Signal Intelligence About The LP

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Saturday, December 22, 2007

Ron Paul Should Embrace The Green Tax Shift

Leading geolibertarian economist (and former LP congressional candidate) Fred Foldvary recommends this week that Ron Paul adopt the green tax shift:
Although Ron Paul opposes new taxes, it would be consistent with his free-market opposition to subsidies and corporate welfare to favor a "green tax shift," replacing income taxes with pollution charges. It's fine to be able to sue polluters, but in some cases, the pollution affects a wide area, including the whole planet. A class-action lawsuit against a polluter such as a coal power plant implies that the polluter compensate all Americans and others affected as an on-going charge. This has the same effect as a pollution levy of the same amount.

There is not a single candidate in the Republican or Democratic Party primary elections who is advocating the green tax shift. [It] would put the free-market movement in the vanguard of environmentalism rather than dragging behind. Freedom is green!
Foldvary is exactly right. The Green Party is eclipsing the LP as America's third party, in part because of the LP's tradition of dogmatism and denial on environmental issues -- a tradition that is being challenged by a growing number of LP candidates and thinkers. Green libertarianism is the only kind of libertarianism that has a chance of significant success in the 21st century. LP Vice Chair Chuck Moulton is correct to say that environmentalism is a luxury good, in that wealthier societies demand a cleaner environment. The winning answer here is not the GOP's energy-industry cronyism, or the Democrats' nanny-state regulation, or the Green's socialist primitivism, or the LP's traditional litigationism. The winning answer is EcoLibertarianism.

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