Nobody is buying anything, my friend. It’s the natural result of real estate speculation. Prices have to keep going up for investors to make their money, but at some point residents can’t afford to buy, so they don’t, and we wait for the bubble to burst. The whole field ought to be illegal, because housing is a human right.

We don’t need to hate on the developers, but neither should we respect them. They were taking advantage of a bubble, knowing full well it wasn’t sustainable, and if they get burned by it, meh.

Talking about the things that are working well for you in your life is fairly natural. But the fact that you feel like you’re an ad suggests that maybe you’re doing it too often.

We cannot know everything about the businesses that we interact with, so I don’t think we need to feel guilty if we later learn that a business is shady. Actually, if you occasionally mention the businesses that you endorse, you might find that people will tell you about some of those shady business practices. And that can be stressful because it might sound like a personal attack, but it’s also an opportunity to take another look at your current situation and figure out what you want to do in the future.

Who cares where they live? Canada can tax its citizens globally, if it really wants to, and it can tax any businesses operating in Canada.

It sounds like you’re suggesting that because our system of government is complex, increasing the complexity even more is generally a perfectly reasonable thing to do. If that’s what you mean, I disagree with you.

It also sounds like you’re repeating basic facts about crafting legislation that we all know. I’m not a lawmaker and I’m not trying to write a law here in the comment section, so I don’t particularly care to prepare a several page document. Certainly one could do so if one were so inclined…

CFCs are a good reminder that we can successfully ban dangerous things, if we carefully follow up to see what the workarounds are, and if they are harmful, too.

Or consider a simple car example. SUVs and trucks in the US have led to a massive increase in deaths. And they pollute heavily. And they fill up roads making traffic worse. And there’s less room for parking. Why not simply ban trucks over a certain size or weight for personal use? Obviously people are driving vehicles far larger than they need, and it’s killing others. So ban new sales starting in five years. Why not? The manufacturers know what they’re doing is unethical, and they don’t care, so nobody would feel bad for them.

I don’t understand what you mean about opaqueness being the principle of our civilization. Democratic government has the express opposite goal.

We can test your argument by asking what has been done historically, and we can successfully point to dozens of examples of environmental regulation that didn’t involve a tax. There can’t be any serious debate about the fact that we’ve done this in the past, and it worked in the past.

You could be right, maybe adding a tax is more effective on average, but I’m apprehensive. When you make the system complex and allow people to trade their credits, you’ve just created a system that’s designed to be abused, and of course it will be.

Regulate. You know, we have done so for decades. Remember leaded gasoline? No credits involved. New rules instituted, companies adjust, victory.

It’s so disingenuous to ask the question, when environmental problems and solutions predate the carbon tax idea by decades, or even centuries, depending how you define things.