Credit for Bad Behavior

By Michael Kinsley

There is a new service from Expedia, Travelocity and other travel websites: environmental expiation. If you wish, when you buy a plane ticket, they will figure out how much carbon your trip will be adding to the atmosphere and charge you for it. (For Boston to Los Angeles, about 3,000 miles, it comes to around $9.) The money goes to nonprofit groups that either plant trees to absorb the carbon or produce an equal amount of energy in an eco-friendly way (using windmills and such). You are still increasing the carbon in the air, but someone else, thanks to you, is reducing it by an equal amount. The net effect: no additional carbon in the atmosphere. Of course, this is all strictly voluntary. If you want to be a pig, destroy the earth for future generations and face your kids, who've learned all about global warming in second grade, that's your privilege.

Similar deals are available for other eco-embarrassments. Some commentators (like TIME's Charles Krauthammer) have uncharitably compared carbon credits to the indulgences sold by the medieval Catholic Church. But indulgences are apparently misunderstood. The Catholic Encyclopedia, in an eye-rolling, "Here we go again" tone, scolds that an indulgence "is not a permission to commit sin, nor a pardon of future sin." No doubt environmentalists would insist the same about carbon credits: they are not a gift certificate or get-out-of-jail-free card for would-be polluters. But they sure do play one on TV.

And so what? Maybe if the idea weren't so closely associated with hippies like Al Gore, conservatives might see carbon credits for what they also are: a brilliant next step in the development of capitalism. What offends conservatives about carbon credits is not some green absurdity but the very core of our economic system: the free exchange of goods and services, a.k.a. the deal. If a deal is voluntary, then by definition it leaves both parties to it better off. Otherwise they wouldn't do it. Put all these deals together and--with a few exceptions--you have free-market capitalism and prosperity. The genius of carbon credits is that it opens up a whole new inventory of things that people can buy and sell. And there is no reason that the principle should be limited to environmentalism.

For example, how about a "bad-parenting surcharge." It would work like this. Suppose you come home after a hard day of work, and there is your acne-ridden, foul-smelling brat of a son--if, indeed, he is your son, which is hard to believe--playing video games with his friends. Your living room is strewn with Dorito crumbs and other detritus that doesn't bear close examining. Needless to say, the lawn has not been mowed as promised. How would you like to slug him? Or rather, how much would you like to slug him? You know you shouldn't. But what if by slugging him, you could actually reduce the total amount of child abuse in the world? Wouldn't that be a good thing?

What's needed is a market in child-abuse credits. Somewhere in the world there is a parent who is slugging his kid every night. For a price, he would refrain for a night, or even two. By paying that parent not to slug his kid twice, you gain the right to slug your kid just once.

It's a win-win-win. You get to slug your kid. This other father gets the money. The other guy's kid is happy--he gets a night off from being slugged. Only your kid has no obvious reason to be happy, at least in the short run. In the longer run, he will surely be eager to take advantage of a market in "parent bashing." In fact, for a larger fee, he will some day be able to go to your nursing home and unplug your ventilator. And somewhere in the underdeveloped world, five or even 10 elderly persons will get medicines they otherwise couldn't afford. Such is the magic of capitalism.

The magic works best in a world of dramatic inequalities. Fortunately, that is just the world we are living in. The greater the gap between rich and poor, both domestically and globally, the more a rich person will pay and the less a poor person will require.

The usual objections can be made to all of this: Why should rich people be able to buy their way out of environmental guilt or short fuses with their kids when poor people can't? The usual answer is that the deal doesn't create the inequality and forbidding the deal doesn't reduce it. If you tell a rich person this is one thing he or she cannot buy, you are also telling a poor person that this is one thing he or she cannot sell.

We can argue all day about where to draw the line and say to rich and poor: You cannot make this deal, even if it benefits both of you. It is too unseemly. Or here's a thought: We can create a market in winning the argument. The rich person can purchase the right not to be challenged, and the poor person, for a fee, can agree to shut up. Everybody's happy. Isn't capitalism great?