[eugenekop]

Dams, nuclear weapons, chemical factories, and other potentially dangerous structures can cause enormous amount of damage if their potential is abused. If someone builds a chemical factory next to my house I think I have the right to check how safe is the factory. A nuclear plant even 500 kilometers away in some remote desert can still kill you and your family. I believe a person can demand that a minimum set of safety regulations is followed at least to see that the operator is not some psychopat who doesn't care about the damage his/her property can cause.

Having said that, what do you think is the criteria for such intervention in property rights? After all for a single person anyone with a gun can potentially be dangerous. What makes dams, nuclear plants and other such structures much more frightening is that they can destroy entire cities and communities. However is it jutsified to intervene in property rights just because many people are threatened?

What do you think?

[Nunt]

I think homesteading can provide a solution here. For example, residential neighborhoods would homestead the right to be free of explosions. So you wouldnt be allowed to build a chemical factory inside an existing residential area. But if the chemical factory was there first, then the factory would have homesteaded the right to create an explosive risk. So residential neighbourhoods would have some property rights to be free of risk. Courts can then determine how big these risks are allowed to be and decide which factories are allowed to be built where and maybe demand that those factories create some extra safety measures to reduce risk.

So to create safety for residential neighbourhoods we would not need to intervene in factory owners property rights, we would just need to respect residential neighbourhoods property rights.

[eugenekop]

That might be true for some chemical factories, but for others, they can pose risk to far away areas. You can't homestead a 100 square kilometers area to protect yourself against a nuclear planet.

[Nunt]

I'm not sure how much distance would matter. If your neighbour's nuclear reactors blows and destroys your house, or a nuclear reactor 100km away blows up your house, your house is equally destroyed and the nuclear reactor's owner is just as much at fault. Also, I wouldnt say that the house owner's property extends 100km. I would say that the nuclear reactor's owner violates property rights of house owner's 100km away. As the (risk of) radiation and explosion is not just limited to his nuclear reactor but extends to house owners 100km away.

It would be up to the courts to determine when risks violate property rights and when they don't. It might be that nuclear plants would be ordered by courts to install safety measures to protect the property rights of a house owner 100km away.

[Daktoria]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoning

[eugenekop]

I think every person is entiteled to a certain minimal safety. For instance if tomorrow 1 million nuclear plants will be built near my neighborhood, there is a virtually 100% chance that one out of those plans will melt down in the next decade. Thus it is clear to me that a risk to property by itself can be considered aggression. Of course not every risk can be considered such, but only a significant risk beyond the accepted risk. An example of an accepted risk can be one tenth of a percent for your property to be harmed.

Following this theory, if you build a chemical factory which is considered to a pose a risk of 1/15 of a percent to property in the radius of 10 kilometers, then it should be legal for you to build this factory. However it would be illegal to build a second such factory because that would increase the risk to be more than the minimum 1/10 of percent. Yet if the risk is minimized using special safety precautions then the court may legitimize the building of the second factory (given that it undergoes periodic regulations to see that the safety measures are still in place).

In practice I think such regulations will be very rare and will only pertain to nuclear reactors and very dangerous chemical factories, dams and other such structures. But I believe that if we don't deal with this issue we leave people with absolutely no recourse in case they are being threatened by a real and credible threat by various potentially dangerous structures far away.

[Wolfman]

Government regulation: Communist dystopian nightmare only desired by ass raping nazi faggots
Private regulation: Perfect.

[Daktoria]

Government regulation: Communist dystopian nightmare only desired by ass raping nazi faggots
Private regulation: Perfect.

Are you gay?

[Dr House]

Dams, nuclear weapons, chemical factories, and other potentially dangerous structures can cause enormous amount of damage if their potential is abused. If someone builds a chemical factory next to my house I think I have the right to check how safe is the factory. A nuclear plant even 500 kilometers away in some remote desert can still kill you and your family. I believe a person can demand that a minimum set of safety regulations is followed at least to see that the operator is not some psychopat who doesn't care about the damage his/her property can cause.

Having said that, what do you think is the criteria for such intervention in property rights? After all for a single person anyone with a gun can potentially be dangerous. What makes dams, nuclear plants and other such structures much more frightening is that they can destroy entire cities and communities. However is it jutsified to intervene in property rights just because many people are threatened?

What do you think?

Nuclear meltdowns and the like cause enormous amounts of collateral property damage and loss of life; which is precisely the problem here. In a libertarian society the neighbors would sue a company that had an accident like this for millions.

[Godstud]

Screw danger! Without it life is boring! Embrace it!

[Nunt]

Nuclear meltdowns and the like cause enormous amounts of collateral property damage and loss of life; which is precisely the problem here. In a libertarian society the neighbors would sue a company that had an accident like this for millions.

While sueing is certainly a possibility. I don't think house owners would have to wait until an accident occurs. I believe this is similar to someone making a credible threat to your property. For example: if a person storms at you with a knife, you don't have to wait untill you are actually stabbed before you are allowed to use lethal force to defend yourself. You would be allowed to shoot that person even though at the time he has not actually stabbed you, but shows a great risk of stabbing you. The same logic would work for nuclear power plants. They have not yet blown your house up yet, but if you can show that they disregard safety so that there is a credible threat of an accident and to your property, you would be able to sue them and demand that they stop threatening your property.

[Eran]

I think this is an impossible question to answer in the abstract.

In practice, the people owning, managing and/or operating the nuclear plant could be personally liable for an accident. That means that such workers would insist on a proper insurance policy to cover their potential liability. A nuclear plant, let's remember, is an incredibly expensive machine. Its owners and investors would insist on insurance policies to cover potential liability (which won't be limited as it is today).

The insurance company insuring the plant would be the ideal candidate to look into safety conditions and adjust premiums (or even coverage) on proper safety measures.

People living near the nuclear plant would also purchase insurance, and property insurance companies will talk to each other, attempting to find the "optimal" solution (along the work of Cause). Those negotiations would take place in the background of established property rights.

But as Rothbard put it, "in a libertarian world, then, everyone would assume the 'proper burden of risk'" (from Law, property rights and air pollution). In other words, life is full of risks, and not all of them can be eliminated.

[eugenekop]

So Eran, do you think people endangering you by let's say reckless driving, flying very low, firing at all directions (but missing you) are not liable for that?

[Eran]

They may or may not be, depending on circumstances. All the activities you just listed have the quality of actually penetrating your physical property (or that of the road-owner). As such, they may be direct property right violations (even if not hitting your personal body).

Further, it isn't clear how many of those activities will take place in practice in a world in which people do not enjoy the protection of the state against the negative consequences of their actions. Today, if you drive recklessly and kill somebody, you may have to go to jail for a few years, but certainly less than for murder. In a strict-liability legal system, your penalty would be the same, probably close to life in prison if you are uninsured. Hence, I predict, liability insurance would be very wide-spread in an ancap society.

Once you are insured, the terms of your insurance would restrict you from engaging in very dangerous activities).

In general, people ought to use privately-owned physical space to separate them from activities they deem dangerous.
Society would have to find the balance point between actionable and non-actionable endangerment.