Pigovian Tax
Like Dr. Greg Mankiw, I am also a big fan of Pigovian taxes. He quite rightfully points out that they "allow us to correct market failures without heavy-handed regulations, while raising government revenue so we can reduce more distortionary forms of taxation." So like Mankiw, I'm a supporter of the aims of the Pigou Club. A pigovian tax is a tax placed on a negative externality to correct for a market failure. For example, a factory does not financially take into account the damage their emissions cause to the air, since there is no market for air pollution. By imposing a Pigovian Tax a government can artifically create a cost for such activity - ideally a cost equal to what the price would be had a market for such activity existed. In a country like Canada with socialized medicine, the cigarette tax acts as a Pigovian tax - it (more than) raises the revenue necessary to offset the expense to the health care system generated by smoking. One of the uses of taxes is to discourage activity that has negative externalities, or we believe is otherwise economically/socially harmful. That's why these 'sin' taxes exist - they discourage people from smoking and drinking. It's also argument often put forward by those in favour of marijuana legalization - that a better and more cost-effective way of detering usage would be to legalize marijuana and tax it rather heavily. These taxes also raise revenue for the state. In 2004-2005, the Canadian government collected $16.7 billion in "other" taxes, which were largely Pigovian taxes such as energy taxes and excise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol. Since taxes deter the activity that is being taxed, then why in the world would we ever tax income? Don't we want to encourage hard work and entrepreunership? Yet in Canada, over 45 percent of federal government revenue comes from personal income taxes and 15 percent comes from corporate income taxes. I've been rather hard on the supporters of the FairTax, but they have the right idea. Taxing activities we wish to encourage (work) does not make a great deal of sense when we can tax activities we are not as interested in promoting (consumption). The FairTaxers take it too far - the amount of revenue needed to finance all the government programs we value cannot be generated by simply a consumption tax alone. But the basic idea is sound. I live in the Southwestern Ontario region of Canada, an area with perhaps the poorest air quality in all of the country. Each year we have a record number of smog days. Wouldn't it make sense that we try to discourage the use of electricity generated from coal and the use of fossil fuels? Yes, this would have negative effects on the economy in isolation, but if we used the revenue generated from such a tax to lower employment insurance premiums or income tax rates, it's likely that the net economic effect would be positive
VIVEK PANT
American Patriotism
Waleed Rally says that the genius of American patriotism is that it manages to be inclusive. The same cannot easily be said of Australian patriotism, and certainly cannot be said of the European version, which is so often expressed in moral panics about the supposed disloyalty of migrants. He then asks: What accounts for the difference? At first blush, the answer is as simple as it is patriotically appealing: that the patriotism of minorities simply mirrors the patriotism of the majority. That is, patriotism is a result of social pressure. If we only demand it stridently enough, our minorities will learn to love us. Or, to put it more acerbically, multiculturalism is a death wish. Such has been the diagnosis of a thousand culture warriors in recent years. Europe's flirtation with multiculturalism has killed its sense of self and allowed its recalcitrant minorities to disappear into a fog of cultural relativism and escape any sense of loyalty to the nation. Europe's multiculturalism is even said to have fostered subcultures hostile to it. There is something different operating in America, something more subtle, complex and ingenious than the brutish social politics of monoculturalism. Something that is not ultimately about multiculturalism or migration, but about a more comprehensive phenomenon: national identity. There is something in the way America thinks and talks about itself that enables widespread national loyalty and astonishing diversity to coexist. Even its rioters rarely shun their American identity; instead, they assert their place in the nation. America, like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, is part of the New World and created from settlement (or conquest) and migration. This creates a fundamentally different dynamic, for it is immediately apparent that there is nothing organic about these nations. The vanquished indigenous aside, everyone is a migrant to some degree, which necessarily fosters a more fluid, open notion of national identity: one that is not so firmly anchored in ethnicity as in Europe. Yet this does not explain why the United States should be any different to Australia. Rally says that America has its creed, but one that corresponds to no particular religious tradition. It is a civil creed constructed on the central political idea of individual liberty. The US was settled by people fleeing religious persecution in Europe; it was thus almost inevitable that freedom, especially of religion, would become the new nation's touchstone. A people who had struggled to attain religious freedom could not easily found a nation on principles that denied that right to others: Theirs is a sense of self that is forward-looking, oriented towards constant improvement. In contrast the message of Australia's staunchest patriots is that ours is a great country with a great history and no need for change. It is a message that replicates the European sense of national self, one bound in a fixed history. The history wars were so intense in Australia for the very reason that our sense of national pride is not forward-looking.
The Subtle internal meanings
In terms of my interests that was an important piece for me to write, because it was really trying to engage with those questions of loss and also drawing on psychoanalytic tools of enquiry. I suppose now my own method or way of thinking doesn't abandon those types of questions, but I'm more interested in how the artwork itself does that. That the artwork itself is a kind of theoretical proposition, and you can think those sorts of questions without necessarily drawing on that kind of apparatus any more than in a socio-historical or formalist way. In this show what's been important for me is that I've been working on Hesse for a long time, and these objects have always been there, have always been incredibly intriguing, but you don't actually know what they are. In most art history you think you know what the object of your enquiry is, but what are these things? A lot of them are between preparatory stuff, and finished work - very much in limbo. Some of it might be debris of the studio or spare parts. To me they throw down the gauntlet, and say, 'let's get back to first principles', how do you even describe these things? So in a way the impulse behind the exhibition is to lay out these works to say - these are precarious works. This is because of the materials that they use and that's very important - part of their visceral effect - that-s why they-re bodily, why they-re precarious. But their conceptual status is as precarious. What we make of them and how small things like this can have a big visceral effect, to me, says a lot about what art is and what art does to us. Why is it that these small things have that kind of effect? That's why I wanted to do this exhibition, and it's my way of writing a book about Hesse - through these really raw experimental works, not simply to fetishise them or say 'here are a whole lot of new Hesses', but on the contrary, to think about what the object of art is. Here we have an artist taking real risks with the object of art. They've always been called 'Test Pieces' and I find that problematic. This is much more the language of industry. It's much more minimalist - test pieces, prototypes, all that kind of language - when they are so organic and textural and so on. But in the end maybe if they test anything out, they test our capacity to see them as art objects. That is a big shift in my own way of thinking, not just about Hesse's work but a range of contemporary artist's work. I've written a lot recently about Gabriel Orozco's working tables, for example. I see this work through the lens of contemporary artists, and the reason that I really wanted this show at the Fruitmarket, is that it is a public space that shows contemporary art. Rather than have it in a big museum, where it is going to look like we are adding to oeuvre of the canonical artist - we wanted that confrontation with the contemporary.