Paying up

(Microsoft Media)

Charles was complaining the other day about the carbon tax, saying that he was sufficiently conscious of what he was doing and that he had for ages already been cautious about resources in general, so much so that he hated having to pay extra for the lack of concern displayed by others.

After all, he added, forcing people to adopt different habits wasn't a convincing approach from his point of view since that included wholesale everybody else willing to use their marbles even if they, admittedly, at times seemed to constitute a clear minority.

Instead the government might want to try and convince people via incentives, if appealing to most people's common sense wasn't going to help most of the time. Incentives could make some things cheaper for those who followed these common-sense approaches.

(Microsoft Media)

It was exasperating, Charles went on. It was just like for insurances, he added, where he had to pay more just because so many other people were behaving so foolishly, inconsiderately or even outright recklessly. They were smoking too much, eating too much, becoming aggressive in traffic situations, there were all sorts of reasons, he moaned, and expensive ones, that left insurance companies having to pay obscene amounts for the consequences of foolish behaviour.

And for all that he, Charles, had to foot the bills more than the insurance companies themselves who simply passed the buck and raked the dough back in from ALL of their members, he cried, by increasing the premiums time and again to replace what they had to fork out for so many of their members.

(Microsoft Media)

Peter found himself in not much of a position to help Charles out of this rut. In spite of seeing the point he was making, he couldn't present him with a quick-fix solution. He helped himself to another cup of coffee, uttered a furtive "oh dear, oh dear", and was happy enough about not being overweight.

On top of that he found comfort in coming in to work every day by bus, so that even on the occasional day that he was in a bad mood, he wasn't behind the steering wheel and couldn't cause much distress to others on the road; and last but not least Peter was content about not smoking - which brought with it his insurer's non-smoker tariff, after all, through which he hoped to have a somewhat lower premium, though he had so far never actually checked this out properly to be certain.