In this thread regarding the Pew Research Center’s “political typology”, Sam Stone, arguing about the false dichotomies presented in their quiz, makes the following statement (middle of post #12):
I don’t want to discuss the quiz itself or politics in general; the debate, if one is to be had, is solely about “the market as the best tool for protecting the environment”. This seems a non-starter to me, patently false on the face of it. I’d like to understand the rationale behind the statement, because I simply don’t see it. It’s not that I’m dismissing it out of hand, as I’m willing to consider whatever arguments are set forth, but it seems so absurd to me that I can’t even begin to formulate an argument in support.
I would think it’s necessary to supply the following in any justification:
[ol]
[li]What the market optimizes, as “best” implies some criteria[/li][li]What “protecting the environment” signifies[/li][li]Hi Opal[/li][/ol]
I can’t speak for Sam or other libertarians, but my take on their position, based on earlier discussions of this topic, is that they don’t mean that markets alone are adequate for environmental protection, just that market mechanisms are the most efficient tools for that purpose.
Libertarians understand the “tragedy of the commons” thingy, and realize that if people can externalize costs of pollution or resource extraction onto shared natural resources like clean air and water and wilderness, they’ll tend to do so. The only solutions are either to divvy up all the environmental “commons” into privately owned property so that nobody can cut costs by dumping on them—a pretty draconian solution and rather complicated when it comes to, say, access to air—or to admit some governmental regulation about what people can and can’t do to the environment. Most pragmatic-type libertarians that I’ve encountered accept the necessity of option 2.
However, there’s a case to be made for trying to make environmental regulation as “market-like” as possible, with things like tax incentives and pollution trading credits and so forth rather than just a bunch of legally mandated Thou-Shalt-Not’s. I may disagree with libertarians about how far one can usefully take the “marketization” of regulation, but fundamentally I think they have a point.
(And for what it’s worth, I still think “Hi Opal” is funny, so there. :))
I fail to see how breaking up common resources into privately owned property would prevent externalizing costs. If I can dump my garbage in my neighbor’s privately owned pail so he has to pay the cost of hauling it away I’m still money ahead. His only recourse is to either take me to court, and that’s what the government evironmental protection people do, beat me up or shoot me if I persist.
David Simmons:If I can dump my garbage in my neighbor’s privately owned pail so he has to pay the cost of hauling it away I’m still money ahead. His only recourse is to either take me to court, and that’s what the government evironmental protection people do, beat me up or shoot me if I persist.
Right you are, but the libertarians don’t have a problem with allowing private citizens to take one another to court for interfering with each other’s private property. They just don’t like the government to be making any rules about anything except interfering with someone else’s private property.
Anyway, as an environmentalist and anti-libertarian I’m just devil’s-advocating in this here argument, and I hereby quit. Let Sam Stone and/or the other libertarians come in and defend their own positions, if they can.
Right. But, the other aspect of this argument is private property rights. And the free-market environmentalists (at least this one) don’t think government agencies should be regulating, to the extreme extent that they do, what use can be made of privately held property. Free-market environmentalists see pristine land as a limited commodity. And as such, a market, largely (not wholly—even the Nature Conservancy partners with governmental units) unregulated and left to its own devices, is the most efficient method of managing that commodity. A clean environment is a luxury good. You want some, buy some.
Here’s another excellent free market enviromentalist organization: The Thoreau Institute. That link goes to their FAQ which may answer many of your questions.
UncleBeer: *A clean environment is a luxury good. *
This is probably the chief sticking point in libertarian environmentalism as far as most non-libertarians are concerned. Certainly there are some kinds of environmental assets that have to be considered “luxury goods”—nobody but the very rich can expect to possess a privately owned estate of acres of wilderness in a high-rent area, for example—but not all of them. Most environmentalists would reject the notion that clean air or clean water should be considered “luxuries” available only to the well-to-do.
I’d like to second Kimstu’s statement that in many ways a clean environment is not a luxury good, but a fundamental need for survival. Clean water and air are excellent examples, and there are others.
I’d also like to recommend that folks interested look into environmental economics and the notion of ecosystem services. There’s a fairly good article about them in The Economist’s April 23rd issue, p. 76. It’s a good source that is certainly not typically considered ‘environmentalist.’
Er, the whole point of “private property” is that the owner has legal recourse against unauthorized use (i.e. if your neighbor finds out that you dumped your trash in his privately owned pail, he can send the cops to explain that you had better stop doing that).
And you guys are correct. I’ve over-stated the position with my rhetorical shorthand. Obviously a clean (or relatively clean) environment - at least locally - is necessary to the well-being of human (and all other) life. I’m not sure how I can really phrase it differently though, without a long-winded and rambling explanation. If you’ll permit, lemme try this tack:
It’s the demand for a pristine environment over wide areas that is a luxury. If one wishes to maintain a pristine environment for the red-cockaded woodpecker, then one should be willing to pay the costs for such through the free-market system. It is through the free-market system that values of items can be most efficiently set and and an orderly flow of goods can be maintained in the long term. Policies implemented by government bureaucracies mandating, or proscribing, certain uses of land at the behest of regulatory-centered environmentalists are little more than theft of property. Permitting government agencies to appropriate environmental goods effectively sets their value at zero. And the demand that government protect the red-cockaded woodpecker at the expense of a private property owner’s intentions for use of that land destroys valuable assets and creates inefficiencies in the market place.
Ach - I don’t mean to neglect my thread; I became unexpectedly occupied and this is the first chance I’ve had to say so. I have to attend to some other things also, but I’ll fulfill my OP responsibilities as soon as I’m able…
The problem is that the environment cannot be bought and sold in little, pre-packaged chunks (again with the tragedy of the commons).
Say I go out as UncleBeer suggests and buy a couple of hundred acres on the Colorado front range with the express purpose of owning my own little piece of clean environment. My piece of environment is and can be affected by every point in the world. Couple of scenarios (i.e. strawmen):
Someone upstream from me pollutes the stream running through my land while mining their own property. This kills vegetation, fish, etc… on my not-so-clean-anymore piece of environment. Without environmental regulation this is not illegal, but if I can demonstrate harm I can collect damage and stop them. OK, so I sue them, collect damages and fix my land with the money I collected. Or I force them to set up containment ponds. Or (most likely) both. Simple case and pretty solvable.
The ranches around me fence of their land to keep the cattle in and thus stop all migration of deer, bighorn sheep, antelope, mountain lion, lynx, moose, what have you from crossing or even reaching my private ecosystem. This coupled with the fact that they have also wiped out the local coyote population has left me with a bunch of problems. The plants, which are normally thinned by the deer, antelope, etc… have now grown out of control and unbalanced the ecosystem. The prairie dogs, moles, etc… that were usually checked by the yearly visits of the mountain lions and the continual grazing of the coyotes are breeding unchecked. How do I show harm and how do I receive restitution? Who do I sue? How do I quantify my damages so that I can get restitution?
My guess is that I am SOL. If I wanted to buy a “complete” ecosystem I should have spent more money and bought a sizable chunk of the front range that included the entire migratory patterns of the animals above. Either that, or I can stock it and fence it like a zoo.
Global warming, acid rain, and the power plants on the west coast.
Enough said. I am sure everyone can see that the lack of environmental regulations and the difficulty of showing direct harm make it almost impossible for me, the private clean environment parcel owner in Colorado, to collect damages from industries thousands of miles away.
What about Florida, citrus crops, temperatures, and ground water movement? Currently in Florida temperatures in the winter have become more extreme (i.e. cold), ruining citrus crops. One of the big reason for this that the swamps are being drained to put in housing, shopping malls, roads, etc… and this is have an effect on winter temperatures. (I can provide a cite for this if asked, though you might have to wait until tomorrow when I am not at work.) Can the citrus farmers, who are being harmed by these environmental changes get any compensation under a free market system?
What if I buy the Bosque del Apache national wildlife refuge in New Mexico (or something similar). I then create a business selling tickets to birdwatchers in November and December when the cranes, herons, eagles, etc… migrate to my land and nest for the winter. Without environmental regulation to protect them, can I get restitution if some yahoos up in North Dakota wipe out the whooping crane population trying to stop them from eating their corn? How much restitution? What if development all up and down the front range wipe them out due to habitat destruction along their migration route? All the wetlands get drained for development or farming and now the cranes, geese, and ducks no longer come to my land (assuming the migration routes changed but the species did not go extinct). What then? How can I protect my assets in this case? Am I again required to fence and stock my environment to protect it? Does “own a clean piece of environment” = “own a zoo”?
Anyway, as a Libertarian in most matters I struggle with this aspect. I have yet to find someone that can convince me that the free market can protect the environment. I do not see a mechanism for it to do so.
I need to leave this discussion until tomorrow/Sunday, so please don’t get offended if any comments directed to me don’t get responses.
OK, that’s a valid response, in that I did not ask for what “the market” signifies. Naturally, I understood it to imply no government regulation – i.e., “let the market decide”. Note the absence of “free”, which I think is a sticking point for me. If one accepts the need for government regulation, there is no such thing as a free market. If “market” is not equated with “free market”, then I don’t understand the term “market” as used by Sam Stone.
Which is why I asked what the market optimizes. Is it optimizing protection of the environment? Obviously not, because then protection of the environment could not go to the highest bidder. But if it is not, that means that there are at least two performance measures in use to make judgements: 1. protecting the environment, and 2. whatever it is that the market is optimizing. A coincidence of the two is just that – a coincidence, and therefore cannot be the best tool to do so.
Now, reading post #11, you illustrate this. To wit:
As I read this, then, protection of the environment is not the primary concern of the market. Rather, optimizing (monetary) value is. But unless monetary value is necessarily equated with protection of the environment, it cannot be the best tool for the job.
I find this with a lot of things (absolute) free marketeers espouse, which is why I started this thread. I’d like to either be able to understand the sentiments or summarily dismiss them as either poppycock or, giving the benefit of the doubt, overstatement on their part.
Also, understand that schemes like Kyoto are not free market even though they use market mechanisms. Somebody from on high still needs to determine the total CO2 that can be produced in 1 year and theres a real risk that they could over or underestimate.
But there’s no one here who is advocating a complete removal the government regulatory aspect from the enviromental landscape. So yeah, like you said, “strawman.”
In any case, the Nature Conservancy would disagree with you. They believe that by purchasing “conservation easements,” they can preserve environmentally crucial portions of the globe.
Well, no. But then “optimization” of any single aspect is necessarily detrimental to others. Market forces, operating with a minimum of government interference, are simply the balances which prevent the economy from tipping to far in any direction. The market doesn’t “optimize” anything - except perhaps itself.
Sure but why, in the general case, such as air (which was mentioned) and water, is individual property owners taking lots of separate actions better than having some government regulations which can take care of them all at once and in addition do so for those individuals who haven’t the resources to do it alone?
Let’s take the anthracite region in northeastern Pennsylvania, say around Scranton. When I went through it in 1946 it looked like I imagined the surface of the moon to look. Towns straggling up the sides of a shallow draw with mines scattered here and there. Down in the bottom of the draw was a stream of horrible water that was filled with things like coal dust, slag, sulphur and other noxious chemicals carried in the coal. The stream crossed lots of other people’s private property but their resources to bring action against the mining companies were limited. Meanwhile the junk continued to wash down the draw year after year with the mine’s lawyers simply dragged things out until the individual property owners’ resources were exhausted.
Libertarians and others act as if they had generated and entirely new idea. I’ve got news for them. The “let private property owners take care of their interests and everything will be fine” was tried and failed in the 1890’s and even before.
I realize that this wasn’t directed at me, but perhaps this is the crux of my issue. When someone says, “the free market is the best tool for X”, where X may be “protecting the environment”, or “health care”, or whatever else, are they actually saying “a forum in which the government necessarily exerts limited but non-zero control is the best tool for X”?
If it is, then I understand. But I don’t think that’s what they mean.
Ditto for me. I have heard Libertarians of several stripes espouse their belief the government should not regulate the environment at all. They believe the free market would be more efficient at protecting and regulating the environment than the government and that civil suits will be the main method for protecting property from environmental damage.
To me this means no government involvment. I know that noone here has taken this stand (yet), but it is a stand that I have heard taken and what I believed the OP was refering to…