Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber has decided to make a campaign of opposing the Mickey Tax. More power to him. Here’s his latest post.

I can see an argument for using the government to impose a general obligation on industry members to solve collective action and free rider problems (there may be problems with this too – but that’s a different debate). But I can’t see any good reason for imposing the Mickey Tax on unwitting visitors to the country other than (a) the big players in the travel industry wanted to foot as little of the bill as possible themselves, and (b) given the politics of the issue, they didn’t have any other easily available group that they could fob the costs off on.

Quite. Still, Henry does say that the airlines are strongly opposed to the proposal, so perhaps we’ll get some sanity yet.