How defunct? If the executives are still around, I’d favor going after them.
And yet again, I ask how is that any different from today? All the EPA regulations in the world won’t stop a company from secretly burying toxic waste on their property. Most likely, it’s only found out until the damage has been done.
A famous one. But I have to wonder how that is any different from the millions of similar decisions made when constructing any dangerous artifact.
Take any low-cost car. Someone, somewhere must have made a decision on which brake system, or tires, or whatever to add. At some point there was a choice–do we spend an extra $10 on the brakes and decrease stopping distances by 5 feet? And if they had bothered to do the math, they’d probably find that some dozens of lives would be saved with the improved brakes; not on a low-speed rear-ending, of course, but on those edge cases where a person’s spine only *barely *fractured, and a change of a few miles per hour would have made an enormous difference.
The only difference with the Pinto is that people were appalled that someone had gone through with the math, and specifically that the cost was so cheap ($11). Statistically, though, the car was no more dangerous than similar cars at the time. Other vehicles must have similar, but perhaps less obvious tradeoffs.
Do you think the Pinto case is fundamentally different, and if so, why?
I think these parts are important: Hooker Chemical had sold the site to the Niagara Falls School Board in 1953 for $1, with a deed explicitly detailing the presence of the waste,[1] and including a liability limitation clause about the contamination.
The Niagara Falls City School District needed land to build new schools, and attempted to purchase the property from Hooker Chemical that had been used to bury toxic waste. The corporation refused to sell, citing safety concerns, and took members of the school board to the canal and drilled several bore holes to demonstrate that there were toxic chemicals below the surface. However, the board refused to capitulate.[1] Eventually, faced with the property being condemned and/or expropriated, Hooker Chemical agreed to sell on the condition that the board buy the entire property for one dollar.*
It appears to me that the school district is utterly at fault here. Buried waste is not a problem as long as it is isolated. But the school, knowing full well about the waste, essentially forced Hooker Chemical to sell. Perhaps you can explain why you think the corporation is at fault.
“Free markets” are a bad idea. Capitalism in its purest form (unregulated markets, let business sort it out) inevitably leads to a monopoly/oligopoly. Again, we saw this in the early 1900’s in the United States. You end up with markets that are anything but free. Innovation is stifled, prices soar, most everyone is screwed.
So, does Libertopia have anti-trust regulations? Now you are regulating the markets.
Do you have an SEC that stomps on things like insider trading and people trying to corner markets and such? Whoops…more regulation.
You can keep this up for a long time. In the end you end up with something much like we have and not Libertopia.
I agree it would be difficult to pursue a lawsuit if the polluter followed all the EPA guidelines. Perhaps not impossible but it’d be an uphill battle and that seems about right to me. If a business owner complies with regulations they should not be punished.
In other words, yes, you could shoot yourself in the head all you want. And it’s true that a stray bullet may injure someone else. But can you not see the problem with what you posted? Do you have no vested interest in an arsenic-free well?
As a semi-interesting anecdote, my in-laws live in rural Goa, India. They have a well, chickens, a few pigs, and a machine shop where they make wrote-iron metal gates.
I don’t know whether or not India has an EPA or environmental regulations, but they certainly weren’t followed on this property. Eventually one of the workers washed a bunch of stuff with a toxic substance that killed all their animals. Now they practice a rather strict self-imposed set of regulations to keep from poisoning themselves. Avoiding death tends to be a pretty powerful motivator.
What should be highlighted here is the need for information. People often do things simply without knowing the consequences, and once corrected they may self correct. Smoking is not one of those things.
Bottled water. Running a corporation, I can afford to have it shipped in.
Not really. Dumping it down the well is a lot cheaper than hauling it out, I’m only using the land to build factories on so who gives a crap about whether plants will ever grow on it again, and I can always abandon it if it becomes entirely useless and buy another plot of land elsewhere.
Yet you only have to fail once. What if that toxic substance had killed all the humans on the property as well? They don’t get an option to try again after that.
This is an entirely different discussion that what was occurring with respect to neighbours living next to each other. Is that really what you consider to be an honest discussion?
So to answer your specific question, even though Dr Strangelove has already done so several times, if your factory is poisoning anyone that is a crime. You are not allowed to do things that harm me. If you dumping in your well kills my livestock, you have caused me financial harm. The result plays out the same as it would today. Except instead of a regulation that says, “don’t pollute” we have a law that says, “you can’t kill someone else’s livestock or poison their family.”
What is it about this that confuses you still?
Which is actually a CURRENT problem, not a new issue with libertarianism. Right now factory farms allow huge amounts of toxic run off, most notably into the Mississippi. This happens because consumers are either too stupid or too cheap to care.
But your question could just as easily be, “Why should i buy the land when I could just shoot you and move in?” If you don’t know the answer you haven’t been paying any attention at all. If you do know the answer I’m not sure why you would have posted the question you posed.
You could if you didn’t ever plan to sell it. Which is also a current problem, especially since there are lots of legal ways to destroy your property and ruin its value.
Just so this is clear: I don’t give a fuck what you do to yourself or your personal property. If you want to salt the land, marry a dude, smoke some weed, then shoot yourself in the head, be my guest. But you are not allowed to harm me, or my property. It’s that simple.
If I “salt the land” as you put it-use it up, screw it up and toss it away…who’s land is it to fix(if it can be fixed, that is)? How many properties do I get to screw up and over-as many as I can afford?
Have you ever heard of the term “Ecosystem”?
You seem dead set on trying to prove that regulations aren’t a perfect defense. Of course they’re not. But they drastically reduce the need for every homestead or every company to go through the same potentially lethal trial-and-error.
What if Czarcasm runs a coal burning power plant a few miles away.
How much air pollution is it ok for him to spew into the air? Even a little bit is harmful and some is unavoidable but having electricity is important too and he is the only guy who makes it.
He is harming you. No two ways about it. Who decides how much is too much air pollution? You? The guy with asthma? Your grandma who is on oxygen?
Fine. Then prove it was me who got arsenic in the water supply. Prove it was MY arsenic and not someone else’s. Or naturally occuring. And by the way, I have a very large law firm on retainer, as well as a very large public relations firm that will be asking some very pointed questions about you in the media.
And there is now a grass-roots movement started, called “Friends of emacnight’s town water” And they don’t take very kindly to your accusations, sir.
Breaking down the country into separate little areas of control (no Federal regulations) would lead to effective control by larger and larger corporations to do what they damn well pleased.
General comment: Michael Sandel has an interesting argument about what he calls “free market triumphalism” (self-explanatory term). Using market manipulation to discourage problems, he argues, changes the nature of those problems from moral to economic. Moral impediments (including laws) discourage acts beyond the actual material penalties they incur; if those impediments are changed to mere fees, they cease to have the same effect. The minor example he uses is that of a daycare that started charging parents a tidy sum ($50, I think) if they arrived late to pick up their children, hoping to eliminate the problem. Instead, people started being late more often. Anyway, there’s more to it than that, and if you can get a copy of his Reith lectures, they’re worth a listen (unfortunately, AFAIK they are no longer available in the podcast form that I heard them in, or I would give a link.)
More specific (slightly off-topic) comment:
You actually picked an odd example. In the case of congestion, the externality is not an externality; it is felt only by others who use the good, so it causes exactly no market distortion. Anti-congestion measures like bus lanes, bike lanes, mass transit, etc., are generally a good idea precisely because they are a subsidy to businesses; they let workers and consumers get in and out of a populated area more smoothly. If the government charges a fee to use a road, it merely indicates that the good in question is now scarce, and the government sees fit to at (often only partially) recuperate their subsidy; if private corporations step in, it presumably indicates that the subsidy has been entirely recuperated.
Without regulations: I have three neighbors all dumping arsenic on their properties, and some of it’s leaking onto my property. If I sue the one to the east of me, he just claims that it can’t be his arsenic, it must be the guy to my west, because the water table drainage runs west-to-east. If I sue the one to my west, he claims that the water table drainage runs east-to-west. If the guy two properties over to my east tries to sue my neighbor, he turns around and says that the drainage runs east-to-west. A hydrologist gets involved (how? Who hires him?) and says that in his professional opinion, he can’t tell which way the water table drains, and doesn’t know whom I should sue.
With regulations: I have three neighbors who dump arsenic on their properties. I report all three to the regulatory agency, and the agency tells all three to knock it off. It might also fine all of them, and disburse the fines to all the folks who are suffering from arsenic leaks, no matter where they are. If there’s need for a hydrologist, the regulatory agency is the one who hires him, but they might not even need to at all, since no matter which way the arsenic is flowing, all of the dumpers are still at fault.
Which system works better at preventing my neighbors from harming me?
In an alternate history with no regulatory agencies and no Montreal Protocol, who is the plaintiff in a suit over CFCs causing ozone depletion? Or do we just let that continue to happen?
This isn’t an argument against Libertarianism, how do you not realize this?
So again, here it is for you, are you ready?
Even with regulations, all the regulations you can imagine, and then some, even the most perfect of all regulations, how is the government/regulator going to prove it was your arsenic in the water?
And if they try, you’ve got lots of money, and lots of lawyers, while the government/regulator has a fixed fund.
Even if your regulatory agency gets through all that, the limited liability you gave to the company means they can go bankrupt and pay nothing. The execs start a new company and the whole mess starts again. Right NOW General Motors is fighting to claim it was the previous GM (no relation to the current GM) that killed people, so can’t be at fault.
Do you see how the system you hate so much isn’t any different than the system you love?
This is what I said earlier about trying to have it both ways. All the things that make it difficult for me to sue my polluting neighbour make it just as hard for the government to enforce regulations. And the harder it is for me the harder it is for the government.
Yet, I could easily have **more **resources than the government. Why should I have to wait for the slow wheels of government to grind along? Why should I have to make repeated calls to the EPA for them to get off their asses? How long will it take for them to get around to my problem? And what’s to say this super rich arsenic company isn’t a key contributor to the current government and a major employer in the area, and providing most of the tax revenue that funds the very regulators that are supposed to shut it down?
See post #136: Moral impediments vs. fixed fees. Laws and regulations will tend to stop people from doing acts that society has deemed as “Bad”. If you make those same acts purely a financial decision, then it becomes easier to justify.
Also, the regulations don’t have to prove that the arsenic you put down the well is polluting someone else’s land. The regulations prevent you from putting the arsenic down your own well, full stop. It’s very difficult to show where a chemical came from when it can move 100’s of miles and still pollute water. It’s much easier to show that you have arsenic, and you are not properly disposing of it according to regulations.
Do you not see this? The problem is that pollution travels. And it is very hard to show where it has come from once it is out in the big world.
