Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much political support in pricing externalities into the cost of products, even though that would be the most efficient "free market" way to solve the problem.
I'm not sure you would even need political support. The courts would just have to uphold the property rights of the polluted, and your right to exercise derivatives on your property i.e. sell a a pollution easement on your property.
That leaves out the political side. Big companies have way more influence on governance than you and I do, and will lobby to make the law favor their business rather than outcomes that would protect the environment.
> If companies have too much influence, that can be changed.
So far it seems that it can't as long as these companies are using investors' money to lobby various governments.
> investors in oil companies are not "responsible" for warming – our consumption is.
Many people would happily use alternatives to lessen the impact of their consumption but there are companies more powerful than them trying to influence and limit their options.
Just to clarify to those reading the comments first, the political point he's making is not to ignore Mississippi just because it's Mississippi.
He has warnings for both Democrats and Republicans at the end and is pretty clearly not a fan of the way either party is approaching education at the national level right now. He is drawing attention to the fact that some red states with historically bad schools have started pulling ahead of some blue states with historically good schools, but his interest is in making sure we learn from that, not scoring culture war points.
That's not what he says. He dedicates most of the section that's directed at Republicans critiquing the administration's wholesale dismantling of the Department of Education and warning that they could run on education in the future if they, you know, didn't do that.
I think people just have an idea of what his political slant must be because he's defending the indefensible state of Mississippi.
Public schools are funded by taxes. Wealthy people already pay those taxes.
If you force everyone to use the public schools, you’re just dividing the tax money across more students.
In the context of school lunch, they would just send their kids to school with a packed lunch.
The whole concept of forbidding people from taking advantage of other educational opportunities is half-baked class warfare fodder. It doesn’t make sense if you think about the numbers, but it appeals to people who are more interested in punishing wealthy people than fixing the situation.
Full disclosure, am a parent who sends their kid to a charter school and strong advocate for parents to be allowed to choose where to send their schools.
That being said, the strong version of the argument being made is that if all schools are funded nationally (so that schools in more affluent areas don't automatically get more money) and rich people and people of influence were forced to send their kids to the same public schools as every body else, then those people would be more inclined to use their influence to try to make public schools better and would be less inclined to fight against raising taxes to improve public education. Of course this would go against those peoples narrow self interest (since many of their kids would probably end up getting a worse education) so it is unlikely to happen
I understand the argument, but I’m trying to point out that similar claims were made about eliminating advanced math classes in California and it did not work at all.
I think the claim appeals to some people because they’re bought in to the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes, and therefore if you force them into your space and restrict their rights to other options they will use that extreme influence to improve the situation for everyone.
Yet in practice it doesn’t work, and we’ve seen it play out. In California the parents who cared about their kids’ math scores just gave up on school math classes and hired tutors or did their own at-home tutoring (at great sacrifice, especially for the non-wealthy). With school lunches you would just see parents with means sending their kids to school with good prepared lunches. I suppose the next logical extension is to ban wealthy parents from sending their kids in with lunches and hope that it will set off the chain of events that’s supposed to make them fix the problem for everyone.
Where I live our school budgets and funding are partially up for vote on the ballot every election cycle. It’s not for the wealthy to decide, it’s just a public vote. And things still aren’t passing easily. I think people reach for the wealthy as an easy excuse for who to blame, but whenever I look at the ballot results it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the general public is averse to increasing school budgets right now.
> the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes
It's not control.
It's simply that there exists a (relatively-speaking) small fraction of wealthy people. To wit, income inequality.
If we had less income inequality in the US, there wouldn't need to be nudges to align wealthy people's interests with everyone else.
If we're fine with large amounts of income inequality, then we're going to need to put in some utilitarian guardrails, given that $ = political power and political power controls school funding.
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