True. Not everyone was affected, just some people. I might point out that unleaded gas was sold back then (Amoco, I believe) but it was a niche market. My father went to the Amoco station for gas for his snow blower, which seemed to work better on unleaded. (Or so he thought.)
For those favoring the lawsuit approach - which is better for society: brain damaged kids whose parents get big settlements, or non-brain damaged kids? Which do you think a parent would prefer?
What he said. This is a textbook example of the sorts of things that free markets don’t deal with very well.
*My textbook uses other forms of pollution for its examples, but the idea is the same.
What this does is replace a simple “no more lead” law that affects all producers and consumers equally, with a cumbersome, expensive and highly uncertain legal remedy. A remedy that seems to require large numbers of people to become brain damaged before it can create change.
The free market cannot effectively deal with leaded fuel, it’s an issue that requires direct government intervention.
Enormous public demand for a switch. That’s pretty unlikely, though, as the dollar is king. We’ve known for a long ass time that the environment presents a prisoner’s dilemma and can’t be protected without government regulation. Hell, I learned that in my eighth grade social studies class. All you nancies who think you’ve found a new hole in the free market and shout “suck it, libertarians!” are about 170 years behind the curve.
Who, specifically, are you addressing here?
That doesn’t mean that a company won’t do it anyway. Ford famously did it with the Pinto, and I seriously doubt that they are the only ones who make such calculations. They just got caught.
Such a system also provides an economic incentive to have some brain damaged children.
IMHO a big problem with a libertarian system is that is it short sighted. There is too much incentive to start up a company that produces a product that has long term bad consequences, but milk it before problems start happening and fold the company before the law suits happen.
true enough, but laws likewise don’t magically stop them from doing it. There’s no law which would stop a gas company from letting more lead get into the final product, any more than alawsuit does; both work after the fact, and both can be concealed - for a while.
Weeeeeellllll, and I’m not sure I want to get out and say this, but…
Thing is, you don’t always have to prove anything. Sometimes, a lot of nonsense will do the job as well as actual proof, or just having a sympathetic jury. It’s not nice, but it’s not necessarilly any worse than what we have now.
It’s happened both ways. It’s all about the lawyers, and who’s willing to screw with whom. Granted, it’s essentially a shotgun proposition - send out some lawsuits and see which ones work. And I can show you examples both ways.
So we have actual honest companies who get screwed because John Edwards is a fast-talking huckster, and real polluters who get off because . But we also have real polluters who get cut off at the knee. C’est la vie.
But it’s also true that the legal code as it stands now is less actionable than many libertarians would like. You CAN prove that companies are polluting if they are polluting. Jurisprudence as it stands now isn’t the best at allocating guilt, and that often lets them wriggle out of trouble.
That’s true. This reminds me of how Dow Corning was driven into bankruptcy by a huge class-action judgment against them when a jury concluded that their silicon breast implants were responsible for a bunch of things like breast cancer and various auto-immune disorders. Turned out there was no connection at all between the implants and the illnesses, but Dow Corning took it in the neck anyhow, because of a the combination of slick lawyers and jurors who don’t understand science.
In general, I think the Libertairianism-shading-into-anarchism is lame, but in all fairness, they do agree that a lot of things are wrong; they disagree on the method of enforcement.
I’m not sure I follow. Are you imagining roving packs of ruthless lawyers smashing children on the head for the sweet payout at the end? Economic incentives are pretty strong, but I’m not convinced they’re strong enough to entice us into poisoning our children.
No, but I am poking gentle fun at the libertarian viewpoint that the market is the best solution for everything.
Although the rabid “market solves everything” morons make up a good percentage of the libertarian party, it’s perfectly plausible that there are every bit as many and more in the Republican party. Libertarianism is social and economic belief.
But I did like that idea of roving packs of lawyers. Get back to me on that when you get it happenin’.
I don’t buy into this view. A lot of people seem to confuse libertarianism for anarchism.
I’m not a libertarian, I am a strong believer in making markets as free as possible. I do draw the line at a different point in the sand than most libertarians, I agree with certain regulations but not all. I don’t have a hard-line “no market regulations” stance I just think market regulations should primarily:
Correct market failures (dealing with externalities is part of this)
Provide for equality of opportunity
Number two is an unrealizable ideal that I only want to see taken so far. I think everyone should have a solid education and if they work their way through the educational system they should have fair opportunities based on the skills they have acquired and learned, they shouldn’t have lesser opportunities because companies don’t want to hire blacks, or Hispanics, or et cetera.
In general though even most libertarians don’t truly believe in a totally unregulated economy. Only anarchists really buy into that because for an economy to be totally unregulated you would effectively be talking about an anarchy.
Oddly enough, I read an article a few weeks ago on Thomas Midgley, the guy who came up with the idea of adding lead to gasoline. It seems that in the early days of the gasoline engine, there was great interest in finding a way to reduce engine “knock”. Midgley discovered that adding tetra-ethyl lead was effective in reducing knocking. Around the same time, ethanol-blended fuels were discovered also to reduce knocking, but Midgley, backed by GM, pushed lead as “the only way to eliminate engine knocking!”, kept tight control of the tetra-ethyl lead manufacturing process, and proceeded to make a bundle o’ cash while sending atmospheric lead levels to super-toxic heights. Among other things, Midgley and his cronies warned that gasoline without lead was harmful to engines, which was untrue; ethanol blends work just fine in “leaded gas” engines.
So, it seems to me that all you’d need to effect a “free market” changeover is ethanol that’s cheaper than leaded gas. Make more ethanol, basically, such that a larger supply drives the price down. Just as food companies switched to high fructose corn syrup as a sweetener when it became cheaper than sugar, so will gasoline manufacturers switch to ethanol when it becomes cheaper than lead.
(Incidentally, Midgley went on to develop the use of CFCs as spray propellants in his later career, making him probably the single organism that has had the greatest negative environmental impact in history.)
The question is a restatement of the classic example of the Tragedy of the Commons. In this case, the commons is the atmosphere. It costs an individual or a corporation nothing to dump whatever they like into the atmosphere.
The free market answer would be to refuse to treat the atmosphere as a commons. Lots of things that have traditionally been regarded as commons that anyone could exploit if they had the inclination have been enclosed.
The trouble is that it’s really had to portion out the atmosphere, because it doesn’t stay put. So if we say that no one has the right to emit into anyone else’s atmosphere, that means no one has the right to emit anything, because you can’t keep your CO2 and O2 and H20 and smoke and CFCs and tetra-ethyl lead on your side of the property line, it invariably seeps over onto my side of the property line.
So it’s easy to imagine a free market regime that says anyone has the right to emit as much lead as they like on their private property, but since they don’t have the right to emit lead onto anyone else’s property, they effectively don’t have the right to emit lead at all. Just like, while anyone might have the right to fire a gun on their private property, they don’t have the right to send bullets flying into their neighbor’s property. This means that if you live in an apartment instead of on a farm, you effectively don’t have the right to shoot your gun in your apartment.
But then the question is, what is the effective penalty for emitting lead…either in bullet form, or in tetraethyl form? Even if I declare you don’t have the right to shoot your gun from your property into my property, what are my remedies if you do this? If you shoot your gun into my property, but it doesn’t cause any actual damage, then I can’t sue you for damages, because I have to be damaged. If you shoot your gun and destroy my precious antique cans, then I can sue you for the loss of my cans, but if the bullet just hits the dirt and doesn’t destroy anything, then what’s the penalty? Pain and suffering? Mental anguish? And if I can’t prove that your lead emissions caused me brain damage, what are my damages? And who do I sue…the driver who drives a car powered with leaded gas, the gas station, the oil companies?
So since we don’t want to have to have a situation where I can’t do anything about you shooting your gun into my property untill you hit something or someone with it, we have to have a regulatory scheme. That is, it’s a crime to shoot your gun in such and such circumstances.
Thing is, everyone acts like a “free market” must be devoid of government interference. But the truth is that without the rule of law there can be no free market. With no law, Gakh the Strong can just club Hoojah the Clever One on the head and take his beads and shells. We have to have the “no clubbing” rule before a free market can exist, and the no clubbing rule has to be enforceable. And we have to have enforceable contracts, we have to have functioning courts.
So a free market without government intervention can’t exist…“government” broadly interpreted, it could just mean social custom so strong that it has the force of law.
This is why the imaginary corporate ruled dystopia makes no sense. If Bill Gates can simply send goons to your house and take whatever he likes, he’s not a capitalist but a feudalist. If he can send goons to your house and force you to work for him or they’ll shoot you, he’s not a capitalist but a slaveowner. It’s possible to imagine a future where capitalist fatcats have used the power of their wealth to transform themselves into feudal overlords, but that isn’t rule by corporation. Why would such a feudal overlord continue to produce products and advertise them and convince people to buy them, and pay people wages and so on? Why not just take whatever you like, and if they don’t like it, shoot them?
While I agree with what Sam Stone is saying (and Lemur866 and a few others) that there are instances when government regulation is a good thing, to answer the OP the way you would do this using market forces (which is different than a free market) is by starting a grass roots awareness program. You would get out there and make the public aware of the danger, thus giving the public information they could use to make informed decisions. It wouldn’t be quick but eventually if you could turn public perception of the problem in the direction you wanted to go market forces would begin to put the squeeze on companies as the consumer would demand a different (safer) product.
To see this in (quasi) operation simply look at the fact that the US, for the first time, has a lower carbon foot print than it did the year before. Granted it’s a small decline…but it’s not going up. Why? Is it regulation from the Bush administration? I’m thinking…not (though of course there ARE federal regulations out there). It’s the public starting to become aware of things like carbon foot print and starting to change market forces (buying more efficient cars or shopping or buying goods and services from ‘clean’(er) companies)…and companies starting to cater to this change in the publics needs.
Companies are in business to make money. If a company can see a competitive advantage in ‘going green’, as they can today, then they are going to do that…because it increases their market share and makes them more, well, green. Same goes with lead in gasoline. It won’t be quick, mind…it takes a lot to change the publics perception…hell, it takes a lot to get on the publics radar. But these things tend to pick up momentum once they ARE on the publics radar. I think we’ll see significant reductions in CO2 emissions in the US even if the government doesn’t impose a bunch of new regulations…I think that train is just now starting to leave the station.
-XT
To answer yes, there has to be a value in unleaded fuel not found in leaded fuels that would produce a change in demand.
Suppose some activist get out a campaign about how spending a little bit more for unleaded fuel saves our health, the environment, etc. If effective, people demand more unleaded fuel and supply changes from leaded to unleaded to meet demand. I don’t think however that this would eliminate regular gas completely.
That’d be this one, I expect. Damned interesting.
I don’t really want to add much to this thread, except to say that there exist public radio stations that run on donations.