I've been reading "Seeing Like a State", and this reminds me of the sort of legibility problems that States historically had around taxation. The premise of th

I've been reading "Seeing Like a State", and this reminds me of the sort of legibility problems that States historically had around taxation. The premise of the book is that the State reorganizes society to make it easier to administer often times to the detriment of society itself. For instance, a medieval European kingdom wants to tax grain - there are no markets which determine the price of grain. There is no universal measurement, there is no universal language. Instead, each village has its own tradition founded upon hundreds of years of bitter dispute between the local lord, the peasants, and the local clergy. A peasant is given some number of baskets each year and is told to fill them up. The peasant and the lord don't trust each other. The peasant suspects baskets are bigger this year and the lord suspects the peasant will scheme to avoid filling them. So, everything is codified - the basket is filled from a certain height (eg shoulder) with a grain with a certain amount of wetness to a certain level - either mounded, semi-mounded, potentially leveled off with a specific tool, etc... Any changes to the system stand to create a revolt. Also, no one has a surname, detailed maps for productivity of fields don't really exist, and lets say 90% of males in England have 1 of 6 names. Peasants don't own anything anyway, but they have complex rules around the communal usage of land (even though that's illegal). Kings are forced to rely on the local knowledge of lesser lords as middlemen who can navigate the local systems without causing revolts; they in turn refuse to do anything to fix a system that benefits them greatly. Anyway, that's about what I see happening if you try to tax carbon. There is no legibility into what causes pollution from the outside - you can't look at the good itself, you must know the history of all inputs down to the raw goods and then some! If you just tax the creation of carbon domestically, you will encourage offshoring everything that necessarily pollutes to places that will pollute way more. If you just tax big players, businesses will split off divisions to be under the limit. If you just tax certain industries, you will send them offshore (apart from air travel). The righter solution would be to implement a carbon VAT, so that you align the incentives of producers and consumers. Now, you are in the business of taxing grain from peasants! How much pollution goes into foreign steel? Who knows? Are their carbon offsets real? Do we just put a tariff on foreign steel which feels sorta right? That will violate trade deals and will doubtlessly punish the honest players the most, once again encouraging more pollution.