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Environmental damage is one place free market thinking has completely failed, repeatedly. It surely is not the right solution. First off, there’s a massive dela

by dahart 3y ago

Environmental damage is one place free market thinking has completely failed, repeatedly. It surely is not the right solution. First off, there’s a massive delay between environmental changes and outcomes. We’d have had to foresee this problem and set the right prices 100 years ago when water rights were being handed out and priced. Secondly, prices are never “appropriate”, we simply cannot forecast the outcome of environmental changes. Cost benefit analyses in the past when it comes to the environment have been wrong by orders of magnitude [1] Third is that viewing things through an economic lens distorts the value and gives automatic preference to the party that is profiteering off the environment. Saying that people in Salt Lake should cough up enough cash to outbid the people who want to grow alfalfa to sell it to China is kinda gross, that’s not how we should handle public safety or our environment. Think about all these issue with respect to air pollution & CO2. What would it have taken to solve it with free markets? We haven’t solved it yet, and it would have needed to be priced and debated starting 100 years ago. And there is no appropriate price for clean air and the earth to stay habitable. [1] https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1326&context=facpub https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...

scatters 3y ago
> Saying that people in Salt Lake should cough up enough cash to outbid the people who want to grow alfalfa to sell it to China is kinda gross It's also incredibly easy; SLC could outbid the farmers hundreds of times over and it wouldn't be even a rounding error in the city budget. It's difficult to see anyone opposing this as anything other than useful idiots for the ag lobby.
- dahart 3y ago
  Because it’s easy is not a valid reason to charge the public to compete with business for the right to keep the lake and not get sick living near it. We need to restrict business interests from driving critical resources into the ground for profit. I’m all for farming and farmers making some money, but we can’t let that be unlimited like it has been forever. And it’s incredibly short sighted to suggest we should go down that road even if it’s easy. The only reason it’s affordable now is because way-too-cheap water rights have been grandfathered in for decades and decades. There hasn’t been free market prices ever, so if we introduce them, the prices are going to skyrocket immediately, and it won’t be so easy anymore.

by dahart 3y ago

scatters 3y ago

> Saying that people in Salt Lake should cough up enough cash to outbid the people who want to grow alfalfa to sell it to China is kinda gross It's also incredibly easy; SLC could outbid the farmers hundreds of times over and it wouldn't be even a rounding error in the city budget. It's difficult to see anyone opposing this as anything other than useful idiots for the ag lobby.

dahart 3y ago
Because it’s easy is not a valid reason to charge the public to compete with business for the right to keep the lake and not get sick living near it. We need to restrict business interests from driving critical resources into the ground for profit. I’m all for farming and farmers making some money, but we can’t let that be unlimited like it has been forever. And it’s incredibly short sighted to suggest we should go down that road even if it’s easy. The only reason it’s affordable now is because way-too-cheap water rights have been grandfathered in for decades and decades. There hasn’t been free market prices ever, so if we introduce them, the prices are going to skyrocket immediately, and it won’t be so easy anymore.