Without what, taxes or spending taxes on abhorrent things? History shows that these two things go hand-in-hand.
Err... that's exactly the point I'm making. Taxes are necessary to fund the civilization we live in - hateful though they may be - and an inevitable result of being taxed will go to things we don't believe in. The very first taxes were levied to pay for wars. Terrible, but necessary.
Right, someone who is against involuntary taxes, like Dr. Paul. He thinks the income tax should be abolished because he understands morality, unlike some people I know.
Right, so what's the problem then? Keep voting for him, maybe he'll get in.
You don't seem to understand the idea of "principle". Things like CAFE are doing more harm than good by simply existing - by being paid for with immoral taxes, by limiting people's freedom of choice, by reducing the opportunity for self-resonsibility.
How does it limit freedom of choice? You pays your money, you gets your choices. People rolling in cash don't give a toss about a few grand of gas-guzzler tax. I'm certainly not saying the tax is a good thing, but it certainly doesn't limit freedom of choice.
And it's worth remembering that modern regulations have made cars better today than ever before (excluding tedious arguments about older cars having more character, which is probably true, but also irrelevant).
Necessity is the mother of invention, and the necessity of meeting things like emissions regs has ensured that your average engine is massively cleaner - but also massively more powerful, refined and quiet than even those of ten years ago.
If you automatically assume that every policy is an immediate affront to your human rights then you miss the bigger picture by a huge margin.
Thankfully capitalism is an offshoot of rationality. And you're right, people dying of respiratory diseases if pretty bad for business. And yet, cigarette companies are still doing well. Possibly because people want to smoke? So let them smoke if they want to! If they get lung cancer and die, that's their problem for choosing to smoke.
You're right, but you're also forgetting - somehow - that cigarettes are addictive. That's why they sell. People don't smoke for the hell of it, they smoke because they have varying levels of psychological or physiological dependency.
Factories are a completely different story. Soot particles aren't addictive so having fewer of them in your lungs immediately becomes a good thing.
I'm discussing the philosophical roots of all our problems and you're badgering on about housing prices? How the hell many levels am I above you right now?
I'm talking about stuff that
actually affects people. House pricing, for example. You are not.
You're not digging deep enough.
I think the problem with this discussion is that you're digging too deep. You're worrying about things on a completely mathematical level rather than standing back and actually looking at how it affects your life as an individual, or affects wider society. Your whole argument is based on theoretical morality rather than rationality.
It's a bit naive to think that eventually all these new cars will become exempt from these taxes. Don't you think that the government might, oh, I don't know, remove the exemptions? Something to consider.
I'm aware of that, but then car companies will keep on improving their products to the benefit of everyone.
And on the logic of taxing dirty cars but exempting clean ones...why the hell are classic cars exempt? They're the dirtiest ones of all. So the really dirty ones are exempt, the kinda clean ones are taxed, and the really clean ones are also exempt. Does that make any sense to you at all?
Because everyone drives around in classic cars, right?
There are 200 1974-1977 Beetles like mine in the UK. Ignoring the fact that mine isn't tax exempt, that's still fewer "dirty classics" in the entire country than an average car dealership in one town sells in a month. Probably fewer than some sell in a week. And most of those Beetles aren't even on the road, like mine. So they're zero-emissions. And the ones that are on the road probably don't do 20,000 miles per year, either.
If you think classic cars are some kind of massive environmental problem, then you're
literally a massive idiot.
I'm not arguing that they aren't necessary either. I'm arguing that involuntary taxes are immoral and in violation of basic human rights that every human is entitled to. By definition, that is the most heinous crime in existence.
I don't actually disagree - I'm just saying you're looking at it entirely one-dimensionally, which would be fair enough if you weren't using it to justify something that requires looking at it in two or three more dimensions.
Edit: I think part of our problem here is that there's an irritating air of double-standards about your posts.
This discussion originally started because you appeared to be saying that we'd done enough "cleaning up" of factories, cars or whatever and that they should just let it be from now on. What I find funny is that things are really no different now than they were back in the 90s, or 80s, when clean-air regs started appearing, CFCs were banned, and cities like Los Angeles made big efforts to reduce smog.
The only difference is that those regulations - which undoubtedly changed things for the better - affected someone else, rather than yourself. Now that you've personally got the accountability of adulthood, you don't want to know. Taxes from people before you were born helped go towards clean air initiatives, but now that your own taxes are doing so, you've taken a big moral stance on it.
It's why I think you're missing the point. Only a fool would disagree that L.A. is a better place without a thick blanket of smog (unless you
really hate people from L.A.), but like-for-like changes in the modern world are automatically not okay because they affect
you.
Don't worry, I'm sure 30 years down the line any kids you have won't give a stuff that you had to pay taxes for their improved lifestyle.
That's why I'm burrowing all the way down to the root of this problem, which is the idea that government must take care of the environment for us through limits on our liberty and property, which of course is immoral. Arguing about the environment in any other capacity is a farce and an insult to the collective intelligence of humanity.
The fundamental misunderstanding you're making is assuming that the world would work if everyone just did their own shizzle the way they wanted. That's not how society works.
In the absence of some improved utopian reality you can't trust Average Joe to not royally cock things up for his fellow man. That includes environmental issues, because the human race naturally looks after number one at the expense of everything else. And I think you're completely overestimating the amount of money you're paying towards environmental stuff. Right or wrong it's probably massively less than you're paying to rehabilitate junkies or something.
I'm not saying taxation is the answer - honestly, I dislike being taxed on stuff as much as anyone else and I
guarantee I'm taxed harder here in the UK than you are over there - but it is
an answer, in the absence of something better.
Actually getting that "something better" would require a fundamental change in the way human beings think and act. It'd require people not to be selfish, and that's an in-built human characteristic.
Edit:
I think I'm going to sum up my thoughts concisely just so you can see where I stand on this.
I don't like taxes. There are too many of them, and they affect my cost of living. However, taxes also fund our modern society, whether that's education, national defense or building roads. Some money is undoubtedly going to go places we don't want, but the extent of this can be decided by exercising your right to vote.
I also think that the miniscule proportion of taxes that goes towards green initiatives is probably worth the money because it improves the standard of living for everyone, though reduced pollution (in all its forms) and essentially, by saving us money in other areas. Example: Government tightens MPG regulations, carmakers make more economical (while faster, comfier and safer) cars, you save money in fuel. Far more in savings in fact than you're paying proportionally in tax to the EPA.
No regulations, no tax? You've got the 70s and 80s, with kids dropping like flies from asthma, or lead poisoning from leaded petrol. Still, you save a bit of money, right?
It's swings and roundabouts, essentially, but you certainly lose no more than you gain.
The problem with the human race is that the majority acts for their own benefit. The difference could be illustrated by earlier this year. While Japan was cleaning up its coastline following the tsunami and handing millions of dollars of cash in as lost property, some scumbags in the UK were rioting just "because we can". The "because we can" attitude is all-pervasive even if it's not as extreme as rioting for the hell of it, and it's why - however morally wrong it is - we have to be taxed on stuff to ever get anything done. That includes environmental issues, however much you hate it - the taxes your parents paid means that the Ohio air you're breathing is better than the air they were breathing.
Guess which of the Japanese "for the good of the people" or U.K. "because we can" societies I'd prefer to live in?
