a disproportionate amount of the burden on those least able to pay for it.

[jcadam]

There are ways to address that. For example - exempting certain things like staple food items.

[danaris]

No, there really aren't. You can mitigate the regressive nature of consumption taxes, but you can't eliminate them.

Fundamentally, poor and middle-class people spend a higher percentage of their annual income on goods and services than rich people do. There just isn't enough stuff that one could ever want to buy (or services to partake in) for rich people to spend the same proportion annually.

The best you'd be able to manage is limiting your consumption taxes to things that only very wealthy people can afford in the first place, like superyachts. But at that point, a) you're not managing to bring in a huge amount of revenue with it, and b) you might as well just raise the higher income tax brackets, or add taxes on wealth over $X amount.

[jcadam]

If you could replace income tax with a national sales tax, I'd be all for it. The problem is, everyone knows any consumption based taxes will be in addition to the current taxes on productivity (e.g., income tax).

In any case, what the govt doesn't take in taxes, it can just take via inflation.

Wealth confiscation via inflation is great! it doesn't require politicians to justify higher taxes to their constituents (and thus face the wrath of their voters), and it can be implemented by unaccountable and unelected officials at the Fed.

[luciusdomitius]

Yes, but it is as socially unfair as government services being charged on for-profit basis. Or even a bit more.

I am the most anti-socialist person I know and even to me, inflation is too cruel of a tax.

[Mountain_Skies]

I my state, local sales taxes (which are a consumption tax) are hugely popular, especially in conservative areas. The reason is simple: voters know upfront what the taxes going to be used for (usually education related capital expenses and road improvements), when the tax will expire, and that it will only be used in the county instead of being shipped off somewhere else to be administered and a portion skimmed off. Each time they come up for renewal, they usually get passed by a large margin. So maybe the problem isn't that people don't like consumption taxes but that they don't like taxes disappearing into a black hole with dubious or non-existent benefits or even used to create negative value to the community.

[dpark]

> leaded petrol cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.

This is the same fallacious thinking “libertarians” fall into when they think civil court will solve for most regulations/codes. The burden of proving harm is too high. Probably hundreds of millions were spent proving that leaded gasoline was unsafe. No criminal prosecution could have accomplished that. They simply don’t have the resources.

And who would they have prosecuted anyway? The gasoline companies weren’t actually the ones causing the harm. It was the billions of people driving around burning the stuff.

There’s a reason we end up with laws regulating specific things like this. It’s untenable for the courts to handle otherwise.

[luciusdomitius]

In case you are actually asking a question - most environmental guidelines in today's EU cities are the result of court cases. Both my hometown and the city I currently live in have been found guilty of neglecting air quality multiple times and ordered to take action. And yeah - in a libertarian (actually an-cap) world it wouldn't be a city, but a municipal services corporation with participatory ownership (a la UK Premier League).

But then again I am not really an anarcho-capitalist, but an extremely mild minarchist (imagine Raegan without his naiveness or Thatcher without her inferiority complex). So even this doesn't represent my opinion.