Even if it isn’t spread among innocent parties, it’s a pretty ghastly moral hazard. “We met our requirement to fund everyone’s medical premiums, so kindly fuck off while we pour mercury waste off the end of the pier.”
Well, I hate to be Debbie Downer, but this happens now. Except that now it’s, “We have met the minimum requirements of our permits. So kindly fuck off when you come back tell us we need to fix something else that no one knew about till yesterday and no one is 100% sure it’s even dangerous.”
I would hate to live in Libertaria. But the system we have now, where pollution is problematic but there’s a patina of protection to give us some peace of mind, is not optimal either. Things slip past the filters all the time.
If EPA releases a report linking autism with exposure to petroleum products, what would society do? Get rid of plastics? The business community would go buck wild at any movement to ban them, and politicians would echo that response. So I don’t see this happening. The “free market” will come up with ways to enable the well-to-do to lower their risk (plastic-free products), but the rest of us will continue to bath in a neurologically damaging environment until a critical mass of fear builds up to tip the market in favor of the consumer. In the meantime, it would be helpful if the government provided healthcare to offset the harm it knowingly allows to exist.
I’m not arguing that this is the ideal (ideal would be strict regulation AND UHC), but it is more practical than waiting for the free market to self-correct.
Or perhaps you have chosen to be offensive rather than create a more internally consistent position. Hard to say, really. I don;t know your mind any more than you know mine.
What I know is you seem to have a much more restricitive scenario in your head than you have chosen to present in the OP, which makes it difficult to engage in a meaningful discussion. For example:
[ul][Monstro]if one doesn’t want to enforce environmental regulations against facilities through the instruments of federal and state agencies AND if one wants to get rid of the FDA, USDA, the CDC, and other governmental agencies that facilitate the execution of public health legislation
[li][spiritus]a society might craft new standards of liability to allow individuals to more easily claim damages for broad environmental damages[/li][li][spiritus]Another choice might be to attempt to redress the imbalance in power through information, passing strict regulations around disclosure, labeling, etc. and putting real teeth into the penalties for any violation.[/li][li][monstro]Stricter laws are worthless without an enforcement arm, which is what our hypothetical government would not have [/li][/ul]
The OP posits teh abolition of environmental and health reguatory agencies. If you wanted to posit the abolition of all market regulations and enforcement capability then you should have done so. Pulling further qualifications out of your hat with each post just makes things needlessly tortuous.
Granted, but neither one of us is asking for environmental laws to be enforced in these hypotheticals. Unless you have decided that truth in labeling laws are somehow an environmental regulation.
I’ll make you a deal, if you can point out any place in this thread where I have suggested that environmental regulations or the enforcement thereof are a necessary component of any hypothetical scenario, then I;ll just say “you win” and we can stop dancing around each other fruitlessly.
UHC represents a clear restriction on trade in perhaps the largest sector of our current economy. I don’t know of any strong libertarians who would agree with you that UHC is an acceptable extension of limited government. Perhaps they exist, but I would hardly call such a position typical of the movement.
It wasn;t clear, and perhaps that is the problem. If you wanted to argue in a conext of extreme libertari then you should not have restricted the OP to abolishment only of environmental and public health regulations. Regardless, even in extreme libertaria neither tort reform to adjust standards of proof for environmental damage nor more powerful rules regarding transparency of information would necessarily be disallowed. In fact, I know many libertarians who argue that transparency of information is necessary for a free market to function well.
I never posited a replacement agency for any of the above. I posited stronger regulation around transparency of information, accuracy in labeling, etc. You ar ethe one who seems incapable of imaging that except as a function of the FDA/USDA/EPA etc. I;m not sure why you think so, since those functions today are performed by other agencies - but that appears to be the case
UHC does not keep the healthcare market free.
The evidence appears to contradict that claim.
But is it any less a moral hazard without UHC? Monstro isn’t really advocating eliminating environmental regulations, he is asking people who do find these onerous if UHC reduces the consequences to the public.
If someone’s position is that we should only penalize those actively polluting, then they must agree that regulations are necessary to define what polluting is. At this point relatively inexpensive inspections seem worth it to reduce the harm done by the polluter, and might be welcomed by a company to protect themselves from penalty due to a misunderstanding of the regulations.
Some might say that the penalties would prevent anyone from polluting in the first place, but we know this isn’t what the real world is like.
They might also say that the market would penalize polluters, by giving them a bad reputation. But the effects are local while lower prices from not paying to limit waste is global, and the American public has seldom penalized those with harmful production techniques.
In any case, if someone wants to eliminate regulations on pollution, it seems fair to have the public at large pay for the increased costs of those who suffer. Since those costs come before any possible reward from law suits, etc., UHC seems the most effective way to do this.