“The American people and the 133 cosponsors of this concurrent resolution understand that a carbon tax is not about protecting the environment, but rather it is a cynical attempt to raise revenue for Washington’s insatiable appetite for more and more spending.”
Federal carbon-dioxide cap-and-trade legislation was defeated in 2009 with no prospect of a retry. Now, the even less popular carbon tax is being floated by non-conservatives and wannabe-be conservatives as somehow “free market” and “efficient.” This very well financed desperado push needs a reality check in Congress.
Any new qualitative tax, and certainly one as huge and far reaching as this one, is an open sesame to bigger government and politicized energy. Some argue that there is a “free market” case for a carbon levy, but there is not a “limited government’ case.…
“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. Power is ever stealing from the many to the few.”
– Wendell Phillips (1852)
Government wealth transfers from the many to the few is called the concentrated benefits, diffuse costs problem. Certain companies and projects get the loot–one hundred cents on the dollar–while the rest of us (taxpayers) pay an incalculable fraction per redistributionist dollar.
Democracy is perverted too because the majority would say “no” if directly asked but are far too busy tending to their own (nonpolitical) lives. Michael Giberson found this in a 1935 book explaining the passage of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1932:
…Although . . . theoretically the interests supporting and opposed to legislation . . . are approximately equal, the pressures upon Congress are extremely unbalanced.
“It’s not unlawful to run an ad hominem presidency. It’s merely shameful. The great rhetorical specialty of this president has been his unrelenting attribution of bad faith to those who disagree with him. He acts on principle; they from the basest of instincts.”
– Charles Krauthammer, “There’s a Fly in My Soup,” Washington Post, May 23, 2013.
The alarmist/statist side of the energy/environmental debate is losing intellectually and now politically. The agenda of inferior energies simply cannot stand up to a combination of analytic failure, government failure, and real-world realities. The oil and gas boom … the cessation of global warming; improving air and water quality … alternative energy busts ….
And as the alarmists have become ever more argumentative and shrill, even (former) allies and sympathizers are seeing a quasi-religious, nonintellectual, even ugly aspect to the Climate Progress view of the world.…