[perkoff]

Well, you could explain _how_ this will happen. Many of us, including me, simply don't get the argument. What differs this from assigning a monetary value to, let's say, _any_ new government license? (e.g. for opening a restaurant, or virtually anything)

Seems like a rehash of the broken window fallacy.

[Alex3917]

"Seems like a rehash of the broken window fallacy."

Unlike with the broken window fallacy, you're not just breaking a window and creating jobs to create that same window again. The jobs created are actually going to make an entirely different set of products that the market wasn't creating before due to a flaw in the way the market was designed by the people who set it up.

That's also why assigning value to carbon is different than assigning value to restaurants. Because of the way the market was designed we have the roughly the right number of restaurants, but way too much carbon.

The important thing to realize is that the market didn't just happen, it was designed by people, and it can be designed differently. In the same way that we don't allow people to, say, dumb garbage in a public park just because they may want to under some idealized market fantasy, we shouldn't allow people to dump unlimited carbon in the atmosphere either.

The market is a tool, invented by people, as the most efficient way to distribute resources to those who value them the most. But as a tool, we need to understand how it works, where it breaks down, and how to apply it effectively to create the kind of society we want to live in. We can't just treat it as some kind of religious construct, where it's magically going to write the laws, vaccinate the children, clean up dogshit from the street, etc.

That's why cap-and-trade is so good, because it uses the power of the market to create the kind of society we want to live in. (As opposed to those who argue that we should live in the kind of society the market wants to create, whatever this means, frankly I have no idea and I don't think the people who advocate it have thought it through enough to realize that it literally doesn't make any sense, it's just empty words.)

[yummyfajitas]

If we adopted broken windows as a policy (rather than a one-off surprise event), you'd be creating jobs making an entirely different set of products that the market wasn't creating before: unbreakable windows, windowless buildings and wall hangings of the outdoors (to make windowless buildings less depressing).

So your argument (if valid) would seem to support equally well an economic benefit from a broken windows policy.

It's possible that a carbon tax might stave off a future disaster, but that's vastly different from creating "the biggest economic boom in US history". That's nonsense. A carbon tax will harm our economy, though perhaps not as much as the predicted disaster to come.

Similarly, a "no dumping garbage" law would also not create an economic boom, even if it is less harmful than garbage filled parks.

[perkoff]

By the same argument, you could basically claim that reducing the carbon emissions to _zero_ would improve the economy. The value that you attach to green policies are not quantifiable in a non-arbitrary way. (In the same way that religious artifacts like Pyramids does not represent a measurable economic value.)