Note: PLEASE keep this factual. This Q is not meant to be political, I’m interested in factual answers only. If all you have to say is “Ron Paul is a nut”, then please start your own thread in GD.
I self identify as “libertarian light” (I want less government, but I do see the need of it), so I’m thusly interested in Ron Paul’s bid for the presidency. However, I understand Paul is a strict libertarian wanting no taxes, and no(?) government.
In the last primary debate he stated he wanted to abolish the EPA and all we need to protect the environment is property rights (that no one has a right to pollute my property).
So let’s say Ron Paul gets to found “Libertaria”, a new country that is strictly, purely, libertarian as Ron Paul sees it.
In Libertaria I own a few acres and have a house. After 5 years a factory buys the 100 acres next to me and when it opens I find my house enveloped in noxious fumes. Between coughs I try to figure out what to do about it.
In Libertaria, how will this be handled? Can I sue the factory? But will a strict libertarian society even have courts? There are no taxes so how are they funded? Am I supposed to hire private security and shut the factory down by force? But they have bigger security… If there are courts, why would the factory care what the court says? There is no police force?
Again, let’s try to keep this theoretical and factual. Keep opinions of Paul in GD, this is a Q on the theory of a strictly libertarian society.
Robert Heinlein wrote a story about this scenario called “Coventry”. Supposedly everyone is free to do whatever they want. In fact, like most anarchic systems, it degenerated into a government by thugs. (Think Somalia, or Lebanon during its civil war.)
The problem is, as soon as you have a court system, you have everything else - prosecutors, police to enforce the court’s will, rules (laws) about what is allowed. After all, what if it’s not choking smoke -just the smell of roses? Pig manure? Or a smelly diesel truck driving by 500 times a day? just once a day? What if the truck is a quarter mile away? What’s the noise limit? What is allowed or not allowed? Pretty soon you end up with a collection of crap rules as bad as the EPA, but paid for one citizen lawsuit at a time…
In many forms of libertarian thought, the idea would be that you would have a claim against the factory for dumping noxious stuff onto your land.
Strict libertarianism is based on the idea that the sole purpose of government should be to protect individual rights and property. Therefore there would still be a court system to enforce contracts and enjoin poor behavior, and a police force to investigate crimes.
I don’t think you’ll find many libertarians arguing for the abolition of police forces. While a lot of libertarians are against income taxes, most support some form of small property, sales, or use taxes to support a minimal government as outlined above.
I am not a Libertarian, but I believe I understand their position. It is not anarchy like you describe, buy one of limited government where the sole purpose of government is to keep order and only pass laws against things which would infringe on another person’s basic right.
In the case you pose, I believe that even the most hardcore Libertarian would have a court system open where you could sue the factory for damages in tort. I would also guess that said Libertarian would support a criminal law against intentionally putting those fumes in your home.
That being said, I think that is the full answer to your question. As far as md2000’s concern about a slippery slope, it is not necessarily warranted. The democratic process with a libertarian mindset could set a line as to what are inconveniences of living in a society versus trespasses on your personal freedom.
I’m not a Libritarian but I’ve listened to them. As I understand it I think that most Libertarian philosophy doesn’t want to entirely eliminate government, those would be anarchists, they just want it to have an extremely limited in function with the sole purpose of preventing coercion, enforcing contracts, and settling claims for damages. So there would be some sort of court, laws and police force. Now how exactly the laws would be written, and whether you would be successful in your suit against the plant I don’t know. In any case I don’t think that there would be any formal regulations preventing pollution, it would be up to you to sue the plant for damages, which of course assumes that you are aware of the pollution and of its effect on you and could demonstrate it conclusively. Good luck.
And of course, once whatever product the factory makes starts getting dangerously expensive due to all the lawsuits, the solution would be tort reform. In other words, making it harder for you to sue them.
Ron Paul has opposed tort reform at the federal level (i.e. relating to medical malpractice), saying while he strongly opposes “frivolous lawsuits” it’s a state matter. He is (as a matter of “principle”) not against tort reform on the state level.
So in the hypothetical mentioned in the OP, it’d be up to government officials in the state where the OP lived to regulate (or not regulate) factory emissions, the federal EPA being eliminated or rendered powerless under Libertopia. Depending on the state’s position on lawsuits, you might or might not be able to sue the factory.
If you could sue, it might boil down to just you (and maybe some neighbors) taking on a big corporation. The odds could be heavily stacked against you, since there’d be no federal clean air violations to argue, and states notoriously have been less willing than the federal government to establish meaningful oversight.
But in Libertopia both you and the factory owners would be free of onerous centralized government, which is all that counts, right?
Libertarianism is not anarchy. Libertarians don’t generally oppose “all” government or all taxes. The basic idea of libertarianism tends to be that people in a society should be free to do whatever they like as long as it doesn’t directly hurt anyone else - not just freedom from government restricting their rights, but freedom from other people restring their rights as well. The purpose of government is to ensure that people don’t impinge on each other’s freedom. So there would still be a government running a strong police force, a strong army, a strong legal system, etc. Some libertarians grudgingly admit those things would need to be funded by mandatory taxes; others think they could get away with voluntary taxes, or some sort of free market funding.
So in your example, you would sue the factory in court for enveloping your house with thick noxious fumes, just like you would do in real life at the moment. That’s a fairly easy example for libertarianism to deal with; the EPA wouldn’t necessarily have to deal with that anyway. The problem comes when you start talking about, say, lots of different industries in different places that are individually contributing to ozone damage, or acid rain, or polluted rivers, or smog over a city. Who do you sue? How do you prove whose fault it is? How does the court enforce it? What happens if the factory starts polluting the ocean, which doesn’t belong to anyone - who sues then? These types of problems are much better handled by a dedicated government regulator.
As others have said, I think the issue here is that there is a confusion between anarchy and libertarianism, the fundamental difference being that libertarians absolutely believe in a government, but they believe it has limited function and should be as localized as reasonably possible.
In a case like this, there would be a lot of different possibilities as far as regulating this sort of behavior. Part of it would certainly be the court systems and in most forms of libertarianism there would still be laws regarding what would and would not violate one’s property rights. However, without supposing certain more specific aspects of the libertarian philosophy at hand, it’s difficult to tie down exactly what those laws might be.
That said, many concepts of government that we are familiar with will likely still exist, they just may exist at much more localized levels. In a case like this, we likely wouldn’t have an EPA, but there’s no reason the state or local governments might not still have zoning laws or other environmental protections in place to protect property values. Or, in fact, a local area may be okay with it because it brings in jobs. That’s sort of the double-edged sword of libertarian philosophy, that you get that more specialized level of control based upon the localized needs rather than a one-size-fits-all centralized version, but it could very easily result complications about what the local laws actually are or end up with local laws that you, along with most people nationally disagree with, but happen to fit your local demographics.
Another idea that’s fundamental to most forms of libertarianism is the idea of increasing the responsibility of the individual and the population as a whole which means that a lot of these sorts of things could be handled to some degree without direct government involvement at all. For instance, there would likely be some groups organized to help protect against environmental intrusions and, using voluntary donations, would help an individual pursue legal action or organize public awareness of the actions of the company with the intention of informing consumers so that they might choose to boycott their products until their behavior changes.
Of course, you may disagree with how effectively these ideas may or may not be, but it’s definitely not the same as anarchy.
I’m pretty sure that is not factually correct, and is just a reflection of your negative view towards libertarianism. However, if you have a cite to back up your claim, I’m willing to change my mind.
Most states have their own laws mirroring EPA regulations. If the EPA disappeared tomorrow, many of the clients my company consults for would still have the same requirements, we just wouldn’t need to send out forms to two places for approval.
There would be a few differences with respect to specific activities, like NESHAP 6C regulating gasoline storage tanks would disappear and many tanks would no longer be classified as significant sources of pollution and would go on an insignificant activities list.
As it stands, if you are a minor source of air pollution (more than 40 tons per year of certain criteria pollutants, lower for some other pollutants but less than 100 tons per year), and you have a gasoline storage tank, that source is regulated. Before the adoption of 6C, as long as you didn’t have more than a certain amount of VOC emissions from the tank in a year, it was very lightly regulated.
I’d like to thank everyone for keeping this thread at such a high level of quality.
I’m getting a better idea of what the idea is. And like several of you have pointed out, it can be discussed how well this type of (strict Libertarian) society would work but it is in no way supposed to be some lawless world run by thugs and mobs (that would be Anarchtopia, across the river).
This is however separate from the platform Paul is running on as president. Meaning, he’s not saying we all have to live in his strict libertarian dream.
So with Ron Paul as president (and him magically controlling congress & senate), there would be little to no federal oversight of education, environment, labor, etc. For those of us who still want it, we’d have to elect politicians on the local & state level to give us such.
I think it’s important to distinguish between two separate issues here. One is the libertarian ideal of how a society should be setup in general (and I really have no idea how much of a libertarian Ron Paul is, since I don’t pay much attention to him.) An entirely separate issue is the appropriate the nature of federalism in the United States. The former is a political ideal, the latter is a specific domestic issue related to how one interprets our actual Constitution.
Ron Paul takes the view (and most American libertarians would probably agree) that the federal government has vastly expanded its scope due mostly to the federal courts’ flawed interpretation of the Interstate Commerce Clause, and that many areas where the federal government regulates things should be the sole purview of state governments.
Since he’s running for president, he would want to enact policy that would limit the scope of the federal government in these areas.
I could be wrong, but I seem to remember RP saying that this is what would happen. So, the EPA’s functions wouldn’t disappear, they would devolve to the states.
Keep in mind that RP is a “constitutionalist” was well as a self-styled libertarian. The fomer are generally in favor or a much weaker federal government, with more authority given to the states. One needn’t believe in such a federalist system to be a libertarian, so what we’re seeing with RP is maybe a little of both schools of thought here.
Don’t states vary widely in the strictness of their environmental regulations? (I don’t think California and New York, for example, are on the same plane with Texas and Mississippi).
If the EPA was abolished, companies in some states might well have the same (or stricter) standards to adhere to, but in other states I suspect anti-pollution standards would be considerably lower. And once EPA is out of action, what’s to stop states from a race to the bottom, as happens now with taxes? If you’re desperate to get a manufacturing plant and its jobs into your state, the temptation would be tremendous to cut corners to compete with other states for the business.
OK, so how do politicians who describe themselves as libertarian propose to handle the problem of rising health care costs? Because tort reform is the only one I’ve ever seen offered.
The states that have tougher air quality standards are basically the ones that have pollution issues. It’s not necessarily that California is being “green” or whatever, it’s more due to the fact that ozone is a serious problem there (geographical issues and a lot of industry). Currently, environmental regs aren’t terribly strict in central AR but we are about to pass a threshold where we have an ozone problem and then the thresholds for permitting, the fees, and the regulation of industry will change.
You lost me. We jumped from factories dumping toxic waste to health care costs… why?
But taking your question without linking it to your first post, libertarians would generally say: let the market take care of things. Government shouldn’t provide healthcare, and if poor people need it, that’s what charities are for. Note that we don’t currently, in any sense of the term, have a free market in health care in the US. Now, you might argue that doing so would cause health care costs to rise, but that’s a subject for GD, not GQ.
Possibly. But so what? There is nothing magically correct about the EPA standards now. If you are a constitutionalist, you think the states should have the right to set their own standards. After all, Mexico and Canada set their own.
And I would dispute your “race to the bottom” analogy as there isn’t one for taxes. Unless you have some data showing that there is…?
From what little I’ve seen, they advocate a market-based solution. Let doctors advertise and compete for patients. Let nurses see patients for non life-threatening illnesses. Also bust the AMA monopoly that keeps the supply of doctors artificially low and therefore salaries and prices high.
Eliminate drug laws so that you don’t need to pay a doctor $70 to get a refill on a prescription you know that you already need. Think if we had a law that required a licensed electrician to change a burnt out light bulb. Electrical services would be very costly.
Let competition bring down prices for normal “wear and tear” items like doctor visits and buy catastrophic insurance for only bad things like cancer and heart disease that we don’t all get. You can’t insure against getting sick one day. It’s a guarantee that it will happen.
Those that can’t afford it can turn to their local churches and charities for help.