Do you have the slightest bit of proof that the men responsible (for example, Jeff Vowell) are actually libertarians, or are you just continuing the SDMB tradition of throwing whatever shit you can find at libertarians in the hope that something sticks?
I’m kinda reminded of the green utopia described in Ernest Callenbach’s 1975 book Ecotopia, in which Oregon, Washington state and northern California secede in 1979, to be explored and extensively described by an American reporter in 1999. Ecotopia has done away with all corporations and nearly-all internal combustion vehicles and virtually all polluting industries. Thing is, in the real world “Ecotopia” (and San Francisco, one of its largest cities) was hit in 1989 by the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake. Without heavy industry and vehicles, that city would still be rubble ten years later.
Even the philosophical opposite of Ecotopia, a Libertopia, would be comparably vulnerable to mass disaster - with some sections being rebuilt if their owners can afford it and others allowed to decay into uselessness because no-one can profitably restore them. I expect a major disaster would give some random segment of the population massive opportunity to price-gouge for goods or charge absurd rents for temporary lodging. The ability of the afflicted to rebuild drops sharply since they have to cough up a lot of wealth for short-term survival, leading to a possibly permanent underclass which can never recover.
Regardless of an individual’s leanings, that individual contracting of fire services is certainly libertarian. It’s privatizing a service that is currently being taxed. Why should I, a hard-working citizen who’s intelligent enough not to leave his stove on all night, have to pay taxes to support some bonehead down the street who set off firecrackers on his lawn?
If you’d argue (general you) that of course fire service needs to be spread among society and is acceptable to tax, well, that just proves you do think there are some things government is better at than the private sector. At that point we know what you are, we’re just haggling over the price.
It was Der Tris that brought up pollution in reference to China and the assumption this island would dump waste into the sea.
Note that CURRENTLY ships dump waste into the sea, and only seem to have to be 3 miles off shore. That is the current state of affairs, meaning that if the whole world went libertarian over night, that aspect wouldn’t change. Does that make sense to you guys yet? So a libertarian island that dumps into the sea wouldn’t be a change, it would be status quo.
Second, I presented the factual information that China does have environmental regulations, with some pretty strict enforcement. Wouldn’t you guys love to see BP execs face execution for the Gulf oil spill?
In all of these absurd libertarian threads there are a lot of dire predictions that manage to completely ignore the current reality. Such as the fact that CURRENTLY there are cities that dump raw sewage (Canadian cities are particularly bad for this).
They only way to achieve a clean environment is if people both want it and are willing to pay for it. So it doesn’t matter if it’s a libertarian or an authoritarian system, both will achieve a clean environment. Case in point: the Blue Flag system in Costa Rica
The government didn’t go around and enforce pollution regulations, it simply presented an information system, letting tourists know if an area was clean or not. Vast amounts of money then flowed into the Blue Flag areas and away from the areas without, because people made the conscious choice to spend money at the cleaner beaches. This encouraged dirty areas to clean up so that they could get some of that sweet action.
Right now, people don’t give a shit about coal fired power plants, so they happily enjoy lower power bills while ignoring the environmental impact. They don’t care about industrial farm run off, because they’d rather cheaper ground beef. Destroying the environment is profitable because people are willing to buy those products. If consumers demanded environmental protections it could be achieved as simply as the Blue Flag program by having the government let people know how much a particular company pollutes.
The problem isn’t with libertarianism, it’s with people, people suck.
Are you seriously so callus that you’d wish death on a group of people you disagree with?
There is a lot wrong with your post, but this one jumps out at me. The point isn’t to be less wasteful or more efficient. I’m not sure why you thought it was.
And besides, the opposite of laissez faire isn’t necessarily going to be any less wasteful or more efficient. As an example, consider garbage collection: if left to private companies you end up with a lot of overlap, multiple trucks collecting on the same street, driving past each other. But competition will push them each individually to be more efficient and less wasteful.
If assigned to the government (or single monopoly) you get lethargy. There is no incentive to reduce wastefulness or to improve efficiency. It’s much harder for the government to make capital investments such as newer trucks (at least in my opinion).
The actual optimum isn’t achievable by either group.
Not sure how many times this has been mentioned, but in a libertarian system you are NOT allowed to make people sick, nor can you murder, nor can you steal. Why is that so complicated to understand? Just like today, I am not allowed to dump arsenic in your well. In a libertarian system you would not be allowed to dump shit onto my property, or poison a stream that runs through my property.
So, you are saying Libertarian Island has the equivalent of the EPA which regulates people and business?
Can I dump toxic shit on my property and/or pollute my air, and pretend that an invisible property line will stop the crap from spilling over onto my neighbor’s property?
I suspect we’re splitting hairs and are in general agreement. ‘Taxes’ may be low, but how do you characterize a government that technically allows free enterprise, but if your little shack gets too successful government thugs will come by and beat you and burn down your shack because you’re gaining a little too much power for their liking? Or perhaps a regional administrator will come by and assess a levy for some arbitrary reason and take half your earnings?
It’s not just corruption by local officials - it can also be pernacious bigotry, paranoid control over the economy that causes government to whack the heads of people who rise a little higher than the average, and other features unique to these despotic regimes.
The biggest problem I have with ‘charter cities’ is that I don’t know how they avoid becoming targets if they are too successful - targets not just of the government, but of zealots and grassroots movements outside the zone that seek to confiscate their wealth. I know these cities are supposed to have first-world sponsors, but are those sponsors ready to go to war to protect them?
There’s no need for an EPA if the court system works sufficiently well. Someone dumps arsenic on my property, I sue them for damages.
There are some open questions, like what happens if a pollutant stored on someone’s property migrates naturally to someone else’s. But these can be solved through case law, with again no need to for a public regulatory agency.
Limited liability corporations present another problem in that they make it easier to get out of paying damages. But these are themselves a construct of the state, and there’s no reason they have to exist in a libertarian system. The courts could then go after the executives/employees/investors individually.
If you store your waste in well-protected containers, your neighbor has no grounds to sue. If you dump it in the ground and it migrates over through the groundwater, then the neighbor does have grounds to sue (assuming that’s what the case law converges on).
I don’t see the difficulty here. It’s not any different from a homeowner having a tree on his property. It’s only an issue if the tree falls over and smashes his neighbor’s house. No one gets to pretend that there are invisible lines, or that the fallen tree is somehow the neighbor’s problem since it’s now on his property.
Do all such matters have to be processed by courts? There’s no shorthand method of saying “you did this, here’s your fine” ? I could imagine the plantiff’s legal costs being more than he can reasonably expect to recover in damages, especially if an arsenic-dumper has the time and resources to drag the process out.
I know for a fact that you have been a participant in any number of debates about libertarianism on this board - debates where the actual beliefs of libertarians have been spelled out in detail, over and over again. They always get ignored, or the response is to find one crazy idea by one person claiming to be a libertarian and then attacking that rather than the long, heavily cited, substantive explanations of libertarianism that many of us have offered. Why should anyone go to the trouble of doing it again?
You’re trying to have it both ways.
First you suggest we have a fine, then you switch over to an expensive court case involving arsenic.
If the latter statement is true, the defendant could just as easily pay the fine without any consequence. I forget off hand, but this issue came up in a few European countries where they wanted to make fines in proportion to wealth, because they realized that to a rich person a speeding ticket is just an extra fee to drive fast.
So what would be the fine for poisoning people? And what’s to stop, again, the same guy from fighting that in court, now against the government instead of the neighbour?
We don’t currently have fines for murder, nor do we regulate against it, or require civil suits (although I think they are allowed eg OJ Simpson). If you poison someone you are tried in court.
If you know this for a fact, you should be able to cite where it has happened?
Specifically?
Who could afford to live there? With most of us, we live where we are born. But to get into this enclave you really have to plan, be ideologically in favor of it and work at it. That is nothing like how a normal civilization works where people of all stripes are born into a society and make the best of it.
They can try, but where are they going to get all the service workers? Where will their economic output come from? Given the choice, will workers choose to live in an island state with lax building codes built in the middle of the ocean, knowing it was designed to give the wealthy all the power (no labor laws, environmental laws, minimum wages, etc)?
Unless they import people from a developing nation and offer them $1/hr. I could see it working then. But it seems like it’ll consist of rich people, libertarian idealogues and poor people from the developing world. I would like to see how that turns out.
I’m not trying to have it any way, I’m trying to figure out how they’d have it their way.
Well, the example at hand is someone dumping (or at least accused of dumping) arsenic on their own property which eventually traveled to and was detected by a neighbor on his property. Is the only action taken against the dumper that of the potential court action brought by the neighbor?
Well, I guess if the citizens of Libertopia are okay with that, I don’t see a problem.
I wasn’t talking about poisoning (let along killing) people, just a pollution dispute currently (in the U.S.) handled by the EPA and, eventually, the civil courts.
Yes, in a libertarian system, the courts would handle far more. And they would have to account for asymmetry in power (individual vs. big corp). But this is already a problem, and we have some means of correcting it (anti-SLAPP statutes, for instance). There’s no reason to think that a libertarian state wouldn’t have the same thing.
There would, presumably, be more private certification organizations than there are now (such as UL and ANSI). While not a guaranteed defense, they might be an ameliorating factor in damages–if you store your waste in containers approved by a respected organization, you might be subject to less damages than if you had simply dumped your waste in a pit and hoped for the best.
The fact that there’s no quick-and-easy “pay your fine” method is a good thing, IMHO. It means that damage done by one party on another is taken more seriously than a simple cost of business. It means that the fine is more likely to reflect the actual damage caused (since the courts will have to decide this based on the evidence). And it means that actions which cause no actual harm do not cost anything.
Move your little mouse pointer to the box called ‘Search’. Click on it. When the little dropdown opens, type “libertarianism” and press your enter key. You will be inundated with page after page of threads on this topic.
Open any one of those threads, and read. I just did that at random, and almost every one of them I looked at contains long messages from people like me, John Mace, xtisme and others giving very patient, very detailed explanations of libertarian philosophy and practice. You’ve been present in most of them. If you can’t remember or don’t bother to read them, I have no idea why I should be compelled to write it again for you or go to the work of sifting out links for you to follow.
Or, you could do what I suggested in another thread (and got mocked for): You could try reading a book or watching the video series called “Free To Choose”, which is available for free streaming on the web. Google it.
But you don’t really want to know these things, do you? You don’t honestly care about understanding libertarian beliefs. You’re just looking for ammunition, or doing what you’re doing now, which is to demand that your opponents work their asses off to spoon-feed you information which you aren’t going to read anyway, or if you do you’ll skim it looking for some nugget you can throw back like a grenade to derail the conversation until the next time this comes up, at which point you’ll demand more cites again.
In the meantime, you almost never bring anything substantive to the table yourself. Just snipes and jibes at your enemies - people who are expending great effort in good faith, with the goal of having a reasonable discussion about differing points of view.
Well, until somebody goes ahead and tries it (which I’d kinda like to see, just out of curiosity), it remains hypothetical.