To me, taxes should be levied but only at levels necessary for as limited a government that we can get away with, and no more government than that. Just enough to keep an ordered society.
Related: Then What Do You Do? Well, if You Are a Democrat You Raise Taxes
Not a Society that is ordered around (which Big Government is wont to do). Just enough to let us that are in that Society make our own decisions and not have someone or something making them for us. Once again, though, Treehugger outs itself.
I’m usually very careful with throwing out the word “totalitarian.” Hyperbole should be used sparingly because of its connotations of a police State.
Unfortunately, as we have seen here in NH during the pandemic, it is getting harder to NOT use it if one has the definition that totalitarianism means an absence of Individual Choice.
The phrase that already drives the Left crazy, “Taxation is Theft” really can be redefined as “Taxation is Totalitarian” because some go WAY off the Rhetorical Cliff concerning taxation:
NH State Rep. Michael Cahill (D-Newmarket): “Since we are refusing to raise revenues to fund needed programs, to fund services to disabled, for example, have you looked at euthanasia?”
But I digress.
The post, Shoppers Have Become Less Concerned About Single-Use Plastics, in which the wailing was that the Eco-Socialist that are all up in arms about the use of single-use plastics, were wailing that ordinary folks decided that protection against the Pandemic by using single-use plastics was much more important than the Enviros struggle to ban them because of GAIA or something. They hate the idea that you and I walk to a different set of priorities. So, when that happens, what is their remedy?
GraniteGrok:
Of course the pandemic needed (and still needs) to be reined in, aided by stricter hygiene measures, but to allow one (public health) catastrophe to fuel an (environmental) catastrophe struck me as foolishly short-sighted.
Unless you are willing to live in a totalitarian State where individual choices (where choice is the quantification of Freedom) are strictly limited, one must allow for trade-offs. Hardly ever are you going to get a binary situation – and people are going to have their own sense of what their priorities are going to be within large ranges of those choices.
The fundamental question then becomes: Who chooses? Do you choose for yourself or does someone else demand they make that choice for you? If you would both make the same choice, no harm, no foul. But if they are different? A dilemma.
Katherine, how would you approach that dilemma?
Of course, the author, Katherine (who would ban single-use plastics in a heartbeat (just like US Senator Diane Feinstein would guns if she was in charge), never responded. In fact, none of the TH authors generally do with the lone exception of Lloyd. Frankly, I think it adds to a post when the author responds but I guess that’s just me. That said, others did and proved my point above (reformatted, emphasis mine):
cascadian12:
Tax it. Tax all plastic packaging from bottles to bags to shrink wrap, which will be a disincentive to buy it, and the tax can be used to fund plastic cleanup, AND make plastic manufacturers responsible for recycling. Without producer responsibility, they end up using the environment as their dumping ground (called an externality in econ talk), which ends up killing fish and wildlife and in the fish we eat. This isn’t totalitarianism. This is managing the problem. Right now, the problem is literally out of control.She obviously missed the point I tried to make – Totalitarianism is all about mandating someone else’s behavior. My lens is Freedom, their lens isn’t. No problem there in having Government force behaviors they believe to achieve their narrow end. And it continues:
Candice:
I think it would have to be a very high tax, or people would begin to see the higher price as the new normal. But I like the idea, especially if those funds were used for clean up and prevention.MikeDr7:
I think the idea is that yes, the tax is high, which drive people to alternatives. So you can buy your bag of peanuts in a plastic bag and pay $2 for the convenience of the packaging, or your can bring your own bag from home and buy peanuts from the bulk aisle without having to pay for any packaging.MikeDr7:
This is the solution. We know it works. On a related subject, a couple of municipalities in the US (including mine, Seattle) have started taxing sugar-sweetened soft drinks (as has Mexico). In Seattle, consumption has dropped 30%. The tax is designed to steer behavior. For a 2 liter of soda, the tax is an extra $1.19, which can more than double the cost. For a carton/box of twelve 12-ounce cans, the tax is $2.52.
And I responded:
GraniteGrok:
The tax is designed to steer behavior.
And in all of your “solutions”, Government is taking away Choice. All of you seem rather happy that the Force of Government, via taxes, will demand behavior of people they otherwise wouldn’t choose for themselves. The very definition of totalitarianism under the guise of “health and safety”.
My question to you all is in respect to a broader view – do you think Government would stop at just mandating behavior that YOU approve of? What would be the Limiting Factor? Where now would be that Line that should not be crossed?
What would be that Line, for each of you, that would cause you to go “uh-oh, that’s too far?“. After all, you all just ran roughshod over others, what would cause you to stop Government continuing that bullying?
Once people have had a taste of Power, they often want more.
I’ll add this – where is your courage to simply make it illegal NOW? Why not just make it illegal now instead of “mostly illegal” in slow motion?
I see this with the anti-smokers all the time – they lack the courage to put their conditions into REAL action and go full stop instead of continually just moving up the age limits and artificially raising its total price.
Sorry, I disagree with Cass Sunstein that a proper role of Government is to “nudge” people into behaviors they believe are beneficial to those people. That’s NOT the proper role of Government. Neither is the demand, by dint of fines totally unhinged from the actual data on the ground, to have people wear masks. For those people, all I can say is to go back and read (if they can read and if they can understand those most excellent of words:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
The Proper Role of Government is to ensure that no one, including Government, trespass Rights. Not to keep people from using single use plastics, not to drink soda, or a gazillion other things that someone thought was “bad for you”. How far we have fallen from those illustrative words to the banal of everyday things.
