Europeon Debt Crisis: There isn't another option EXCEPT austerity.

[Mr Khan]

sperrico87 said:

Kasz216 said:

Mr Khan said:

That would only make sense as taxation to use things that the government has provided, gas not being one of them. The issue being that the government provides generally only public goods (aside from the little matter of the post office) that are more difficult to monetize. Sure roads have tolls, but how do you monetize, say, environmental cleanliness?

Just because some abuse social safety nets does not mean that the system itself is inherently flawed. There will be people who abuse all things, and no mechanism is perfect for solving all ills, but such social safety nets mean that society will provide for its own, to make sure that they have the dignity that they are morally entitled to. The need for government employment is to correct against those who want to work but cannot, because most people want to work on the whole, and this underlies the need for government intervention. It's not about "unilateral decisionmaking" it's about accounting for things that the free market cannot grasp, public goods like the health and education of the people, the cleanliness of the environment, industries that need a push before they can become self-sufficiently competitive, or large-scale mass transit systems. The ideal balance of Social Democracy is for the free market to work where the free market works (which is still the vast majority of commerce), and for the government to pick up the slack everywhere else. Much like too much democracy is a bad thing, verifiably, so a too-liberated market is also verifiably bad.

Arguably?  By having people care about enviromental cleanliness and willing to pay a few cents more for ecologically responsible products.  Of course, that's probably overestimating the average consumer.

I would also add that one of the few roles the government actually has is to enforce contracts.  So, if someone or some company pollutes, then they will be taken to court and forced to pay damages and made to stop polluting.  It isn't as though, because there'd be no EPA, that pollution will occur unabated because there's no Government police force to stop pollution.  That isn't so at all. 

Also, while speaking of the EPA, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it is an unconstitutional creation of the Executive branch, and many times they actually do more harm than good.  Just like with the FDA, an arm of government created by politicians, they create more problems than they solve, and they act as unnecessary policemen who use force and bully people, which is something that wouldn't occur in a free market.  If it did occur, other functions of the market would resolve it, as is always the case.

The courts take much longer to decide things than the EPA does, and that would be often-irreversible environmental damage that occurred in the meantime, and the other question is: who sues, or for what? Some things are bad for the environment but not lawsuit worthy since they don't do a particular amount of harm to any one person, or the harm is so diluted amongst a group of people that they don't care enough to fix the problem themselves. The free market does not control for pollution, except where the finding of more effecient methods of production just so happens to curb pollution in the process, in which case government pushes forward help companies in the long run