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I'm less interested in telling people what they "must" do (or making laws for that purpose) than in making sure people have enough information on which to make good decisions.
For example, I feel our energy prices have been kept artificially low by ignoring many costs associated with producing energy, such as environmental damage, long-term waste storage problems, etc. By eliminating subsidies to energy companies and requiring resources to be dedicated to researching replacements for non-renewable energy sources (e.g. fossil fuels), and including carbon credits in fossil fuel costs, we let the market really work to allow people to regulate themselves. But how can people make good decisions based on costs if the costs are obscured from them?
There are other kinds of feedback that could help people make good decisions, too. In the US, a car can't be sold without an odometer, and there are laws prohibiting tampering with them. My Honda Civic Hybrid includes an extra feature in the odometer that tells me the gas mileage I'm getting , but it's only a feature of the two "trip" odometers. I can leave "Trip A" and never reset it and tell overall what mileage my car is getting, but why not make that a feature of all odometers, and not allow people to alter the baseline gas mileage reading? Then everyone could see, when they buy or drive any car, how much gas they're using. I think that would help people make much better decisions about how they want to spend their money, as well as how they are impacting the environment.
In other words, I think a system that ensures that people who use resources are generally paying for them is fair, and I trust people to make more good decisions if more information is provided for them. But I think our current system actively obscures costs to promote additional consumption. I don't believe this is in any of our long term interests.
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