Lunchbox/Soapbox: Peter Singer - Why We Need a Beef Tax

The 2010 season launches with a contribution from noted contrarian and celebrated thinker Peter Singer:

Why We Need a Beef Tax

Taxes can do a lot of good. They pay for schools, parks, police and hospitals. But that’s not all they can do. High taxes on cigarettes have saved many lives. And when it comes to commodities that should be taxed, we’ve been ignoring the cow in the room.

From health reasons to cruelty to animals to global warming, the arguments for a Beef Tax are compelling. It’s time for meat eaters to pay for the harm they do.

And this is just the first of our regular lunchtime gatherings.

Lunchbox/Soapbox is a simple idea; an old-fashioned Speakers’ Corner in the middle of the city, in the middle of the day.

At the Wheeler Centre we’re keen to showcase our writers as thinkers and as artists, as people with passions and peccadilloes. So we’ve come up with Lunchbox/Soapbox: a weekly space for them to sound off on a topic of their choice. Think of it as a 20-minute piece of polemic to give lunching CBD folk something to chew on.

The themes will be idiosyncratic: from pop-cultural analysis to high cultural criticism; from political grandstanding to personal mischief-making. But they’ll all be thought-provoking. Bring your lunch along to this bite-sized session.

Presenter

Peter Singer

Peter Singer was born in Melbourne in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University since 1999, a position that since 2005 he has combined with an appointment as Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, attached to the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.