Free-market environmentalism

Free market environmentalism is an ideology that argues the free market is the best tool to preserve the health and sustainability of the environment. This is in sharp contrast to the most common modern approach of looking to government intervention to help prevent excessive destruction of the environment.

Taxation

The implementation of property rights provides governments with an opportunity to raise revenues. This has been illustrated by recent auctions of bands of the electromagnetic spectrum for telephony, another example of an attempt to manage a scarce resource through property rights rather than regulation. Such auctions offer an alternative to conventional taxation for funding public spending. Some economists, most notably Henry George in the 1870s, have argued that taxes on income and profits represent taxes on productivity, innovation and creativity and that we should rather tax bads such as pollution, consumption of fossil fuels and road congestion. Environmental property rights offer a means to shift taxation from goods to bads.

Related Topics:
Property right - Auction - Electromagnetic spectrum - Henry George - 1870 - Property rights

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