And what make you sure that you’d automatically even know they are poisoning you? Plenty of toxins are invisible. What’s the benefit of suing them when you are already dying or your children are already born with birth defects? What about all the pollution that can’t be traced to a specific source, like acid rain? What about the companies that will decide that the price of the lawsuits is worth it?
So you don’t specifically know where I can see specific libertarian beliefs? Because unless you tell me exactly what they are, I suspect you’ll simply declare any one that’s criticized a not really libertarian idea.
Honestly, I wonder if anyone at all is actually a Scottsman.
It seems to me, that the board libertarians sometimes advocate nonsense that would never work in reality. And when called on it, they backtrack or ignore it.
But you’re the one who made the assertion, shall I assume you’re retracting it?
I’m not going to watch a video series so I can understand where you get the nonsense you believe. I don’t want to know why you decided to devote yourself to a rigid ideology, I want to understand what, in your opinion, that ideology is.
You are long on ideals and short on actual ideas. Specifically what are you advocating? What is libertarian? By being fuzzy about your beliefs you grant yourself space to hide when those beliefs are criticized.
What is your point of view again? Specifically?
If I snipe, it’s because your point is a little flitting bird, and thus hard to hit.
Ontopic: The Libertarian Islands are far too stupid to actually ever exist, but if they did, I’d laugh at their utter failure. Until they sank of course. Then, I’d be sad.
The hope is that after a few expensive cases, companies would learn that dumping toxins is unprofitable.
Beyond that, there would undoubtedly be an army of lawyers running around with testing kits and offering free tests to anyone near a factory.
And besides, it’s not like this isn’t already a problem in other ways. The EPA isn’t everywhere at once. The problem simply needs to be manageable.
Pollution that can’t be traced to a specific source, or that doesn’t have specific victims, is problematic. The EPA doesn’t really have a great history here either, with their slowness in dealing with acid rain and greenhouse gases. One might imagine a massive tobacco-style lawsuit that ultimately concludes with huge settlements and contract-enforced concessions. Frankly, I don’t think there are any optimal solutions here, other than “supreme enlightened dictator of the world”. A libertarian system would have to plod its way to improvement, just as we do now.
As for “the price of lawsuits being worth it”; well, it depends on the specifics of what we’re talking about. There’s no de facto reason to believe that it would be a worse situation than it is today, where fines may be seen as a cost of business. And court-imposed damages are likely to be higher than the equivalent fines (since they would include court costs, extra damages from willful negligence, and wouldn’t be subject to legal upper bounds).
The idea isn’t necessarily a problem, anyway. Suppose some company allows chemicals to leak onto adjacent residential properties, but that the problem is caught before anyone becomes sick. The residents sue the company, recover the lost property value, and move away. Not a big deal.
When those people are seriously so callous toward their fellow citizens as to abandon their communities and build their own isolationist colony because they don’t want to pay taxes to provide community resources, it’s called poetic justice when the lack of those very same community resources results in their demise.
I’m sure you could find many things “wrong” with the post…it wasn’t intended to be anecdotal, just illustrative. But wait - if a libertarian system can’t claim to be less wasteful or inefficient than others then what makes it more desirable than other systems? It certainly can’t claim to be more equitable, on the contrary it distinctly benefits certain elites that happen to have the money or power to do as they please. The reason for libertarian resistance to regulation seems to be that it places a burden on business and introduces inefficiencies into the system. You are correct in saying that “the opposite of laissez faire isn’t necessarily going to be any less wasteful or more efficient”, if by opposite you mean some sort of collectivism. But no one’s advocating that either. It doesn’t have to be either/or, all or nothing. As I pointed out, there is a middle ground between the dog-eat-dog world of *laissez faire *libertarianism and the inertia of collectivism. A participatory democracy, where ambition and lethergy are balanced, by reasonable rules and sensible regulation. We can - and should - argue about the degree of regulation and the specific rules that apply.
Really? and in the absence of the regulatory entities that you claim to despise, how do you propose to enforce that? If your successful business model includes dumping shit onto your neighbors property, wouldn’t it be an undue burden on you, an unfair “taking” of your hard-earned money to force you to install a sewage-treatment facility? And how could said neighbor force you stop dumping? Come after you with a gun? What if you could afford a bigger gun than he could? Of course, he’s quite free, in this utopian society, to pack up and move…re-establish himself elsewhere, on another stream, where hopefully he’d find less-shitty neighbors. On the other hand, if you establish governing agencies to oversee sewage disposal, arsenic storage, etc. then you are veering away from your libertarian model.
Actually, it was a privatization of a service that was not previously being provided - the fee was a way to fund the expansion of the neighboring city’s fire department’s sphere of influence. The problem wasn’t that the city was selling its services to people living outside the city, it was that they did it stupid - making their work harder and putting that fire truck out of commission for longer because they didn’t want to give out a freebie. The phrase “cutting off your nose to spite your face” comes to mind.
It seems to me that I could dump arsenic down my own well all the live-long day, and people would be hard pressed to prove that it was my arsenic that was poisoning their land and/or water supply.
Sam, I suggest you actually research these claims on HK and the Special Economic Zones. It isn’t the picture you paint and never was in either place.
Quite possibly.
I’d characterize it as lacking rule of law.
If those inside the city want to tax themselves for more public services, I don’t have a problem. If those outside the city want a piece of the action and decide to start charging tariffs or income taxes, that’s politics baby. Canadians for example renegotiate all the time (I’m not being a wise guy here, btw, Canada does an above average job of handling tribalism without bloodshed).
If another Baby Doc actually invades the principality, then that’s a problem – I suspect that the sponsor could establish a police force and maybe a Swat team. But if it came to open warfare, the principality loses. Hm. This plan won’t work in Zimbabwe. But I suspect that there instances where it could work – India comes to mind. After all, I suspect there are plenty of people there who are sick of the License Raj.
Then your problem isn’t with libertarians, it’s that the police aren’t omniscient.
Honest question, from someone who doesn’t much participate in these debates, but I was under the impression that building codes were one of the things that libertarians were generally very much against? If people in a libertarian society aren’t taking precautions to mitigate the damage of other people’s property, what’s the recourse? How do you detect this failure, and rectify it, absent some sort of coercive government agency?
People do indeed suck. But if libertarianism is proposed as the best way to organize a society, and because of the nature of people, libertarianism leads to objectively worse outcomes than other approaches, that seems to me to be very much a problem with libertarianism. I mean, any form of government can be shown to be the best way to rule people, if you presuppose an essential alteration to the human character.
I’m also confused, in general, by your examples of Chinese government action against corporate polluters. Certainly, these examples point to widespread corruption in Chinese society, but that seems to be an issue entirely separate from the benefits or drawbacks of libertarianism. I mean, I can bribe a judge just as easily as I can bribe a building code inspector. What is it, inherent to libertarianism, that guarantees it will be free of these sorts of corruption problems?
No-the problem is that in a libertarian society I am free to do whatever I want on my land unless someone can prove that I am directly causing harm to their land, and without land-use regulation there is nothing stopping me from permanently damaging my land. Now, I suppose there might be the off chance that someone could come up with a way to prove that what I do directly harms specific others, and i could be fined for it-but my land, and the surrounding area, will still be screwed up for a long time.
I pay my fine and move away.
The person who gets my money uses it to move away.
What happens with the useless property…and what stops this from happening again?
One thing about libertarian solutions to problems like these is that they are reactive rather than proactive. I would far rather prevent crap from being put into my water or air in the first place, rather than have to rely on suing somone after the fact to mitigate damage. It is quite hard to mitigate environmental damage anyway; The cat is out of the bag, so to speak, and it’s frequently very hard (if not impossible) to get an environmental system back to the way it was before the pollution event.
I would rather have a set of well defined regulations that spell out what a person or company is not allowed to put into the public air or water. Case law in environmental pollution cases is notoriously open to interpretation, and is would not give crystal clear directions PRIOR to the pollution event about what can or cannot be done.
Yes, and not only that, corporations have deep pockets and many lawyers, and often get out of paying appropriate damages. This happens NOW (Exxon Valdez anyone), and I don’t think it would get better under a libertarian system. And if your solution involved the destruction of the corporation model… good luck with that. I"d love to see individual executives held responsible for environmental damage - not gonna happen though.
As Sam Stone noted: Have you actually read the book? That’s a really lousy synopsis. It’s mostly a political revolution book, with a few lengthy passages in which RAH sets out an idealized libertarian society that works great because it’s, you know, fiction.
How is the current system not also reactive? It’s not like the EPA has someone standing around constantly at every possible source of pollution. Sure, they do inspections, but for the most part their power is in levying fines after the fact.
All true, but again, how is that much different from what we have now? Environmental disasters still happen, and the worst ones seem to happen because of incompetence, which sadly is a bit out of the EPA’s league.
I see that almost as as outright negative. EPA regulations are far from perfect; they contain loopholes, and they are slow to respond to new pollutants. A company may well exploit these loopholes and then claim innocence due to following the existing regulations to the letter.
The plaintiff doesn’t care how the pollutant got on his property; only that he is compensated properly. In this sense, regulations seem redundant.
What about companies that genuinely want to avoid pollution (either because they think it’s the “right thing” or because they think the financial risk is too great otherwise)? Do they need the EPA to tell them how to behave? No; they can use environmental consultation companies to tell them how to store their waste properly, and so on. These companies already exist, of course.
Well–if we are inventing a “Libertopia” from scratch, there’s no reason we can’t build limits on limited liability into the constitution. It’s what I would do if designing one, at any rate (and I’m not even particularly anti-corporate).
In any case, all else being equal, there’s no reason a libertarian country would be better or worse than existing models in this regard. It’s an orthogonal problem.
They also impose regulations ahead of time, which is more pro-active than hoping for the theoretical possibility that someone at some point might file a lawsuit.
But far less than there used to be; the present system is working. It has produced large and measurable improvements. And when the EPA passes regulations on such things as how to dispose of waste they are to a degree trying to mitigate the effects of incompetence.
Longer article on OP:
http://www.details.com/culture-trends/critical-eye/201109/peter-thiel-billionaire-paypal-facebook-internet-success#ixzz1VCNep352
“Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together.”
They are planning on installing the first mothership off the waters of San Francisco. Would it be more than 200 miles off US shores? If not, methinks the residents would be liable for US and California taxes. If so, then I wonder what their military policy would be: they would certainly fall under the US’s security umbrella. There may also be emission issues, though they could easily be finessed by the original planners of this floating condo.
I like the charter city concept better, because of its pragmatism and because it addresses an actual failure of governance, as opposed to an inability to persuade your countrymen that you are not a loon. Still, it’s easy to imagine an offshore village of 1-60 pioneers or rather a couple of rich families, plus staff.
Only very slightly. A lawsuit seems virtually guaranteed if there is an actual negative effect on someone. If there is no actual negative effect… should it have been regulated in the first place?
I don’t deny that the EPA is a net improvement over what we had, given the other constraints. I simply question whether it is necessary if one makes it easier for plaintiffs to sue for damages over pollution.
Quickly perusing their history, it appears that most of their acts are reactions to obvious sources of pollution: sulfur compounds in the air, toxic substances in groundwater, dumping sewage in rivers/lakes, etc.
I am genuinely confused as to why these problems didn’t generate huge lawsuits at the time. What was clear to the EPA should have been clear to the courts as well. If there was some flaw in the system which prevented cases from going through, it seems that that is what should have been fixed.
For what it’s worth, I will grant that an “EPA-lite” at the least is necessary to control widely-dispersed forms of pollution, such as from cars. A reverse-class-action lawsuit against every car owner would be untenable.
One of the models under which new towns were founded in what’s now Spain and Portugal during the Middle Ages was similar; they had “temporary charters” to help them get started (usually involving something like tax exemptions for certain crops or other types of businesses the king/count wanted to see in that area) but were expected to eventually come up with their own local laws. It worked quite well within the intended parameters: bringing in skilled immigrants, moving travelers to Santiago inland (going by boat used to be most common), populating no-man’s lands…