My point is, if they think that making it harder for people to sue is appropriate when it comes to health care, why wouldn’t they think the same thing when it comes to pollution?
In theory, wouldn’t this fall into the preservation of individual property rights?
We can argue the practicalities of establishing and enforcing the rights of individuals and communities with respect to pollution, but, at least in the ideal case, the libertarian position on this has been fairly consistent and states that it wouldn’t happen. Again, the practicalities of this position are a matter of debate, but this particular point is at least addressed.
You can disagree with the premises/conclusions of the libertarian thought (and I do), but that’s more GD territory than GQ territory.
Saying as Paul does, “that’s a states rights issue” does not solve the issue or define libertarianism, if all you’ve done is push big government interference down to a lower level of government. Much as we would like to think otherwise, the level of corruption and disregard of rights seems to be biggest at the botttom of the pyramid, not the top. It was the feds who went to war to abolish slavery, then had to assert that civil rights could not be removed by a state, then sent in the guard to enforce desegregation and basic constitutional rights, and so forth.
From 1783 to 1789 the states realized, even back then, that an underempowered federal government was as dangerous as no central government. Hence the constitution you have today.
The fed have a very big stick (often a blunt instrument) to enforce compliance across the country, often involving incentive money taxed from the richer states. Since many states are small and wind and water travel easily from state to state, environmental standards would be one of the last things I would think should be devolved to every man/state for themselves. Could you or I sue over lead in the gasoline? Are we really damaged? How about freon destroying our ozone? Who has standing to sue? What personal damage can you prove?
The biggest problem is what constitutes infringing on someone’s rights? Is it wrong to force someone to pay minimum wage? To pay legal tender not company scrip? To force an employer to accept a union if the majority of employees vote for it? History is replete wit bad examples - the Pinkerton goons should have been arrested in the confrontations of the late 1800’s and early 1900’s, but often it seems the local and state police were on their side. Why would the 2000’s be different?
Already we see that for example, without government swinging its mighty hammer, cell phone companies would be happy to keep ripping off consumers; cars would not have seat belts or airbags, paint would be bright and shiny with lead, thalidomide might still be available for morning sickness, and how would you know FIdo (or the baby) is dying from melamine in their food and its an epidemic, without a Stanadards Lab and Center for Disease Control? Maybe west Texas could consolidate even more of the patent infringement suits, since it caves to every slick lawyer and the other states would have to recognize its judgements…
The infrastructure of the 21st century is huge and complex and needs coordination. Radio spectrum, interstate highways, health and safety standards for products, interstate electrical grids, environemntal safety, safe handling of nuclear material… It’s not something we need to wait until 50 individual governments work it out for themselves.
I like Ron Paul and his message that government is too unwieldy, but I think of myself as a “pratical libertarian”.
“Ron Paul’s platform” is not the same thing as strict libertarianism. I’m not an expert on his view but I think you’re right that Ron Paul believes education should be run at the state and local level (ie. still government-run, but not at the federal level). However strict libertarianism is different. Strict libertarians would demand no role for the government in education whatsoever: in their ideal world, there are private schools to which you can send your kids if you can afford it. Otherwise you can educate them yourself, or they can go uneducated. It’s up to you.
The same thing applies to the environment: no government oversight whatsoever. Not at the state level, not at the local level. If someone’s polluting your property you can sue them in court. If they’re polluting something that isn’t your property, like the ocean, there’s nothing you can do about it.
Labor laws would barely exist. Two individuals sign a contract of employment, which is enforceable in the courts, but beyond that the government wouldn’t get involved. No minimum wage, no maximum working hours, no requirements for holiday time or sick pay, no minimum employment age, etc.
There’s a lot of different types of libertarianism; the type you’re thinking of is often called anarcho-capitalism or right-libertarianism. Ayn Rand was one of the most famous exponents.
Also bear in mind in strict right-libertarianism there would be no welfare programs whatsoever. No pensions, no unemployment pay, no sick pay. If you’re too old or sick to work or can’t find a job, you’d need to find a family member or friend willing to support you. If you want medical treatment, you need to have bought private health insurance in advance or they won’t let you in the hospital, no matter how serious it is. If you want the fire service to protect your house, you need to sign up and pay them in advance, or they won’t come to your house when there’s a fire. If roads or bridges needs to be repaired, you need to find someone willing to pay for it. If you want to check whether your food is safe to eat, or your medicine is safe to use, you need to pay someone to test it for you, because it won’t have passed any regulations.
And so on. The police will protect you from each other, the army will protect you from outside threats and the courts will protect your property rights. Beyond that, you’re on your own.
Can you give us some links to when “they” say that they think this so we can understand the details. Maybe “they” have a reason for what they are saying, assuming “they” are actually saying this.
So, then how does a country the size of Norway survive? It has a population about right at the median US state population.
One might also find that, with a much weaker federal government, smaller states would have an incentive to merge, or at least to cooperate more closely. Does it really make sense to have a North and South Dakota? That depends on what’s going on around it and what the federal government is doing or not doing.
How? Barely, with luck and friends. Don’t know much about Norway, but here’s my off the cuff analysis: It was the sidekick of Sweden and/or Denmark much of its history; a push-over in WWII - other than that geography and distance insulate it from many other threats - unlike Belgium. According to my Norwegian numerical computing prof, most technical graduate leve courses are given in English, so you need to speak a foreign language to be a technically competent professional. It is a relatively homogeneous society, unlike say Belgium, and does not have a downtrodden minority like southern US states had. Nor does it seem to have a history of domination by a minority of extremely rich families or robber baron industralists who can call the shots… Thanks to geography (or topography? Climate?) it is difficult for an oppressive regime to dominate the country. It has not had a serious religious divide either. Just luck… they started with a relatively undivided society - that’s a good start to calm egalitarian democracy. OTOH, I don’t think of them as at the forefront of democratic action or saving the world.
When you think of corrupt US states or municipalities, do ones with the same attributes as Norway come to mind?
Also, someone come up with an answer - with no EPA, with “only property rights”, how bad does it have to get before you prsonally can sue to stop sales of leaded gasoline or freon? What about ads for cigarettes, aimed at minors?
Let me just describe conversations I had with a once-upon-a-time friend that I have lost contact with over the years, but he has a web site and is still active in Libertarianism. He felt that the government should protect only land tenure and life. (One might include health care under that, but I never discussed it with him.) So he favored strong police and military forces. I assume he also favored a strong court system to make it work, but we never discussed that. His most bizarre belief was the infrastructure (roads, water supply, sewage) was no business of the government. If a company wanted to build a road or even a city street, they would have to somehow acquire (buy or lease) the needed land, build the road, and charge tolls on all users. Or I could build a road through my property and charge tolls to anyone wanting to use it. Water? Either drill your own well or buy it from a company that sells it either from trucks or even through pipes it has somehow managed to lay. Same with sewage. Septic tank anyone? Everyone? The whole thing sounds dreadful to me.
On the other side, he would drop laws that make things like prostitution, drugs, gambling, etc. illegal. So there is some upside to it. I gather that most American libertarians still feel the government ought to meddle in those things.
Staying strictly factual here, the EPA sets strict minimum requirements for state environmental programs. I won’t say that if the EPA disappeared tomorrow, then on the day after tomorrow, every state in the union would immediately lower environmental standards, but I think the strong consensus among environmental professionals is that at least some states would.
I have to disagree with you. The only regulation on prostitution, drugs, and gambling that libertarians would be okay with are the same ones that would apply to any other industry, namely that it is free of coercion (i.e., the women aren’t forced into it) and there is no fraud (i.e., the drugs are properly labeled).
Some states might, but if I have to guess it would be along the lines of reduced recordkeeping and regulation of smaller sources, not a return to rivers catching on fire.
It could easily be the latter, at least in some states. The problem with deregulating an issue like that to state control is that you end up with a ‘race to the bottom’ - your state can draw an enormous amount of business, create an enormous amount of jobs and make an enormous amount of money if it’s willing to relax its regulations on, say, refineries discharging oil waste into certain rivers. Add into the mix the huge political influence those large businesses are able to wield over state’s budgets (a large oil company could potentially triple a mayor or governor’s campaign contributions without having to think about it), and it’s inevitable certain states at least will end up deregulating the industry almost entirely. That’s what happened with the credit card industry, which is nowadays heavily based in certain highly-deregulated states.
However, without the EPA-backed permit to shield them from litigation (basically, it’s hard to sue a company that is acting in complete compliance with their permits), causing a fish kill or some other symptom of river pollution will cause massive lawsuits. The hunters, fishermen, and conservation groups are a large enough lobby to shut a factory down if they are measurably impacting a river or wetland. To really get away with dumping chemicals in a river on an industrial scale would require you to buy out/corrupt all officials as far downstream as there is an impact.
I don’t quite think credit deregulation is comparable.
That depends how the civil litigation laws would be written. They’re not currently written like that. You’re assuming the law would be weighed heavily in favor of consumers as opposed to businesses, and there’s no reason that would necessarily be the case. You have to balance the rights of businesses to conduct their operations against people who are affected by those operations, and in those scenarios businesses almost always have greater clout to get the scales tipped in their favour. That’s why there were rivers catching on fire before the EPA was set up in 1970.
Credit deregulation is perfectly comparable - credit card companies have the right to conduct their business freely to a certain extent, and that right has to be balanced against requirements to protect the consumer. But when there’s a lot of business, money and jobs up for grabs, there are strong incentives for states to scrap most of the consumer protections in favor of allowing businesses a free rein. Consumers end up suffering. The same thing goes for environmental pollution, the health insurance industry (a lot of conservative politicians advocate both deregulation of federal rules on the health insurance industry and allowing health insurers to sell across state lines, which would create the same ‘race to the bottom’ scenario), or most other most industries really.
Incidentally, you seem to have a few serious misconceptions about strict libertarianism:
In a strictly libertarian world, the only people who would be able to sue would be the people who own a stretch of the river being polluted. If no one owns it, it’s fair game. Hunters and conservation groups wouldn’t be able to sue no matter how polluted it got. Fishermen probably couldn’t either unless they owned part of the river.
Who are you thinking would shut down the factory? The courts wouldn’t have that power in a strict libertarian world, and the government certainly wouldn’t.
I guess I’m not seeing what the point of enacting a law is if there’s no enforcement of the law.
My understanding of how the libertarian system would work is that there would be government agencies that would set environmental standards and enact environmental laws. But these agencies would not directly enforce these standards and laws.
It would be people who would determine if they thought a local business was breaking the environmental law. And then they would take the business to court and sue them for damages.
How is an individual supposed to make these determinations? Let’s say I live in the city of Rochester and I find that my water contains some illegal pollutants. There are dozens of businesses in the city - how do I determine which one is illegally dumping the pollutants? Especially if it takes weeks for the pollutants to reach my water supply. Even if I somehow had the authority and resources to go around to every business and search their property for the pollutants, I probably wouldn’t be there at the right time to catch them dumping them.
I think it’s possible for someone to think that A is broken and that B is not, and to therefore suggest a change to A that they would not suggest for B. I’m not guaranteeing that that is the case here, I’m just suggesting that believing one type of lawsuit needs to be reformed does not necessitate a belief that all do.
From my experience, most people with a Libertarian bent support cap and trade controls for pollutions. The most recent form of this, CSAPR has faced backlash, but not because of the overall theory, but because of the timing issues. Still, though, most utilities prefer CSAPR or CAIR to things like MACT.
The courts would most assuredly have the authority to order damages to property to be ceased. Libertarianism isn’t anarchy.
Also, if you assume that all public land is sold at the beginning of this new libertarian government, then yes hunters and fishermen will have no standing to sue unless they own the land (or river). However, conservation groups own a significant portion of wetlands here in Arkansas, so they would definitely have standing to sue as soon as specific chemical pollutants are above background or detection limits.
Still, nobody has addressed my question - what about leaded gasoline? Freon? When the damage is sufficiently non-localized and any individual contributor’s share of the damage is below trivial, who defends the comons? I can’t sue over freon until the ozone hole reaches down to my location? And then only if I can show it has caused substantial damage to me? And do I get to sue the nuclear plant next door only after it blows up?
Who “owns” fishing rights? (Another commons question). Water rights on a river? Can a government take and give away your subsurface water or mineral rights? (The Russians, for example, thought nuclear reactor containment vessels were unnecessary.)
The argument over pollution in prevous posts is very relevant. With some chemicals, by the time the damage is done, it is far too late. a hollow shell of a bankrupt company shrugs its shoulders and says “My lawyer has advised me not to say sorry.” Meanwhile, someone either cleans up Love Canal on the taxpayer dollar or it becomes a no-go zone polluting downstream for another few centuries. Don’t think that even when caught red-handed, a company won’t happily try the “it wasn’t me - prove it was” defence.
One of the main things that a government could do for tort reform is the law Canada has - generally, the losing party pays the legal expenses of the winning party. This seriously cuts down on nuisance suits and the lawsuit where someone harasses another up until court date, at which time they drop the suit and walk away.