Monday, October 31, 2011

Model taxes and "credit" markets on the negative externalities of exercised speech

I don't see much discussion of this anywhere, although it seems to me to be a fairly obvious concern. The costs on exercised (and often commercial) speech against expert-determined best policy seems to me to cost the world trillions of dollars. Also, I'd like to see a model public policy of retroactive accounting in this area, including not just fines and taxes but payouts and tax credits.

4 comments:

  1. Wouldn't this push against the diversified experimentation you also want? Maybe only if you consider public discussions of best policy part of diversified experimentation. Or maybe that's only one more factor to take into account when you're determining the optimal tax/subsidies?

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  2. Hopefully Anonymous said ...

    "Wouldn't this push against the diversified experimentation you also want?"

    Maybe -it's a technocratic optimization problem. Good faith brainstorming and (optimally) diversified experimentation is different than media that in bad faith or dumb faith impoverishes the global welfare.

    I'm not opposed to successive retroactive fines/taxes and reparations/prizes to the same populations for the same historical act as our understanding of the past changes (and hopefully improves) -I think it's a technocratic question.

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  3. Sounds waaay too dangerous to me to have authorities defining right-think and penalizing wrong-think. Preventing idiots from having democratic influence through changing voting rules is more sensible.

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  4. Hopefully Anonymous said ...
    TGGP, remember the default is also a regulation which is taxing some and subsidizing others. You wouldn't want any experimentation with this? I think you're venerating the status quo.

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