Carbon Taxation: Remembering When Ken Green (AEI) Went from Aye to Nay

MasterResource ^ | May 13, 2015 | By Robert Bradley Jr.

[Brad from Tennessee]

“Even in flush economic times, carbon taxes would be bad policy. When economies are already laboring under too much spending and are at diminishing-return levels of taxation, implementing a carbon tax would be a mistake.”

– Kenneth Green, Dissecting the Carbon Tax, The American, July 13, 2012.

Open-mindedness is a mark of scholarship. And some great lights of classical-liberal social thought in the 20th century changed their minds for theoretical/empirical reasons from a utilitarian perspective.

F. A. Hayek began as a democratic socialist. Milton Friedman started as a FDR New Dealer and Keynesian. [1] Friedman later in life even moved away from his (naive) view of a fixed-monetary rule where, as he once put it, a computer program could manage the money supply. [2] Turns out that ‘money supply’ is not a fixed, known quantity; turns out that money is a government monopoly subject to politics.

In resource thought, Julian Simon began as a Malthusian. [3] But the data told a different story. The number of human beings and progress measures were positively, not negatively, correlated. The Malthusians, and now neo-Malthusians, were wrong, so Simon changed his mind. . .

[SkyDancer]

Here. Have one of these:

[jsanders2001]

The founding fathers would be pissed if they even thought a government was going to create a tax out of thin air but yet it seems they’ve done it. Global warming set the narrative and carbon tax is the result...