Mama Must Be So Proud

Belgium has named a tax after VP Al Gore!

The WSJ Ed Page has the details

Earlier this month, Mr. Gore spent a day in Brussels to promote his film on global warming. "Our planet has a fever, and the fever has been getting steadily higher," he said in a speech. "It is in fact a full-scale planetary emergency." Within days, Belgian politicians were rewriting their tax laws to do something about this looming calamity.

Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt invoked his American visitor in proposing a new "environmentally friendly" tax on packages that would penalize users of aluminum or plastic and provide incentives to switch to paper or cardboard, whose production releases less CO2 into the atmosphere. The details have yet to be worked out, but the idea is for milk sold in, say, a plastic bottle to cost more than milk sold in a cardboard container.

"We must take Al Gore's message seriously," Mr. Verhofstadt told parliament the other day. The measure, introduced into the draft 2007 budget, was fast dubbed "the Gore tax." Also in the works are tax breaks for car pollution filters and deductions for energy-efficient investors.

This is what's fundamentally wrong with government. You say that's Belgium, but I live in Boulder County, which I might start calling "Little Belgium." Such a tax would pass here in an instant.

While in the Senate, Sen. Al Gore, Jr. decided that government should design toilets. Now he is encouraging the EU (which needs little encouragement to meddle) that the government should make packaging decisions. The Hayekian idea of innovation from multiple sources being sorted out in the market as abandoned.

Let Trent Lott design milk cartons? Ted Kennedy might bring some innovation to Scotch bottles, but I’d still rather trust the market.

Environment Posted by jk at October 30, 2006 12:04 PM