Fellow Kossacks,
I come to this site, as I believe many of you do, because I am a systems thinker. I understand that buildings, economies, and societies function as systems. This allows me to understand why a tax on carbon will bring individual prices in line with societal costs, I'll break that down after the break. But on the same topic of prices reflecting costs, I urge kos to address the ad on the front page of the website by doing this:
TAKE DOWN THE BAG TAX AD NOW
Lets first talk about externalities. They are an economic term for external costs. It means that if I sell you something, I charge you a price, but if someone else has to pay something for that transaction to occur, they have borne a cost. Thus, price is not reflecting true cost.
Price is an important communicator of information.
Since carbon has no price, we use it willy nilly. And it is costing our economy and environment dearly. If the price of carbon reflected that cost, we would use it in a societally optimal manner. Optimal meaning individuals would make their own optimal choices, not that we would live in utopia.
On to bags.
This is what bags with a price lower than their cost do to our environment.
Since we pay nothing for them, we treat them as if they have no cost. But look at those pictures and tell me there is no cost.
We are supposed to be an intelligent community. We are supposed to be able see beyond ourselves and understand how our individual actions affect society. And we are supposed to have compassion.
That is what it means to me to be a progressive.
If it means the same thing to you, tell Kos this:
TAKE DOWN THE BAG TAX AD NOW