Will Wilkinson asks whether it's useful to refrain flying in order to prevent global warming. Answer: no. Any one consumer's demand will not impact the level of carbon emitted, just as no consumer who refrains from eating meat will actually cause the amount of meat consumed to fall; the random mismatch in the supply and demand in your local market for chicken will far exceed the number of chickens you might have eaten for any time frame you choose.
So why do it? To create a cultural norm about carbon emissions, or chicken eating, says Will. I have a different intuition, which is that if you want everyone to do something, you are morally bound to do it whether or not they follow suit. I am rethinking that--but I have a sense that those sorts of illogical bourgeois committments to virtue are precisely what allow us to overcome collective action problems without coercion.
Your intuition sounds roughly similar to Kant's Catagorical Imperative, "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law." I think this is a tad absolutist and distressingly impractical, and puts you on a very lonely path full of disappointment at the world.
"but I have a sense that those sorts of illogical bourgeois committments to virtue are precisely what allow us to overcome collective action problems without coercion."
But Megan, why operate upon the premise that such things even require either coercion or informal pillorying. I believe that in a free society we can have our cake and eat it too. I can fly, eat beef, drive a Hummer all free of trendy bourgeois opprobrium, and at the same time not fear that the alternative for my (collective) clean conscience will be totalitarianism.
I disagree that it's going to help on either level. By cutting back independently you decrease the incentives for a binding solution - appeals to bourgeois virtue isn't gonnna do much for reducing the use of a fungible commodity with relatively light diminishing returns on higher levels of use.
While the best aggregate outcome may be the one where everybody signs on to reductions, for each individual entity, the best outcome for them is for everybody but them to sign on. Thus, if there are entities that are going to play hardball in advocating their interests (and for the issue in question we know there are) a voluntarily implemented partial solution will increase their incentives to oppose a binding solution.
This is why it's so damn hard to negotiate treaties on GHGs. If you don't get everybody to sign on up front, or the incentives not to sign on later are even higher. It's also why it's important to include rules for developing countries in the first pass - if we don't get them to in the system now, we're even less likely to later.
I'd also point out that reducing one's flying doesn't have any inherent moral valence. If you're made sufficiently worse off by doing so, somebody else should be reducing their flights instead, which is what the price signals need to be there to clarify. Categorical imperatives only make sense when when you can generalize about the moral valence of the category of actions - if there's a categorical imperative against something, it should follow that the socially optimal level of it is none.
if you want everyone to do something, you are morally bound to do it whether or not they follow suit
No, you're not. Is every sailor morally bound to contribute to the Lighthouse Fund*? If so, are you in favor of a rule system where it always pays to be immoral?
*To clarify: I am referring to the most famous illustration of the free rider problem. All sailors would like to have a lighthouse at a certain place, but it can only be built if enough of them contribute. If the contributions are voluntary, the sailors will never raise enough money, since every single sailor will count on the contribution of the others.
I'm honestly confused by this one. Admittedly that may just be because I don't know a ton of economics.
Nonetheless, it seems like the same logic should apply here as anywhere else. Choosing not to fly ought to move the demand curve so that one fewer flight is demanded at the current price. So the equilibrium ought to have slightly less carbon emissions.
Of course it can't quite actually work like that. The relevant quantity supplied is number of planes flown, so you can't get one less passenger's worth of carbon. So that means in actuality, you get either no reduction, or a whole plane's worth of reduction. Obviously the probability of the latter is a lot higher. But still, multiply the low probability of having an effect by the large impact, and you get that the expected value of the impact is roughly what it intuitively would be.
Put an alternate way: if enough people refuse to fly, it would have an impact. Why think there's some point at which those choices start adding up to an effect, rather than just increasing linearly with the number of people who make that decision?
(Again, like I said--I don't know this material incredibly well. I just have seen claims like yours many times, and I've never seen a clear explanation).
I think there have been too many posts on this blog, especially recently. 10-12 a day is kind of a lot. Can there be less quantity? I feel like I have work to do every time I check my RSS feed for this site.
Any one consumer's demand will not impact the level of carbon emitted, just as no consumer who refrains from eating meat will actually cause the amount of meat consumed to fall; the random mismatch in the supply and demand in your local market for chicken will far exceed the number of chickens you might have eaten for any time frame you choose.
Will is very, very wrong here. Yes, in all probability, your additional demand will not change the level of carbon emitted, because it's not likely to change the airline schedule and create another flight. There is, however, a small chance that your added demand will be the decisive input that causes a new flight to be scheduled, and in that case your impact toward climate change is tremendous. Consider both these possibilities together -- a high chance of no effect and a low chance of extremely high effect -- and you'll find that your expected marginal contribution to global warming is roughly the per-person emission from each flight.
I always like to think back to the two classic examples where voluntary and coerced collectives can be analyzed side by side. First their are the pilgrims that almost got wiped out, because they engaged in a communal system when arriving to America. Once they went to every man for themselves (which really means you are responsible for managing your own relationships and let the threat of exit regulate all parties to behave with one another).
The second example is 1950's Chinese ag. While the farmers were coming out of the stone age post WWII they needed advanced equipment that no farmer could afford based on the size of the plots chairman Mao gave them. So they formed collectives and shared the costs and part of the harvest. Chairman Mao heard of the success and began forcing people to split the costs and share the benefits. Of course once you switch to coerce collectivization you create a single stage prisoner's dilemma (equilibrium is to defect). And if you have all your farmers being lazy and you don't trade, well you get a famine.
The sailors problem is quite easy to solve. Charge a fee to anyone that lands after dark to transfer wealth from those that don't pitch in for the lighthouse to those that do.
I think that people ought to practice what they preach, but things (obviously) aren't black and white. In the example being discussed, some guy was weighing the costs of his purchasing a plane ticket to New Zealand and the benefits of attending his sister's wedding. In that vein, he'd better make sure his sister never has any children, either. Their lifetime carbon emissions would be even worse than his becoming a global jetsetter.
In a broader sense, I do feel that leading by example is a good thing and that being a hypocrite is a bad thing. However, I think that one should always keep one's priorities in order. I think one's first responsibility is to be a good person (a good friend, a good son, a good sister, a good mother, etc.) and to try to enhance our own lives and others' lives as much as possible. This should not be sacrificed for some high-minded notion of guardianship over the planet. I think this latter endeavor is important, but certainly not at the sacrifice of other, more significant aspects of life.
Matt Rognile,
Sorry, but the chances that the marginal demand from any one flier would ever cause an extra flight to be scheduled are not just "small," they are astronomically low, and any effect on the number of flights would most likely be swamped by the effects random "noise" in the system, like flight cancellations due to weather.
That said, I'm not convinced that the effect on carbon emissions of a single extra flier really would be immeasurably small. Even though the total number of flights almost certainly would not increase, the weight of the passenger and his baggage would cause some increase in fuel consumption, and therefore an increase in carbon emissions. Even though the effect may be infinitesimal for any one flight, the cumulative effect from a lifetime of flying would probably be significant.
Mixner: "That said, I'm not convinced that the effect on carbon emissions of a single extra flier really would be immeasurably small."
Maybe this will convince you, in 2007 there were 29.6 million flights worldwide.
http://www.skycontrol.net/reports/oag-review-of-2007-more-than-295-million-flights-worldwide-highest-ever-number-recorded-largest-year-on-year-increase-since-2004/
The source doesn't have a stat on average number of passengers per flight, but even if you managed to fly 3 times a day 365 days a year (which would leave you with little time to do anything else by the time you get through security) you will have managed to be on 0.003% of the flights. If you estimate say 150 passengers per plane you will be responsible for 0.0000225% of global passenger traffic.
Mixner said:
Sorry, but the chances that the marginal demand from any one flier would ever cause an extra flight to be scheduled are not just "small," they are astronomically low, and any effect on the number of flights would most likely be swamped by the effects random "noise" in the system, like flight cancellations due to weather.
Maybe I should be a little more explicit about the logic here. Say that the typical plane servicing this route carries about 250 passengers. Roughly speaking, every time you increase the demand by 250, the airline is going to schedule another plane. Without knowledge of where the cutoff lies, it's impossible to know whether you individually will "tip the balance" and cause a new plane to be scheduled, but ultimately it's reasonable to assume that the chance of this is around 1/250. Your expected contribution to carbon emissions, then, will be 1/250 * (effect of each plane flight).
But this is exactly what we get if we just look at the carbon emissions emitted per person on a plane. This is why I think that the "per-person" metric is the most reasonable.
Admittedly, there are many complications, like the ones discussed by previous posters: weather, scheduling difficulties, etc. But in almost every case, there is a "tipping point" where an additional flier will cause the airline to change its schedule, and when we incorporate the enormous marginal effect of a flier at the tipping point, we get an expected marginal effect for all fliers that generally corresponds to the per-person emissions of the flight.
The "it's so little it won't make a difference" line of argument is occasionally valid, but it's usually a logical fallacy.
Jay,
Sorry, no, it doesn't convince me. I'm not sure why you would think the ratio of a single flier to the total number of fliers supports the claim that the carbon emissions from that single flier are immeasurably small.
According to the IATA, modern airplanes average 3.5 litres of fuel per 100 passenger kilometres. And each kilogram of fuel burned emits 3.16 kg of CO2.
Megan,
It's good that you're re-thinking your intuition.
It's too bad that kind of moralism had to be dragged in in the first place.
One of the advantages of refraining from that kind of moralizing is that if you make a mistake, at least you didn't wrongly accuse others of being immoral.
But hey, we all have our preferred methodology.
Matt R,
Your assumptions are highly implausible. At least some, and perhaps all, of the demand for 250 additional seats would probably be satisfied from unused capacity on existing flights. But even if we accept the 250 figure, that may exceed the total number of flights the average flier takes in his lifetime. It doesn't make much sense to try and estimate a flier's marginal contribution to carbon emissions from dubious assumptions about his effect on the number of flights when we have actual data on aircraft fuel efficiency and emissions per passenger kilometer.
I am rethinking that--but I have a sense that those sorts of illogical bourgeois committments to virtue are precisely what allow us to overcome collective action problems without coercion.
I would like Megan to advance a few examples of where, exactly, we have "overcome collective action problems without coercion". Like how we cleaned up America's air without the Clean Air Act? How we freed the slaves without the Emancipation Proclamation? How we preserved the wilderness without establishing government-mandated wilderness and national parks? How we made sure every child got an education without ordering children to attend school by law? How we defended the country from foreign attack through a network of voluntary citizens' militias funded through charitable contributions? How we kept our streets safe with voluntary Block Patrols, without resorting to pesky police, arrests, and courts of law?
None of the important things have been solved, except by government. The things that have been left up to private, voluntary efforts haven't been solved. Private charity is a wonderful thing - mostly for things that aren't so important that they have to be actually solved. And for building the public will to get government to solve the really important issues.
brooksfoe,
You really have become blinded by your myopic view that equates "collective action" with government and coercion. The vast majority of collective action by human beings to solve problems is voluntary, from parents acting collectively to raise their children, to the employees of corporations acting collectively to provides goods and services to their customers, to entire nations acting collectively to trade with one another.
No one is saying we don't need laws. But we should only use laws as a last resort, in cases where voluntary mechanisms are not adequate. In case it has escaped your attention, the trend of the last several decades throughout the industrialized democracies has been away from central planning and public control of resources, and towards deregulation, private ownership, and market-based solutions.
Mixner said:
Your assumptions are highly implausible. At least some, and perhaps all, of the demand for 250 additional seats would probably be satisfied from unused capacity on existing flights. But even if we accept the 250 figure, that may exceed the total number of flights the average flier takes in his lifetime. It doesn't make much sense to try and estimate a flier's marginal contribution to carbon emissions from dubious assumptions about his effect on the number of flights when we have actual data on aircraft fuel efficiency and emissions per passenger kilometer.
I'm not sure whether we really have any argument, because your last sentence, supporting the use of statistics like "emissions per passenger kilometer," is in perfect agreement with what I advocate.
My argument is that the rate of emissions per passenger is a good estimate for the expected carbon emissions that will arise from your decision to take a flight. It's important to note, by the way, what I mean by "expected": I'm not using the term in the colloquial sense, where the "expected" value is the one most likely to happen, but rather in the mathematical and economic sense, where if we find the "expectation" we will get the average (with respect to probability) level of carbon emissions that such a decision will create.
When you say that most of the demand for additional seats will be satisfied with "unused capacity," you fall into a logical trap. Yes, under most circumstances, your additional purchase will simply cause an otherwise empty seat to be filled. But there is the small but real chance that your purchase will be the one that prompts the airline to create another flight -- and if that happens, you're going to cause a tremendous amount of additional carbon emissions.
Don't think that this is possible? Again, that's a fallacy, albeit a very common one. An airline's decision to create a flight seems so incredibly "large," and a customer's decision to book a ticket seems so "small," that it's hard to imagine a 1-person change in the latter ever affecting the former. Yet upon critical examination, it's clear that this must happen. If 1000 customers want to buy tickets, the airline may book (say) 5 flights. If 10,000 customers want tickets, the airline will probably book 50 flights. Somewhere -- indeed, at many places -- in the middle, an incremental change in demand of one ticket will cause the creation of an entirely new flight.
Does the fact that airline flight schedules are planned ahead of time, often before you decide to buy a ticket, somehow change this logic? Surprisingly enough, the answer is still no. Airlines base their decisions to schedule future flights on expressed consumer demand. As a result, even if your decision to purchase at ticket has absolutely no effect at the time of your flight, it may have an effect later on, when the airline is deciding how many flights to run.
Yes, the chance that your decision to fly will change airlines' consumer data to the point where they decide to schedule more flights is very, very low -- but the effect if they do is very, very large. Like before, these magnitudes essentially cancel out, leaving the expected impact of your decision to fly equal to the per-passenger carbon emissions from that flight.
One good way to think about all this is to consider a curve that measures supply relative to demand. If you smooth it out a little, it'll look roughly like a straight line: the number of flights offered will be proportional to the number of tickets demanded. Of course, it's not straight -- it's flat, shoots up, is flat, etc., capturing the fact that most ticket purchases won't cause an additional flight to be created, but that a few will.
Unless you have incredibly good information about the aviation industry, you don't know your position on this line -- yes, in all probability, you're on the flat part, but you might be on the part that rapidly ascends, where your additional purchase will cause a new flight to be commissioned. On average, the impact of your purchase will be equal to the "slope" of the smoothed line, which is, again, the level of per-passenger carbon emissions that result from your purchase.
There is a much better example Will could have considered. Do you obey water restrictions in a drought - after all you may only be using 200 litres/day in a total of say 300Ml.
Mixner:
No one is saying we don't need laws. But we should only use laws as a last resort, in cases where voluntary mechanisms are not adequate.
I agree. In other areas, such as the ones you cite (parents' natural and cultural desire to care for their children, corporate desire to provide services in exchange for money), there is no collective action "problem". The idea of "collective action problems" doesn't mean that people never act collectively without some kind of compulsion; that would be ludicrous. What it means is that in some cases, collective actions which would benefit everyone are not undertaken because of the near-term incentives for individuals and small groups not to undertake them. Freeing the slaves was good for America in the long run, but bad for slaveholders in the short term. Cleaning up the country's air was good for America in the long run, but bad for automakers and manufacturers and power companies in the short term.
I don't think it's impossible that some genuine collective action problems have been resolved through voluntary mechanisms of altruistic self-organization. It's just that I literally can't think of any at the moment, and the examples you provide don't qualify.
Some examples of collective action problems that are solved largely or entirely through norms: queuing, littering, merging.
It seems like the real reason not-flying doesn't save any carbon is that oil and jet fuel are fungible commodities; stipulating that my decision not to fly reduces the amount of jet fuel consumed for that flight, this just means someone else is going to buy and burn the fuel. Similarly, in The Doctor's example, if there's a drought and no organized mechanism or strong social norm to prevent the violation of water restrictions, if you don't use that water someone else will. Which goes back to Megan's point: it's important to foster social norms that promote not-screwing-other-people-over. That or legal restrictions are really the only solution we have to this kind of collective action problem.
I still think it'd be easier to pass a carbon tax and then not worry about carbon consumption, though.
I have friends who are vegetarians/vegans and they always give the "practice what you preach" justification when I ask why the engage in such a meaningless activity.
Most of these friends are also very liberal, so I then ask if they believe in equality. Most admit to being strongly egalitarian and in favor of radical increases in taxes (in a couple of cases, I'm talking about people who want everyone's incomes to be "equal"). So, I then ask why they don't feel the need to "practice what they preach" and give away a massive share of their income (in the case of the people who favor equal incomes for all, I ask why they don't give away every dollar they make over the median income). Needless to say, the responses are a bit muddled.
Practicing what you preach, then seems to be something that is done when the costs are low enough. (And possibly visible enough to others?) Then I guess it's just ignored at other times.
The vast majority of collective action by human beings to solve problems is voluntary, from parents acting collectively to raise their children, to the employees of corporations acting collectively to provides goods and services to their customers, to entire nations acting collectively to trade with one another
Whatever the merits of your argument, these are weird examples. Employees, for instance, are not acting collectively voluntarily but within a formally cosntituted organization with a hierarchy and established rules and procedures. Countries trading with each other are engaging in transactions, which yes is voluntary but I don't see the public good-collective action dimension. As for parents raising children, there is a huge amount of shirking in most relationships. Just ask anyone about his/her spouse.
brooksfoe,
A couple others to add:
Tipping, and, I suspect, shoplifting and other petty thievery (which may be formally illegal but most people don't do it even if they know they won't get caught).
In general, in the US and, I assume, basically all other first world countries, interactions with merchants are infused with social norms that largely replace official law enforcement, with much more subtlety than the police would be able to manage. They are so much a fabric of society that you just don't notice them until you have to shop in an unfamiliar social environment.
brooksfoe,
I agree. In other areas, such as the ones you cite (parents' natural and cultural desire to care for their children, corporate desire to provide services in exchange for money), there is no collective action "problem". The idea of "collective action problems" doesn't mean that people never act collectively without some kind of compulsion; that would be ludicrous. What it means is that in some cases, collective actions which would benefit everyone are not undertaken because of the near-term incentives for individuals and small groups not to undertake them.
Well, make up your mind. What is a "collective action problem," as you are using the phrase here? Define it. If a "collective action problem" is by definition a problem that requires a coercive solution, then Megan obviously cannot provide any examples of collective action problems that have been solved without coercion. If, on the other hand, a "collective action problem" may be a problem that can be solved without coercion, then any problem that can be solved by voluntary collective action may be a "collective action problem." As I said, the vast majority of collective action by human beings to solve problems is voluntary. Like many others here, you seem to be throwing around the phrase "collective action problem" without having any clear idea of what you mean by it. State your definition, and then perhaps we can provide the examples you asked for.
Whatever the merits of your argument, these are weird examples. Employees, for instance, are not acting collectively voluntarily but within a formally cosntituted organization with a hierarchy and established rules and procedures.
All human action is obviously constrained by laws and rules of various kinds, whether it's workplace activity by the employees of a company or any other kind of activity. If this is supposed to mean the action isn't voluntary, no action is voluntary.
Countries trading with each other are engaging in transactions, which yes is voluntary but I don't see the public good-collective action dimension.
Huh? Trade is a primary means of increasing wealth. It is obviously a collective action because it requires at least two parties.
As for parents raising children, there is a huge amount of shirking in most relationships.
So what? The point is that, in general, parents act collectively to raise their children. The family is the basic unit of social organization in all human societies. It's the most basic form of collective action we have.
Statists and lefties need to let go of this ridiculous notion that "collective action" is synonymous with action dictated by government laws or regulations. The vast majority of collective action by human beings has nothing to do with laws.
Doesn't the same argument require you to vote
for your favorite candidate, even if he has
no chance of winning?
Coase Theorem.
Schelling Point.
Yes, a more patient man would explain, but a less patient one would use the word "fucktard".
Some examples of collective action problems that are solved largely or entirely through norms: queuing, littering, merging.
Yes, see, there you go. Those are pretty good examples. However, proper merging is taught in legally mandated driving schools and backstopped by a society that puts plenty of traffic police on the roads, creating a general culture of obedience to rules. Littering is illegal and was hugely reduced by government-led public service campaigns in the 1970s. And queing is often enforced by private businesses or public entities on whose territory the queues form. In societies where such behavior is not enforced, queuing doesn't happen, and the transition from no-queuing to queuing in places like Singapore has involved heavy government coercion in public space. Finally, none of these behaviors involve situations like the carbon costs of flying, where there are huge economic and convenience benefits to the behavior and gigantic corporations actively encouraging people to engage in it because that's their livelihood.
But generally these are pretty good examples.
For MattXIV, the collective action problem critique of Coasian bargains is the entirety of the subject matter at hand. Of course Coasian bargaining works in many situations, and those do not result in collective action problems.
Another example of a collective action problem is the usefulness of refraining from employing stupid insults on blog discussions, which creates a better discussion environment for everyone but which requires some individuals to sacrifice the tremendous satisfaction they derive from employing playground insults against people with whom they disagree. This is a situation in which only norms, rather than enforcement, can be employed, but it's obvious that the end result leaves more playground name-calling than would really be ideal.
Mixner
I get the feeling that you are talking past people here. "Collective action" for most of us here means a very specific thing, not merely individuals acting in some collective or cooperative fashion, but in the fairly specific sense defined in Mancur Olson's "The Logic of Collective Action."
Loosely, this involves situations where there is a public good (i.e., some benefit enjoyable by all of a group of people, perhaps even by everyone) but no formal means of compelling everyone to contribute to the provision of the good, so that there is an incentive for individuals to shirk payment o their share. The solution is often creation of an organization that privatizes some other benefit so that members of the group affected (see above)will have an incentive to join the organization, which can then charge them for the cost of providing the public good. Think of agricultural cooperatives where holding back supply is the key to maintaining an oligoploy price. The incentive for any individual producer is to let others join the coop and hold back supply so that the individual can sell his/her full production at the oligopoly price. So in order to avoid this, the coop has to provide other benefits to induce members to join (e.g., selling fdertilizer at below the market price) or else get the government to engage in some coercive activity (e.g., The Florida Citrus Commission).
The reason is questioned your examples above is that none of them fit into this framing of collective action problems.
Gene, that's not exactly right. The examples Mixner has given are, in fact, instances of collective action. The term is as broad and as broadly applicable as he imagines it to be. But they aren't pertinent, because they are situations in which the collective action problem has been solved (usually because of selective incentives and/or small group sizes and/or the existence of easily monitored and enforceable social norms). The existence of collective action problems that have easy and obvious solutions does not, unfortunately, imply that collective action is always easy.
Megan, on the other hand, is slightly less confused than Mixner. But only slightly. She misunderstands the argument made by Henry Farrell and me and the liberals who understand the collective action problem (and based on my reading of the comments here, there are, sadly, as few of them as there are libertarians willing to admit that the problem exists). It is not that the collective action problem prevents the people of NJ from making a contribution to the tax me fund (obviously this is not true, because some people contributed). Nor is it necessarily that withholding taxes is a solution to the collective action problem. She is correct that there is no strategic value to withholding. This is not like a repeated PD game, where punishing your counterpart for defecting in this round can compel him or her to cooperate in the next. (Note that withholding, while not a solution per se, is an equilibrium, again obviously given the behavior we observe.)
What we are (or, perhaps I should say I am) arguing is, rather, that withholding in this case is a reasonable (some would even say rational) course of action to take, even by people who do not object to being taxed. Yes, some NJ residents are free-riding here. The rest are merely imagining that everyone else will free-ride, and not contributing their money to a lost cause.
As to Mixner's bizarre, insistent question, about why these people don't just hold a bake sale (and I have no idea why he keeps asking me to hold a bake sale, as I am not a resident of New Jersey), I really don't have an answer. I'm guessing it may have to do with limited time and energy, and that here the previously misguided question of fairness might start to become relevant...
I made (at least) one error: Megan is only half right that there is no strategic value to withholding. She's right that we cannot compel others to contribute by withholding. But withholding is a good strategy because it is a best response conditional on the expected responses of others. This is why just focusing on the free-rider part of the problem, as Mixner has done in the rare instances where he's evinced an understanding of collective action, is misguided. If I am not predisposed to free ride, I may nonetheless not contribute on the assumption that no one else will.
Gene, that's not exactly right. The examples Mixner has given are, in fact, instances of collective action. The term is as broad and as broadly applicable as he imagines it to be.
Yes.
But they aren't pertinent, because they are situations in which the collective action problem has been solved
On the contrary, they are relevant precisely because they are examples of "collective action problems" that have been solved without coercion, which is exactly what brooksfoe requested. I suspect brooksfoe has a very much more restrictive definition of "collective action problems" in mind, but since he refuses to define the phrase as he is using it, it's hard to know what he really means.
As to Mixner's bizarre, insistent question, about why these people don't just hold a bake sale (and I have no idea why he keeps asking me to hold a bake sale, as I am not a resident of New Jersey), I really don't have an answer.
The answer is obvious: they're hypocrites.
I'm guessing it may have to do with limited time and energy,
Yes, writing a check to the government, or setting up a bank account to which others can write checks to be forwarded to the government, would be so difficult and time-consuming. As opposed to trying to raise taxes, which is of course so easy it happens all the time.
Mixner asks if writing a check is difficult. I'm not sure I see how this is relevant. No, writing a check is not difficult. But that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about convincing other people to write checks. This actually does take time and energy, as the fundraising staff of any non-profit organization will tell you.
If starting a charity (which is, essentially, what you're suggesting here) is always so easy, then why does anyone donate to existent charities rather than starting their own?
Loosely, this involves situations where there is a public good (i.e., some benefit enjoyable by all of a group of people, perhaps even by everyone) but no formal means of compelling everyone to contribute to the provision of the good, so that there is an incentive for individuals to shirk payment o their share.
Well, even assuming I agree that the things you seek to fund by raising taxes are public goods, and that I would receive some benefit in exchange for my higher taxes that is commensurate with the extra amount of tax I would have to pay, there are obviously numerous examples of public goods funded by voluntary mechanisms rather than involuntary taxes. Most goods funded by charities and non-profits would fall into the category.
Again, public broadcasting is a classic example. If NPR supporters are willing to send money to keep it on the air despite the fact that for every listener who sends in a check there are ten who do not, then supporters of higher government spending on health care, the environment, poverty relief, scientific research or whatever else it may be should be willing to send checks to the government to fund those activities even if most other people do not.
Mixner asks if writing a check is difficult. I'm not sure I see how this is relevant. No, writing a check is not difficult. But that's not what we are talking about. We are talking about convincing other people to write checks.
If you're the only one, or one of only a small number of people, who thinks he should be paying more to the government in taxes, then you're probably not going to be very successful at raising taxes, are you? In order to have some reasonable chance of getting a large number of people to support an increase in their taxes, you must first persuade them that their current taxes are too low, and if you've done that you already have a pool of people who should be willing to send extra money to the government. All you need to do is organize your collective donation, which in this age of blogs and the internet and email is easier than ever. You're just making excuses for failing to act because you're a hypocrite.
Mixner, first, and for the last time, I don't live in New Jersey. Please stop calling me names. I agree with you that "all [they] need to do is organize [their] collective donation." It's the suggestion that this is an inherently easy thing to do -- and more importantly the absurd notion that the mere act of creating a "tax me" fund facilitates this in any real way -- that I am disagreeing with. I think I have made this distinction sufficiently clear. If you want to argue about something I'm not saying, then you should find someone else to do it with.
Mixner, first, and for the last time, I don't live in New Jersey.
Don't you? And your point is....?
It's the suggestion that this is an inherently easy thing to do -- and more importantly the absurd notion that the mere act of creating a "tax me" fund facilitates this in any real way -- that I am disagreeing with.
Er, why doesn't it "facilitate this in any real way?" And obviously, it's not just a matter of "creating the fund." You also need to publicize it. Both are very easy to do, especially given the ease of mass communication via the internet. You could easily make thousands of liberals aware of the fund within just a few hours of creating it, via blog posts, email messages, online newsletters, and so on. And it would snowball from there. What are you waiting for? Think of all the money you could be raising for "worthy" government programs, instead of wasting time here pretending you can't do it.
Is this a work of performance art?