I hope I am keeping my response “theoretical and factual.”
In the real world money talks. Even if you could sue the factory, the factory owner would be able to afford far better legal support than you could. Also, judges are not dispassionate calculating machines, but human beings with values and emotions. If the judge hearing the case belonged to the same country club as the factory owner, he would probably find some legal excuse to let the factory owner continue to pollute the air.
Even if you won this case, nothing would stop another industrialist from starting another factory, and doing the same thing. Before too long you would lose your few acres and a house paying legal fees to stop people from doing what the government never should have let them do in the first place.
Also, what if you could not afford several acres and a house? What if you worked in that factory, enduring dangerous and unhealthful working conditions every day. You could not afford a lawyer. You were afraid to complain, because in a libertarian economy there would be no unemployment compensation, and no labor unions.
The closest approximation of what libertarians advocate were the British and American economies in the nineteenth century. Back then in cities the air and water was severely polluted. Rich people lived up wind, and up stream. Ordinary citizens had no recourse.
For millions of Americans libertarianism is an attractive philosophy, because libertarians justify everything in the name of “freedom,” and most Americans think freedom is a good thing. The reality is not good, however.
You referred to hunters, fishermen, and conservation groups being “a large enough lobby” to shut a factory down. In a libertarian world there’s no one you could lobby to shut a factory down. The courts might award a prohibitory injunction, although in the real world they tend to award damages instead. Either way, the idea that the courts alone would be able to prevent rivers becoming severely polluted is wishful thinking. They had that power before 1970, and a lot of rivers still became severely polluted. I find the same wishful thinking is pervasive in libertarian doctrine.
That’s just it. Libertarians remind me of myself and my friends when we were in college. We could sit in coffee houses and at side walk cafes discussing the perfect society. Now in our case the perfect society was a democratic socialist society.
We would describe how it would be designed and run. We had no concept of whether it would work as planned, and no idea of how to sell it to the voters.
Democratic socialism has never existed anywhere. Laissez faire capitalism existed in the nineteenth century. It was not pretty.
I think that’s one of the major issues that cause all the arguments when we have libertarian threads. It usually ends up being a comparison between how libertarianism would theoretically work under ideal conditions versus how other systems actually work in the real world. I think one thing we’d all agree on is that all political systems work a lot better under ideal conditions than they do in the real world. So to make a fair comparison between different systems you have to assume the theoretical systems would experience some real world loss of quality.
Look at Communism. People spent the 19th century saying how great Communism was in theory and the 20th century demonstrating how bad it was in practice.
