Making Violence and Destruction Cost Prohibitive

The world's worst problems persist because it's so affordable to continue doing them. This needs to stop.

One of my favorite stand-up bits is by Chris Rock, who suggests the way to stop gun violence is to make bullets really expensive. He says this: 

You don’t need no gun control….We need some bullet control….I think all bullets should cost five thousand dollars [per bullet]….Cause if a bullet cost five thousand dollars there would be no more innocent bystanders….Every time somebody get shot we’d say, ‘Damn, he must have done something…he’s got fifty thousand dollars worth of bullets in his ass.’ And people would think before they killed somebody if a bullet cost five thousand dollars. ‘Man I would blow your fucking head off…if I could afford it.’ ‘I’m gonna get me another job, I’m going to start saving some money, and you’re a dead man. You’d better hope I can’t get no bullets on layaway.’

Based on case studies, Rock’s theory would almost certainly work to solve many of today’s unsolvable problems.

One of those case studies is cigarettes. I moved to NYC around when Mayor Bloomberg put a huge tax on cigarettes that increased a pack’s price from around $2 to $7. The tax was later increased to the point where a pack cost between $10-12. You know what, a lot of people stopped smoking. According to The Journal of American Health, “Adult smoking rate declined [in NYC] by 28% from 2002 to 2012, and the youth smoking rate declined by 52% from 2001 to 2011.” 

The other case study is fuel consumption. Anyone who’s visited Western Europe will attest to the dramatically higher price of fuel there; the high (appropriate?) price is primarily due to added taxes that pay for infrastructure, pollution, and other intrinsic byproducts of automobile use. A gallon of gas currently is about $7.50 in France, Germany, and Denmark, and people in these countries drive about half as much as Americans do, on average. If the price of fuel in the US included what’s spent on military aid to Ukraine, Israel, and other foreign, energy-security outposts, the price would probably be $20/gallon, if not more. If this were the case, the wars would likely end and people would basically stop driving their cars instantaneously and start using ultra fuel efficient vehicles like bikes and rickshaws.   

This same logic can be applied to consumer goods. If a bottle of Coke or an iPhone was priced to include its disposal and other presently-externalized costs —either through taxation or charging the manufacturer for its currently-externalized costs —my guess is Coke (the world’s #1 plastic polluter) would go out of business and people would make their iPhones last for a decade.   

So many of the world’s problems stem, not from the wrong technology, but from wrong pricing. If the price of stuff included its actual costs —ones that include infrastructure maintenance, strategic military interventions, waste management, climate impacts, etc. —there would be a lot fewer problems to solve because doing the wrong, violent, and destructive thing would be too damn expensive.