DISQUS

Oh, and why have all these big players lined up behind cap and trade and not a tax? Wouldn't the equivalence thesis predict indifference? I suspect that the answer is that their expected competitive advantage given a tax is lower than their expected advantage given cap and trade. In which case, that's a pretty significant real-world failure of equivalence, no?

That's exactly why they're doing it. And the specifics of the kinds of cap-and-trade policies that they're advocating for - auctioned credits vs. free ones, and so on - are entirely in alignment with their economic interests, too. Obviously corporate interests should get to speak their piece about how they want things to go, but you'd think that the results of their lobbying would be met with a bit more skepticism.

I'm with several of the other commenters in that my problem is so much with state intervention in such a situation per se, as opposed to the particular form it took in this case. If things at the compound really were bad enough that such drastic measures were warranted, then perhaps they never should have been allowed to get to such a point in the first place. Once they did, though, the state had no right to break up these families; I have little doubt that the government's meddling - e.g., putting these brainwashed/sheltered/etc. kids in public schools, not to mention foster care - will do far more harm than good.

Will,

Are you ONLY making the descriptive claim? Because what you say in the third paragraph - that "if we’re talking about whether or not a certain constraint on self-interest ought [your emphasis] to be normatively binding ... I think there’s a good answer to that: because heeding the constraint will tend to make the person who heeds it better off, conditional on others heeding it, too" - sure seems to have a normative dimension as well. (Or am I missing something?)