How can lawmakers reduce the skyrocketing rate of gun deaths in the United States? How can they stymie the spread of viral fake news stories designed to undermine our elections? Certain constitutionally protected activities—like owning a gun or speaking online—can generate social harms. Yet when lawmakers enact regulations to reduce those harms, they are regularly struck down as unconstitutional. Indeed, the very laws designed to most aggressively reduce social harms—like total criminal bans—are the least likely to be upheld. As a result, regulators appear stuck with an unpleasant choice—regulate constitutionally or effectively, but not both.

This Article proposes a novel solution: Pigouvian taxation. A Pigouvian tax is an economic tool whereby people are required to bear the social costs of their own activity, rather than forcing others to do so. Pigouvian taxes can thread the needle that traditional regulations have not, reducing serious social costs while respecting constitutional protections of individual rights. This is because many constitutional tests—for example, strict scrutiny’s “narrow tailoring” requirement—implicitly reflect the very kind of economic thinking on which Pigouvian taxes rely. In short, constitutional doctrines protecting individual activity do not require society to implicitly subsidize such activity by absorbing any and all costs it generates. Legitimate social costs may be regulated. But regulations must maintain a careful proportionality between the constitutional burdens they impose and the social harms they seek to eliminate. Pigouvian taxes, unlike traditional command-and-control rules, are inherently well-suited to such tailoring. Thus, in areas where traditional rules have been difficult or impossible to adequately tailor—like guns and speech—Pigouvian taxation presents an important new regulatory tool.

立法者如何才能降低美国飙升的枪支死亡率？他们如何阻止旨在破坏我们选举的病毒式假新闻故事的传播？某些受宪法保护的活动——例如拥有枪支或在网上说话——会产生社会危害。然而，当立法者颁布法规以减少这些危害时，他们经常被视为违宪而被否决。事实上，旨在最积极地减少社会危害的法律——比如全面的刑事禁令——最不可能得到维护。结果，监管者似乎陷入了一个令人不快的选择——从宪法上或有效地进行监管，但不能同时进行。

这篇文章提出了一个新的解决方案：庇古税。庇古税是一种经济工具，要求人们承担自己活动的社会成本，而不是强迫他人这样做。庇古税可以发挥传统法规所没有的作用，降低严重的社会成本，同时尊重宪法对个人权利的保护。这是因为许多宪法测试——例如严格审查的“狭义剪裁”要求——隐含地反映了庇古税所依赖的那种经济思想。简而言之，保护个人活动的宪法学说并不要求社会通过吸收其产生的任何和所有成本来暗中补贴此类活动。合法的社会成本可能会受到监管。但法规必须在它们强加的宪法负担与它们试图消除的社会危害之间保持谨慎的比例。与传统的命令和控制规则不同，庇古税天生就非常适合这种剪裁。因此，在传统规则难以或不可能充分调整的领域（如枪支和言论），庇古税收提供了一种重要的新监管工具。