'But if the price of transportation isn't adequately reflecting the costs of environmental damage, their choices are based on false information.'
But then, as I posted just now, nearly three quarters of UK fuel prices are tax. The explicit point of the tax is to factor in the environmental costs. The net effect is nil for the environment (or negative on your estimate), since no car journeys appear to be foregone because of the cost. For the chancellor, the effect is wholly positive - more money to spend on sending troops to Iraq, or maybe building hospitals, but whichever it is, it is unlikely to be subject to any meaningful democratic scrutiny.
Maybe you think that fuel should be ten, or twenty times its cost of production. That might achieve a result, but what result, exactly? That car travel should be the preserve of the rich, and that the rest should go on buses, or shanks' pony. Why not just pass a law saying that women and people of colour should be barred from driving, if you think that cars should be resticted to elites? (that's a rhetorical, not a serious proposition, let me add, before I get into any trouble)
That apart, I think the methodology of fixing prices to introduce non-economic exigencies is at best confused. It is an attempt to assimilate all of social reality into the market, when it is precisely the failure of the market to accomodate social reality that indicates its limitations. Put another way, it is an attempt to save the outer husk of the market mechanism, in the face of its failure to approximate human needs. The attempt to make prices reflect non-economic goods misunderstands what prices are: *spontaneous* expressions of the existing division of labour, in the exchange ratios of goods. The spontaneous character of prices is a necessary appearance of labour-time in a non-planned economic order. The theory that prices are only a conventional set of arrangements understates their spontaneous character. Practical attempts to fix prices usually involve some kind of legally enforced instrument, like a license, that attains the character of a commodity only by virtue of government enforcement. Over time, market exigencies generally work around them, or engulf them, or take hold of them to make more profits. As a conservative impulse to contain change, they generally work to reinforce the existing distribution of goods. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20040924/b57a02db/attachment.htm>