Why Carbon Taxes Work

I agree with a literal reading of your comment, but will just point out that the wealthy countries all tend to be the ones that let the market do its thing though. We've got a lot of examples now of authoritarian vs free market (the Koreas, Germanys and China pre- and post- Deng Xiaoping leap to mind). People routinely do better when they control their own destiny rather than strong central authorities.

If we pick which end of the spectrum is more likely to keep people fed, the answer is pretty much always the intelligence of a free market will do the best job. Starvation tends to be isolated. This is something that central authorities don't do so well, and that has been tested out quite a few times in practice now. I'm still mildly amazed that the continued and ongoing failures of political leadership for decades hasn't made an obvious dent in the number of people wanting the politicians to be in charge. Politicians are popular, not competent. Markets are really good at putting competent but unpopular people in charge which is a better strategy.

The purpose of a CO2 tax is reduce emissions and a lot of emissions are not caused by luxury products and services but simple stuff like growing food or driving to work.

Increasing the price of fuel to the point where people switch to biking to work would be very successful from a climate standpoint but extremely unpopular.

I think people actually underestimate the effect of a carbon tax. The tax has to be extreme enough that it changes behaviour in the real wold, and something like 70-80% of energy comes from fossil fuels.

If people aren't near to rioting because their lifestyle is being forced to change then the tax isn't doing anything. It isn't going to look like cheerful.

If a carbon tax is applied in just one country, then people are rewarded for shifting carbon intensive activities to another country.

There also needs to be a clear answer to 'who should receive the carbon tax revenue?'. If countries receive the revenue, they have an incentive to try to attract carbon intensive industries to collect revenue from them.

The only real solution is a worldwide tax paid by countries to something like the world Bank. Each country could then tax their citizens equally.