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Can one of the HN free-marketeers explain how this sort of thing would arise "naturally" through market forces, without regulatory intervention?
by qlm 8y ago
Can one of the HN free-marketeers explain how this sort of thing would arise "naturally" through market forces, without regulatory intervention?
- pmorici 8y agoIf you were allowed to sue polluters for damages to your property is a common example I've seen. So for example you notice your building is being blackened and sue the coal fired plant down the street for the cleaning fees to restore it's facade. Sounds good but it is totally impractical if you've had any experience with the legal system.
- qlm 8y agoWhat if there are many factories owned by different businesses producing the pollution? Do you sue all of them? What if the cost of cleaning is smaller than the cost of changing business practices to protect health and the environment?
- pmorici 8y agoYes, one of the many reasons it is totally impractical.
- pokemongoaway 8y agoThere should be some company that makes money by detecting pollution, determining its source(s), and potentially providing insurance - or litigation. This would give incentive to find previously unknown pollutants that maybe even the factory and environmentalists were unaware of. The government has been very ineffective at this: see Flint Michigan.
- gnud 8y agoGreat, if I'm dying of poisoning I can sue, at least. Helpful.
- village-idiot 8y agoIt's not possible, because pollution is an externality[0], something that's well known to destabilize free markets. Without regulation, purely profit driven actors have no incentive to reduce pollution one bit, since doing so gives them an economic disadvantage against their polluting peers. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
- pokemongoaway 8y agoCompanies that take negative externalities and make them real for the customer at a profit are good solutions available to entrepreneurs. Charity is a good case for this. Government reactions to negative externalities have so far been pretty dismal.
- fabatka 8y agoI think biology would have "solved" the problem in this case. Without regulation and sustained pollution, the population would eventually decrease enough (through migration and increased mortality rate) to reduce pollution.
- mrob 8y agoPollution can harm quality of life for everybody, but mostly kill elderly people who've already had children.
- ghufran_syed 8y agohttps://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution https://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution Or rather, how this sort of thing happens because of the ‘wrong sort of’ government action
- ghufran_syed 8y agoOr more explicitly - governments choose to deny citizens certain property rights with the aim of increasing economic development (possibly run by friends of, or contributors to, those in government). So citizens harmed by externalities such as pollution cannot sue for redress
- pokemongoaway 8y agoSure, it was individuals in a marketplace that invented the things we used now which are cleaner and more efficient. You can't regulate inventions into existence. And imagine how much customers would be willing to pay if they were in a dirty environment, and you came up with an even equally efficient technology that was cleaner... On top of this, the more regulation you have, the more you don't have a separation between business an government. And isn't that what everyone is complaining about these days? For example, ISPs, pharma, telecom, insurance, and medicine have all become huge liabilities to compete with - unless you're one of the few designated players in the space. Checkout page 15: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/-air-quality-in-america_134905535523.pdf https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/-air-quality-... No one on the free market side claims the clean air act did nothing. So it is very unfair that seemingly everyone on the opposing side is pushing the idea that the clean air act did everything (which you can tell by this graph is not true).
- monort 8y agoTort law. It was the government, that prohibited suing polluters in the first place (in the name of a progress). Free-market cities probably wouldn't have ICE cars or fabrics nearby, because it would be prohibitively expensive to buy a permission to pollute from each land-owner in a city.