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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stan J. Czernel who wrote (82995)	9/8/2008 7:56:07 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 541930

But rental still allows the manufacturer to chuck the thing into a landfill when its useful life is over. The scheme I have outlined extends the idea of ownership to include the items afterlife You can extend the idea of "ownership" of the environmental implications a variety of ways. "Rental" is only one. You can attach the ownership extension/environmental accountability notion to paradigms for the acquisition of goods other than "rental." So the "rental" approach and the ownership-extension approach are different concepts, entirely severable. They aren't necessarily a package. Entangling confuses the grasp of the concepts, both of which would be quite alien to just about everyone, would go over just about everybody's head. You have an alien substitute for traditional ownership couple with an alien notion of environmental accountability. That makes for a hard sell. It seems to me that manufacturers being incentivized and/or paying for the consequences of their environmental design impacts would be easier if it weren't confused by the addition of a whole new concept of ownership/rentalship on the part of the buyer. The "rental" notion is interesting, but a non-starter IMO from a practical point of view. If you want to incentivize, I suggest sticking with more familiar approaches like regulation, pigovian taxes, and market forces.