Libertarianism and ownership of land - Page 2 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Classical liberalism. The individual before the state, non-interventionist, free-market based society.
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#14100153
lucky wrote:It makes no logical sense to call an approximation "false". An approximation can only be more or less accurate than another one.

You are absolutely right.

I should have said that it is a very poor approximation. On second thought, your statement is so vague as to fall into the category of "not even false".

If what you mean to say is that it is possible for the approximation to be so bad that a zero tax fares better, then yes, that's a possibility, but that's not an argument for one or the other, since the reverse is also a possibility.

That assumes that the only alternative to taxes (or other regulatory tools such as outright prohibition on certain polluting activities) is doing nothing.

My position is that the best solution to pollution problem is strict and effective enforcement of property rights, together with various forms of non-violent social pressure (e.g. consumer action) against polluters.

The advantage of using property rights is that, based on Cause Theorem, an economically-efficient result will emerge (subject to transaction cost). No similar tendency should be expected from the political process.

Nunt wrote:But since we have no identified victim, to who can we pay those damages? Maybe pay each inhabitant of earth and equal share of the damages for global pollutants such as CO2 or pay out to more local people for local pollutants such as smog? Even though this may not provide perfect restitution, it may be a good proxy.

Global Warming is not a pollution problem. Change to Earth's climate is both part of nature and, even in the presence of human action, incredibly slow. We could speculate on how we might act if facts were different, but that would be a waste of time.

By-and-large, only pollution for which identifiable victims can be found is worth preventing.
#14100234
Eran wrote:Global Warming is not a pollution problem. Change to Earth's climate is both part of nature and, even in the presence of human action, incredibly slow. We could speculate on how we might act if facts were different, but that would be a waste of time.
Whether or not greenhouse gas emissions interfere with people's ongoing peaceful projects is for the courts to decide.

By-and-large, only pollution for which identifiable victims can be found is worth preventing.

I disagree. Its not because we are unable to provide deterministic proof that people are suffering pollution (as in: the emission of that particular molecule of pollution has caused lung cancer in that person) that people are not actually suffering from the pollution. Imo it doesn't matter whether we can prove that or not. If you engage in an activity that has a certain probability of violating someone's property right, you are liable to pay compensation for that increased probability. Imo this is just a form of self defence. You do not have to wait untill your property right is actually violated. You are allowed to defend yourself preemptively.

I see an analogy here between a bar fight: if a guy comes at you with his fist raised, you are allowed to defend yourself and kick his legs from under before he lands the blow. At that stage you only know probabilistically that you may get hurt. Maybe he's going to swing and miss, maybe he's just doing a strange dance or whatever.

The same logic would apply to pollution. If a guy pollutes and increases your probability of getting cancer, you don't have to wait untill you get cancer. You would sue before you actually got cancer.
#14100259
Whether or not greenhouse gas emissions interfere with people's ongoing peaceful projects is for the courts to decide.

Of course. I am expressing my opinion that the level of interference (as a matter of practice, not as a matter of principle) is minor.

I disagree.

No, you don't. I think I didn't explain myself well. My statement wasn't to suggest that only pollution that caused specific harm should be prohibited, but rather than only pollution that has the potential of causing such harm should be prohibited.

More precisely, only pollution that has the effect of physically invading another person's property (or interfering with his use-rights) should be regulated away. This is in contrast with people who believe that polluting "the environment" is wrong regardless of whether that "environment" belongs or is used by anybody.

I see an analogy here between a bar fight: if a guy comes at you with his fist raised, you are allowed to defend yourself and kick his legs from under before he lands the blow. At that stage you only know probabilistically that you may get hurt. Maybe he's going to swing and miss, maybe he's just doing a strange dance or whatever.

I agree. To use your analogy though, the guy has to be within striking distance of you. A guy who raises his fist 100 yards away cannot be legitimately attacked.
#14100404
Eran wrote:My position is that the best solution to pollution problem is strict and effective enforcement of property rights, together with various forms of non-violent social pressure (e.g. consumer action) against polluters.

The advantage of using property rights is that, based on Cause Theorem, an economically-efficient result will emerge (subject to transaction cost).

Private ownership... of the air?? Of a major river? Of a sea? That would create some major problems that are much worse than imperfections of current solutions to pollution. I know you reject most of (mainstream) economics, such as the whole subject of market power and monopoly deadweight loss, but you're just wrong.

The most important pollution regulations in effect today deal with emissions into the air (CO2, SO2, NOx). Similarly, the primary externality of things like toxic waste is that it evaporates into the air and leaks into water.

I think your posts about economics, while well written and pleasant to read, are in effect just ideological rants disconnected from actual economic research.

Eran wrote:Global Warming is not a pollution problem.

It is suspicious that anti-government ideology happens to correlate highly with this opinion contradicting environmental research, and it happens to rationalize the ideology by simply dismissing a problem that causes it trouble. Which leads me to believe that the opinion in those cases is more often informed by the ideology and confirmation bias than it is by science.
#14100844
Private ownership... of the air?? Of a major river? Of a sea? That would create some major problems that are much worse than imperfections of current solutions to pollution. I know you reject most of (mainstream) economics, such as the whole subject of market power and monopoly deadweight loss, but you're just wrong.

Air is not privately owned in general, but any property owner has a right not to have the air within their property polluted. Thus if I own a house next to a road, I could sue the road owner for air pollution emanating from the road onto my property.

As for rivers and the sea, please recall that rights protected include not just those of exclusive ownership, but also easements - rights of use. People who use the river - for swimming, navigation, cleaning or as a source of fresh water - have a right to sue anybody who pollutes the river.

In principle, the same holds for the ocean, though naturally the level of pollution has to be such as to materially affect their use of it (e.g. by killing fish).

What does monopoly have to do with this? I am not suggesting that a single person owns the entire Mississippi River...

I think your posts about economics, while well written and pleasant to read, are in effect just ideological rants disconnected from actual economic research.

Thank you for the positive feedback. I'd be interested in discussing specifics in more detail. I have a very low opinion of "actual economic research", based both on ideology (which I don't consider to be a dirty word) and on professional experience. However, I am far from an academic economist, and I may well not be doing the field justice. I am always willing to learn and correct myself.

It is suspicious that anti-government ideology happens to correlate highly with this opinion contradicting environmental research, and it happens to rationalize the ideology by simply dismissing a problem that causes it trouble. Which leads me to believe that the opinion in those cases is more often informed by the ideology and confirmation bias than it is by science.

I understand your view. Mine on this topic is to set aside the "science", and focus on the link between what we do (or can) know scientifically, and the policy implications. That link is, in my opinion, very weak. For example, while any number of scientific studies purport to show an expected 3-4 degree warming within the century, none (that are both scientific and credible) can, with any level of reliability, estimate the economic consequences of such warming in the face of human adaptation and technological innovation.
#14101055
Eran wrote:Air is not privately owned in general, but any property owner has a right not to have the air within their property polluted. Thus if I own a house next to a road, I could sue the road owner for air pollution emanating from the road onto my property.

Whereas if, like most urban folks, you live roughly equidistantly from umpteen roads of varying busyness, you'd have no chance.

But say you happen to live next to one very busy road owned by me and I simply ignore your lawsuit. Then what?
#14101146
But say you happen to live next to one very busy road owned by me and I simply ignore your lawsuit. Then what?

Then I ask for the lawsuit to be enforced. I may be assessed damages which I could have taken from your bank account, or, at an extreme, have armed men close your road.

Consider any alternative form of pollution control, e.g. government regulation. I could equally ask: Say I run my car emitting more than the allowed level of gases, and simply ignore the law. Then what?
#14101275
Eran wrote:Then I ask for the lawsuit to be enforced. I may be assessed damages which I could have taken from your bank account, or, at an extreme, have armed men close your road.
By who ? On what grounds? Who's paying your armed men? You? If not government, how are you proposing anything less coercive than having government regulate pollution on behalf of people who can't afford 'men-with-guns-who-come-to-your-house' ? Otherwise, I recognise neither your grounds for sueing nor the authority of your court. Expect my mercenaries to forcibly recoup from you whatever damages yours have done and a lawsuit against you to recoup their wages. Meanwhile I'm offering your mercenaries more money than you have, me being a road magnate and you being joe-road-user.

Oh, and keep off my road - you know, the one next to your house.

Consider any alternative form of pollution control, e.g. government regulation. I could equally ask: Say I run my car emitting more than the allowed level of gases, and simply ignore the law. Then what?
Then the government enforces the law. Obviously.
#14101302
Have you not read up on the positions of the people you argue with?

You basically asking for theories behind private protection firms that are laid out in book length. :eh:
#14101311
If you've read them then ask about your direct problems with private protection entities.

Let's get strait o the point rather than have you asking us questions when you already know the answer. :eh:
#14101347
I normally like reading through pages upon pages of posts and replying to every single one of them, but I have some WoW to play today, so I'll get right down to what I believe and let you all respond to it:

1) A nation-state is defined, not by the people who inhabit it or the laws that it passes, but by its borders and the land within those borders. These borders are claimed not by individuals, but by the public, and as such, the land is owned by the public. Earth, as a whole, is "owned" by its inhabitants as a whole.

2) Efficient use of land requires creating incentives for individuals to profit from it. Individuals are entitled to the fruits of their labor. The fruits of one's labor can include improvements made to land, but cannot include land itself; thus, improvements made to the land can be privately owned, but the land itself can only be owned by the public. Natural resources on or under the land are publicly owned as well, but extracting them requires labor; thus, ownership of extracted resources needs to be negotiated between the public and the extractor prior to extraction. Whether the extractor pays the public for the resources and becomes their rightful owner, or the public pays the extractor for the labor and retains ownership, is irrelevant. Personally, I'd prefer that the extractors pay the public and keep the resources (maybe the extractor doesn't want to melt down a particular lump of copper because it's shaped like Jesus or something). The appropriate amount of payment to make to the public should be done as an auction: the right to use the land goes to whoever has the highest estimate of how productive they can make it. The problem here is separating the value of the land from the value of the improvements on it, and disentangling the rights to each. What happens if I build a house and someone else wins the next auction for the land on which it is built?

3) Libertarianism operates on the idea that individuals should be able to make their own decisions so long as they are solely responsible for the negative or positive effects of those decisions. Decisions with public consequences need to be made publicly, with the deciding public being the affected public. Thus, for example, decisions regarding the proper amount of pollution to dump into a lake should be made by everyone who is directly affected by that lake's pollution levels (so Utah gets sole authority over what happens to Salt Lake, but what happens to the Great Lakes would need to be decided by a pact between the USA and Canada), whereas decisions regarding atmospheric carbon dioxide levels would need to be made by humanity as a whole, seeing as how we all breathe the same atmosphere.

4) I support scrapping the UN and replacing it with GEO, a Global Environmental Organization, which would be much, much narrower in scope but would have more power to enforce its decisions. It would have the power to tax national governments and spend the money on geoengineering projects, but would not have the power to tax subnational or transnational entities like corporations or individual financial transactions, nor to pass laws regulating individual actions and crimes like murder or theft, nor to spend money on "humanitarian aid" or other pseudo-entitlements except those with measurable environmental effects (i.e., free tubal ligations for anyone who wants them). Member states of GEO would retain their own national militaries and could still go to war with each other. Nations would not have to join GEO in order to benefit from it; thus, getting nations to join GEO would require an incentive beyond representation in the global congress. I believe that the best incentive would be forced compliance. If they have to abide by our rules anyway, they might as well have a say in what those rules are.
#14101526
The protection agencies come together and if the road owners protection agency decides its worth the expense they decide on a third party arbiter to decide.
#14101767
mikema63 wrote:The protection agencies come together and if the road owners protection agency decides its worth the expense they decide on a third party arbiter to decide.

I very much doubt it in the real world, but we haven't got to that bit yet.

First, the assumption that any particular road or roads could be identified as the pollution source is completely unrealistic for most urbanites. There's most of your pollution continuing unchecked right off the bat.

Then, the idea of the road owner being responsible is bizarre and arbitrary. If not actual motorists, why not automobile manufacturers, petrol vendors, oil companies etc? What did the householder imagine the road was for? If he can sue the road owner for pollution, can he sue the brewer for hangovers? The road owner would have to have contracted with the householder specifically not to pollute (another silliness) otherwise what force or fraud is there?

Unless road owner culpability were an established enforcible convention, ie a form of government obviating costly lawsuits, there's no way I (road owner) would recognise even the premise of such a lawsuit, nor employ any private agency that does. Otherwise, if forced by men-with-guns, there's every chance I'd win in court, especially with my superior resources and your dodgy lawsuit.

That's all before the problematic business of mercenaries allegedly coming together to enforce government by some unelected arbitrator.
#14101774
SueDeNîmes  wrote:By who?

We should split this discussion into two parts.

1. Can pollution be controlled exclusively through protection of property rights?
2. Do we need government to protect property rights?

Answering the second question should be done in a separate thread. While I have written much on the subject, I never tire, and will be happy to discuss it with you (or anybody else) again. Briefly, government isn't necessary for the protection of property rights IF those property rights are broadly (though not necessarily universally) accepted in society as the basis for the legitimate use of force.

This is very similar to the condition for a democracy to be stable. If all you think about is physical force, please consider why the President of the United States obeys decisions of the US Supreme Court with which he disagrees. After all, the USSC has no military power, and the President is widely considered to be the most powerful person on Earth.

The answer is that the President is operating within a certain cultural (in the broad sense) framework which would make it virtually unthinkable to disobey the USSC. If he tried, he would be impeached. If he ordered the military to storm Congress, his ordered would be disobeyed. By his generals or, ultimately, by soldiers themselves.

In a stable ancap, most people recognize property rights as the basis for the legitimate use of force just as in a stable democracy people recognize majority decisions (subject to constitutional constraints) as that basis. Any person who tried to issue orders which obviously violate other people's property rights would be taken down, or, ultimately, ignored by his own men.


Going back to the first question then, we can now discuss pollution assuming property rights are effectively enforced, whether with or without government. A legitimate court would issue an order to the road owner to pay restitution. Either government or private agents would enforce that order (in the unlikely event that it was ignored). Once the precedence has been set, road owners will be careful to either limit the level of emission (by conditioning permission to use their road on having clean vehicles) or reach agreement with neighbouring property owners.

Similarly, residential neighbourhoods and commercial districts would prohibit entry to unclean cars.

Once most people are required to own clean cars, they will continue to use those same clean cars whether or not the road they use requires them.

Then, the idea of the road owner being responsible is bizarre and arbitrary. If not actual motorists, why not automobile manufacturers, petrol vendors, oil companies etc? What did the householder imagine the road was for? If he can sue the road owner for pollution, can he sue the brewer for hangovers? The road owner would have to have contracted with the householder specifically not to pollute (another silliness) otherwise what force or fraud is there?

There is a huge difference. The road owner allows his property to be the source of emissions. Those emissions invade the property of neighbouring property owners, in violation of their property rights.

Probably the strictest representative of libertarian legal theory is Murray Rothbard. In his Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution he writes:

While the situation for plaintiffs against auto emissions might seem hopeless under libertarian law, there is a partial way out. In a libertarian society, the roads would be privately owned. This means that the auto emissions would be emanating from the road of the road owner into the lungs or airspace of other citizens, so that the road owner would be liable for pollution damage to the surrounding inhabitants. Suing the road owner is much more feasible than suing each individual car owner for the minute amount of pollutants he might be responsible for. In order to protect himself from these suits, or even from possible injunctions, the road owner would then have the economic incentive to issue anti-pollution regulations for all cars that wish to ride on his road


Keep in mind that the law-suit is unlikely to be between a single person and a large road-owning corporation. Rather, libertarian legal system allows people to sell their tort-rights. A large insurance company could purchase tort-rights from millions of people before suing the road company. Such a company could easily match the resources of the road company.
#14102003
SueDeNîmes  wrote:By who?
Eran wrote:We should split this discussion into two parts.

1. Can pollution be controlled exclusively through protection of property rights?
2. Do we need government to protect property rights?

Answering the second question should be done in a separate thread. While I have written much on the subject, I never tire, and will be happy to discuss it with you (or anybody else) again. Briefly, government isn't necessary for the protection of property rights IF those property rights are broadly (though not necessarily universally) accepted in society as the basis for the legitimate use of force.

This is very similar to the condition for a democracy to be stable. If all you think about is physical force, please consider why the President of the United States obeys decisions of the US Supreme Court with which he disagrees. After all, the USSC has no military power, and the President is widely considered to be the most powerful person on Earth.

The answer is that the President is operating within a certain cultural (in the broad sense) framework which would make it virtually unthinkable to disobey the USSC. If he tried, he would be impeached. If he ordered the military to storm Congress, his ordered would be disobeyed. By his generals or, ultimately, by soldiers themselves.

In a stable ancap, most people recognize property rights as the basis for the legitimate use of force just as in a stable democracy people recognize majority decisions (subject to constitutional constraints) as that basis. Any person who tried to issue orders which obviously violate other people's property rights would be taken down, or, ultimately, ignored by his own men.
That's right and why what you propose is a non-starter. Anarchocapitalism sounds to most folks like the conditions their great grandparents fought to overcome. Indeed, it's a direct attempt to overturn hard-won rights and concessions.


Going back to the first question then, we can now discuss pollution assuming property rights are effectively enforced, whether with or without government. A legitimate court would issue an order to the road owner to pay restitution. Either government or private agents would enforce that order (in the unlikely event that it was ignored). Once the precedence has been set, road owners will be careful to either limit the level of emission (by conditioning permission to use their road on having clean vehicles) or reach agreement with neighbouring property owners.

Similarly, residential neighbourhoods and commercial districts would prohibit entry to unclean cars.

Once most people are required to own clean cars, they will continue to use those same clean cars whether or not the road they use requires them.
Yeah we've heard that bit. That's just assuming your conclusion by dismissing the objections as separate issue. By doing so, you end up replacing overt gov't with de facto gov't minus some democracy but no less coercion. Nor is it clear how it protects property any more than democratic gov't does. The damage mostly continues unabated and I can imagine 100 ways your market mechanism might not work where direct mandate would without incurring it in the first place.

Plus, I'd imagine jurors at your "legitimate court" would find in the road owner's favour. Buying a house by a road, then sueing the road owner for polluting your property is nigh as frivalous as sueing MacDonalds for making you fat.

There is a huge difference. The road owner allows his property to be the source of emissions.
No, the motorist does that. The road itself probably makes the fewest actual emissions of all the secondary contributors. The road owner gets it in the neck because the ideology can't admit that it makes sense for government to do certain things.


Those emissions invade the property of neighbouring property owners, in violation of their property rights.

Probably the strictest representative of libertarian legal theory is Murray Rothbard. In his Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution he writes:
While the situation for plaintiffs against auto emissions might seem hopeless under libertarian law, there is a partial way out. In a libertarian society, the roads would be privately owned. This means that the auto emissions would be emanating from the road of the road owner into the lungs or airspace of other citizens, so that the road owner would be liable for pollution damage to the surrounding inhabitants. Suing the road owner is much more feasible than suing each individual car owner for the minute amount of pollutants he might be responsible for. In order to protect himself from these suits, or even from possible injunctions, the road owner would then have the economic incentive to issue anti-pollution regulations for all cars that wish to ride on his road
And (ignoring his arbitrarily ascribing culpability for his ideology's sake) it would not actually be feasible for the typical urban dweller anyway - as he all but admits.

Keep in mind that the law-suit is unlikely to be between a single person and a large road-owning corporation. Rather, libertarian legal system allows people to sell their tort-rights. A large insurance company could purchase tort-rights from millions of people before suing the road company. Such a company could easily match the resources of the road company.
..replacing stable democracy with insanely litigious plutocracy. People DON'T WANT to have to fight corporations in court or sell their rights to big insurance companies they trust less than government. It's exactly what they fear about Libertarianism.

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