Ill concieved ideas number 1524
I was rudely dragged into awakefulness this morning whilst checking my email to find an email from Mike Tuffrey suggesting that the London Assembly should institute a reward card to reward people for spending their money ’sutainably’.
Its hard to know where to begin in criticising this. Its illiberal, a big government solution, it seeks to impose ethics upon people from government and it is far too open to unintended consequences.
There is the civil liberties aspect - a government controlled means of monitoring your shopping habits- any civil libertarian should be looking to oppose this right now.
I dread to imagine how much it will cost the tax payer, and really, why should government be involved in our shopping habits so directly?
More seriously however, and more subtly is the real unintended consequences which will occur.
Who is to decide what counts as ’sustainable’? They will be open to lobbying by vested interests.
You can bet that the organic lobby will campaign for organic produce to be included - acting as yet more subsidy to them. Yet is organic farming sustainable? It certainly isn’t on a global scale.
Those who make the decisions will not be able to make fully informed decisions. There are many unintended side effects to many apparently environmentally friendly activities. Some recycling may use more energy for example. Or the rush towards corn derived ethanol in the US is pricing corn out of the reach of Mexico’s poor, leading to the staple of their diet being unavailable.
This card would amount to a subsidy on those who lobby successfully. It will not be based upon the complex environmental and humanitarian problems which it claims to deal with.
What we need, as the national party is saying, is taxation on pollution at cost replacing other forms of taxation. The taxation should be as close to source as possible. This will then be reflected in price, making the complex decisions about the pollution easy to make.
This sort of gimmick is expensive, ineffective, intrusive and a waste of money. It is illiberal and shames the Liberal Democrats to have one of our elected representatives suggesting it.
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May 1st, 2007 at 11:12 am
But it is handy when potential representatives crawl out of the woodwork and expose themselves.
If people are to be told in advance which goods will garner the most rewards, this will act as a government-sponsored advertising campaign, a “What’s hot and what’s not” list drawn up by (in this case) the GLA.
It opens up the possibility not just of lobbying but of full blown corruption; paying an official £10,000 to give a government award that is worth (say) £100,000 a year to your customers (in aggregate) could easily generate a lot of buisness.
It is a daft idea, but it helps shape my voting decision. Thanks, Mike.