If your car was subject to a perpetual auction and ownership tax as Weyl proposes, bashing your car to bits with a hammer would cost you even if you didn’t personally need a car, because it would hurt the rental or resale value and you’d still be paying tax.
I don’t think this is right. COST stands for “Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax”. The self-assessed part refers to the idea that you personally state the value you’d be willing to sell the item for (and pay tax on that value). Once you’ve destroyed the item, presumably you’d be willing to part with the remains for a lower price, so you should just re-state the value and pay a lower tax.
It’s true that damaging the car hurts the resale value and thus costs you (in terms of your material wealth), but this would be true whether or not you were living under a COST regime.
Yeah. I think the only connection here (though it’s very tenuous) is that under a COST car market (although I’ve never seen Glen talk about applying COST to markets like that, usually it’s for markets with a lot of scarcity and interdependence) every car is up for sale at all times, so other people are threatening to buy your car if you don’t value it highly enough, and you can buy a new one yourself with very low transaction costs (because of the size of the market), so you are a bit less likely to want to own one yourself at any given time.
I don’t think this is right. COST stands for “Common Ownership Self-Assessed Tax”. The self-assessed part refers to the idea that you personally state the value you’d be willing to sell the item for (and pay tax on that value). Once you’ve destroyed the item, presumably you’d be willing to part with the remains for a lower price, so you should just re-state the value and pay a lower tax.
It’s true that damaging the car hurts the resale value and thus costs you (in terms of your material wealth), but this would be true whether or not you were living under a COST regime.
Yeah. I think the only connection here (though it’s very tenuous) is that under a COST car market (although I’ve never seen Glen talk about applying COST to markets like that, usually it’s for markets with a lot of scarcity and interdependence) every car is up for sale at all times, so other people are threatening to buy your car if you don’t value it highly enough, and you can buy a new one yourself with very low transaction costs (because of the size of the market), so you are a bit less likely to want to own one yourself at any given time.