Simon Hukin’s article “CPRS: A Taxing Question” presents a clear, compelling case for a carbon tax, not an ETS / CPRS or other variant, with logic and eloquence.

I haven’t yet committed time to developing a cogent argument for a carbon tax over an ETS. I’m glad to discover Mr Hukin has done a better job than I would have done.

A carbon tax is based on logic.

A direct tax on carbon is honest. It has integrity.

A direct carbon tax won’t distort the market or protect polluters with ETS smoke and mirrors like Rudd & co in Australia, Obama in the USA and the Brussels-based EU bureaucracy.

To understand the smoke and mirrors nature of ETS / Cap-and-Trade, watch The Story of Cap and Trade

Taxation of natural resources and pollution according to usage and impacts is equitable.

Resource and pollution based taxation would create an environment that is designed to reward clean, careful, industrious people and punish destructive, polluting, wasteful people.

To each according to the value placed upon their productivity by the market, and from each according to the value placed upon the physical resources utilised and environmental impacts inherent in that production as determined through international political agreement.

Does that make it easier for the average worker and business owner to support resource and pollution based taxation, knowing that such a taxation system can replace labour based taxation?

I fear that in our current global paradigm of economic struggle and the quest for individual monetary advancement to the detriment of ecological health, it does not.

As far as I am aware, in Australia only the Greens have introduction of a direct tax on carbon for primary energy as a policy point.

Australian Greens Policy G1: Economics: Point 25.1 “a carbon tax levied on generators of mains-supplied electricity or gas”

Note the preceding qualifier:

“implement a gradual and long term shift in the tax system from work based taxes to taxes on natural resources and pollution including…”

However, a carbon tax is only workable within a globally binding agreement for each nation to tax polluters at equivalent levels.

Politically it doesn’t have a snowflake’s chance in hell.

The elites who run the global economic and monetarist systems will never willingly make such a necessary concession of their personal power and economic domination, until its too late and the seeds of their hubris have borne the bitter fruit of global ecological catastrophy for us all.

That will remain so for as long a majority of people support the power system devised by the elites by placing their individual personal comforts ahead of any commitment to holistic solutions designed to deliver the best outcomes for the greatest numbers of people.

It is self-evident that taxation of a person’s labour in any degree is a form of economic slavery.

What is not so obvious is that most people acquise to this abuse of their liberty primarily through ignorance of any superior alternative paradigm.

People whose choices are largely based on fear and greed, or aversion and craving (as the Buddha taught), cannot see clearly the trap they are in and fail to understand that some pain and sacrifice in the short term can yield a correspondingly greater benefit in the longer term.

Henry George wrote “Progress and Poverty”, the greatest treatise on the evils of labour taxation and the virtues of resource based taxation, 130 years ago.

I suggest to anyone who wants to gain an understanding of why the world is in such a mess ecologically, economically, politically; read “Progress and Poverty”.

If we are to survive and prosper as successful custodians of our natural world, I believe that economic and taxation reform that the Greens have proposed for many years will have to be adopted globally within twenty years.

One hundred, or even fifty years, will be far too late and see us living in a hot, dirty, polluted world that is closer to the Christian conception of Hell than the mythical Garden of Eden, that we could re-create if we were mindful of our choices now.

The world is in desparate need of a spiritual revolution.

I go so far as to assert it is a necessary prerequisite, before we can have the economic, monetarist and taxation reforms necessary to safeguard our life-sustaining planetary ecological system.

That logically invokes a challenging question.

What religious vehicle is best suited to supporting a life-sustaining global spiritual revolution?

I may share my thoughts on that if enough people express an interest in knowing what I perceive in this matter.