> It certainly takes courage to drive the wrong direction on the highway and at the same time to claim that all the others are driving the wrong way. On the pl

> It certainly takes courage to drive the wrong direction on the highway and at the same time to claim that all the others are driving the wrong way. On the plus-side if you crash, probably so does human civilization, so there won't be much in the way of history books to record this idiocy.. I've always thought that instead of government regulations we should just have a laissez-faire approach where externalities are assessed and paid for (e.g. the carbon-credit direction but much more generically). You want to drill in the arctic? No one should be stopping you. An agency can asses the value of the environmental harm you are estimated to cause and you will spend an equivalent amount of money to offset the negative externalities. If it still makes economical sense to drill with externalities taken into account, go ahead and do it.