Comment by hnhamdani | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hnhamdani | Hacker News Reader

As an Indonesian, I'll give some context and nuance around the burning.

1. Who did the burning? mostly It is CORPORATIONs that owned massive chunks of lands (which some of the case these lands overlap with National Park territories). The rest is small land owners (which also cover big areas if you sum it). These companies though have a strong lobby in the government across layers, whether it is in the national level or province level. FYI, many of the companies are foreign ones including Singapore companies and Malaysian companies.

2. Why did the government not make it illegal to burn land? There are several factors. Actually the amount of land that CAN BE burnt is limited. However the government do not strictly enforce it, because you know, it's Indonesian government. So a step back, how come the government allow people to burn land in the first place? There is an old local bill (in Borneo area) that protect land owner to burn land. This date back to an old tradition that in Borneo, in order to farm you gotta burn the land first because of the nature of the peat land itself. I agree that in 2015, there should be a solution in making a farmland productive without even to burn it. This bill is not yet overruled and even so, being abused by corps to justified the act.

3. Another reason why there is almost no response from the Indonesian government is that the burning happened only in Sumatra and Borneo to the (North)West side (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand). For better or worse, Java island doesn't get the haze at all, thus many politicians can't relate how bad it is actually.

What is sad is that it is the epitome of capitalism, that we can't do much about it. Palm oil is used everywhere and as long as there is a demand, supply will be there too.

Regarding that last, I don't buy it. Products can be produced differently, or can be substituted. There are many success stories of destructive products either being banned or having their production regulated and people either switch to something else or figure out how to produce it less destructively.

Not long ago, you might have said "freon is used everywhere" or "leaded gasoline is used everywhere" or "asbestos is used everywhere" and as long as there is demand, supply will be there too. But people didn't just give up, they fought, and won.

Edit: all three replies (as of right now) seem to be saying the same thing: that what I'm proposing doesn't work with market forces, and requires government regulation. Which is exactly what I'm saying: just because capitalism dictates that this continues doesn't mean we have to put up with it, we can ban palm oil or at least ban palm oil farmed in a harmful manner, and fix the problem.

That only happens when the new solution is better and cheaper, or the old solution becomes illegal. And more importantly, almost exclusively in the First World, where taking advantage of an entire country is a little harder.

But it took years for leaded gasoline, asbestos, and freon to be replaced. And that only happened because they were made illegal or regulated out of certain uses, not because a better alternative existed that the market preferred.

This is a job for a functional government, not for capitalism. But it doesn't sound like help is on the way anytime soon.

Or perhaps a functional international regime, pretty much the opposite role that the WTO and TPP fulfill.

The trick with palm oil is that it is in so many products you might not even know it. Food, beauty products, industrial usage and the majority of names used in the ingredients doesn't even contain 'palm' in it for most cases. The other historic cases you made were easily identified and segregated by product or end-use. Indonesia and Malaysia, normally at odds with each other on certain subjects, are forming a palm oil cartel to even further push for global usage of the product that has brought them money without regards to the environment.

Thank you for your answer, interesting to read these 3 points. But I think with your last sentence you are inconsistent with what you've described before, which is:

- a complete lack of democracy, instead a small elite that is literally burning their country to the ground, in order to take it all until nothing is left.

- the absence of skill or will to provide the necessary legislative law in order to actually govern this country and not just passively stand on the sidelines and watch until every thing is dissolved in smoke.

He's kinda right about the capitalism thing - a small elite controlling everything is the inevitable outcome for a capitalist society without government (i.e. socialist, for the greater good of the population) oversight.

Now, that's not really what happened here, the government seems to have already been weak and corrupted, so those with money just take advantage of it.

Sorry, someone in government has control over this. They have a military and I am quite sure its not multinational's run amok. When people blame capitalism in many cases it simply is government run amok. These companies cannot operate where a military is without someone allowing it.

Governments have been selling out people forever, whether to other individuals or whatever business group they formed. that is not capitalism, its exploitation

Their incentives are to burn the dead crops to maximize profit. There is not a system of property rights and a government willing to enforce them to prevent them from burning. I kind of doubt it's even a Coasean outcome given that it's causing quite a lot of damage to the air quality in Singapore and neighboring countries where they might be willing to pay them not to burn, but somehow that solution doesn't work (neutral enforcers of the agreement is obviously one difficult issue, and nobody is willing to go to war over it).

> "that is not capitalism, its exploitation"

Let's put it like this. Imagine the Indonesian government didn't exist. What would the people be able to do to stop the environmental destruction? Would you advocate vigilante justice?

Without a structured government, then the people are the "government", so to speak, and vigilante justice would not be so vigilante.

> "vigilante justice would not be so vigilante."

Explain why.

Because vigilante justice is usually defined as people taking legal authority for themselves because they feel the government's authority or response is lacking. If there is no government to define this by, then it is not vigilante justice and starts to delve more into natural rights. Think of a remote village with no semblance of what we would describe as a modern government, they still deal with problems in their own way. You wouldn't call them vigilantes.

I'm not asking for the dictionary definition, I'm asking about why vigilante justice (whether you want to call the participants vigilantes or not) would be less troublesome.

For example, imagine I've discovered Starbucks is doing terrible things, and to express my disgust I go around throwing bricks in the windows of the Starbucks in my area. What prevents/discourages this sort of vigilante behaviour?

If there is no government stepping in to prevent Starbucks from doing terrible things, it's no longer vigilante justice.

You're missing the point. My definition of terrible things may be different from your definition of terrible things. Without a legal framework in place, everyone will choose to act based on their own personal views.

Let's go back to the Starbucks example. The reason I used Starbucks is because they're very likely to be one of the companies that's indirectly supporting the deforestation happening in Indonesia as a result of demand in palm oil.

http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/aug/25/...

Now how responsible do you make them? One person may argue it's not Starbucks' fault, it's up to the suppliers to act responsibly. Another person would say that companies like Starbucks should be made responsible, as they're one of the companies driving demand for cheap palm oil without the environmental cost factored in.

The reason we have laws in place is to act as a way to set out acceptable behaviour, informed by consensus rather than the whim of an individual. If we abandon law we abandon the framework by which the actions of individuals can be fairly judged. If we leave it up to individuals then you're much more likely to have chaos, more exciting perhaps but more frustrating if you want to have any lasting stability.

I believe you missed my point as well. Government creates laws that are voted on (either through representation or directly with full democratic voting) which are then enforced through "approved" force (the executive branch, the police, etc). When government and police don't exist (or aren't doing their jobs) it forms a vacuum for vigilantes to exist in.

This isn't just theory. In countries where (for lack of a better work) the justice framework has broken down (such as Mexico) vigilantes fight against cartels due to police and the government taking no action (either due to fear, corruption, etc). A vigilante is only a vigilante until there is no local sanctioned governing and policing structure, at which point the vigilante becomes the police for all intents and purposes.

Does this cause chaos? I'm sure. At the same time, I'm sure locals would prefer someone protecting them versus no one.

I'm not completely against vigilantism, there are cases where it's warranted, especially as a temporary workaround for government corruption. However, once you start relying on vigilantism as the only way to get things done then new problems arise, if I had to generalise those problems they're to do with increased difficulty in going back to stable governance.

Consider the rise of the Sicilian Mafia as one example of what can happen when you have an inept government unable or unwilling to protect its people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sicilian_Mafia#Post-feudal_Sic...

In a hypothetical where the government doesn't exist to provide justice, "vigilante justice" would be the only justice. Whether vigilante justice is preferable to a total absence of justice is the question.

More generally, the whole point of vigilantism is going outside the established judicial framework. If there is no such framework, the concept of vigilantism is meaningless.

As to what prevents/discourages this behaviour, the answer is mostly going to be "the presence of an existing judicial structure, backed by force, which disallows such behaviour".

Can't we define 'vigilante' to be a response that's not commensurate with the crime? A lack of justice, if you will. In that view, its quite debatable if no justice would not be better.

No, because that's not what the word means, nor what it is generally held to mean by prior precedent.

We're using different dictionaries then. Vengeance would seem to agree with my definition.

noun

1. a member of a vigilance committee.

2. any person who takes the law into his or her own hands, as by avenging a crime.

adjective

3. done violently and summarily, without recourse to lawful procedures

you are definitely not getting the support you think from those definitions. vigilantism fairly clearly has nothing to do with a commensurate response.

So 'avenge' doesn't ring any bells with you? True justice is not about vengeance. In America, we have specific clauses forbidding 'cruel and unusual punishment'.

That was an example. The definitional clause preceding it was the important part.

Also, you surely aren't going to convince me that your personal interpretation of a common word is correct by being snotty with me about it.

I'm sorry it seemed that way to you. I try to be concise in writing. If it has an emotional tone, its not because I meant to put it there.

The adjective form of vigilante spells out violent and summary action. Summary action is often incorrect action which would not be commensurate with the (non-existent in that case) crime. Violent action is not the usual response of the justice system, so again it would be a response not commensurate with the (real this time) crime.

That definition seems to support my original description pretty well!

Vigilante justice is usually about the people choosing to enforce laws that they feel the government is choosing to not enforce. Vengeance usually has nothing to do with the law or its enforcement.

Say a heinous murder is committed and the perpetrator has been discovered. Vigilante justice is a person, or group, taking the perpetrator into custody and punishing them because they don't like that the government refuses to do so for some reason. Vengeance is a person, or group, taking the perpetrator into custody and punishing them even if the government wishes to do the same.

If you're getting hung up on the word vigilante (which has been the case for most people who replied to my earlier comment it seems), replace the word 'vigilante' with the word 'street', i.e. street justice. Note my intended meaning hasn't changed, only the way I'm choosing to express it.

Now what prevents street justice in a society without government intervention? The (simplified) answer is self-organised defence organisations. Is a mob/gang boss a preferable means of protection in a community, compared to those means that can be put in place by an elected government?

The only thing to discourage it would be the better sense of the people in the community. Presumably there are better ways to stop Starbucks than throwing bricks. You have to convince enough people that the place needs to be shut down, then go in and confiscate the coffee beans.

What would stop organised crime taking advantage of this? The local mafia (or equivalent) providing protection for a fee, etc...

I would imagine that, without a structured government to prevent your destructive behavior and the inevitable response, the owner of the Starbucks in question would shoot you for damaging their property. Neither your actions nor the response of the owner would be considered vigilante justice.

> "I would imagine that, without a structured government to prevent your destructive behavior and the inevitable response, the owner of the Starbucks in question would shoot you for damaging their property. Neither your actions nor the response of the owner would be considered vigilante justice."

I don't care how you define it, what I'm asking is, is that better? Is that the society we want?

No, it is not preferable; for two reasons. For one, vigilante justice usually devolves into something as despicable as the thing the people are wanting justice for. It is also a sign that the government is failing and the people are slipping into anarchy. But that is a different matter than the hypothetical I was answering.

I'm glad we agree on something.

Going back to my original point, which was about whether a capitalist society without government intervention would be free from exploitation, what are your thoughts on that?

I understood what you were trying to say, and I never disagreed. But I didn't feel that was the point of the discussion I was responding to. I don't recall that the economic system of choice was involved in determining whether vigilante justice was actually vigilante justice in the absence of government.

As for your question, a capitalistic society is never free from exploitation. Regardless of the state of the government. Without the government then capitalism would eventually run amok to the detriment of the people. With government it can still go too far due to corruption and cronyism to the detriment of the people. But between the two, I'll take capitalism with government oversight.

But I don't see much of this point to discuss as I believe that any form of economic and government system will never be free from exploitation, because human beings are involved.

In a place where there is no government, I don't see what would be wrong with vigilante justice. If there are no authorities and no help then you have little choice but to take matters into your own hands.

> "In a place where there is no government, I don't see what would be wrong with vigilante justice. If there are no authorities and no help then you have little choice but to take matters into your own hands."

The problems with vigilante justice are universal, it doesn't matter if you have little choice or not. Generally speaking the problem is that vigilante justice is much more open to the whim of individual desires and views.

Why is that bad? Let's use the 'brick through the window of Starbucks' example I've used before. If you agree that Starbucks are bad, then the brick through the window may look justified, but if you do not believe Starbucks are bad then the action may appear unjustified.

Consider that the problem some people have with government is that decisions are made on your behalf and you feel powerless to change this. However, if you consider what you have without government, you still have people making decisions on your behalf, except you now have millions more of them, and there's less chance to influence what happens as a result of their actions if you disagree with what they've done. Is that better?

What you outline is basically why I think it's a bad idea to live in a place with no government. There's a huge potential for problems and often there are no good choices.

The moment you say "Imagine the Indonesian government didn't exist," well, it's going to be a complete shithole. At best you'll be at the mercy of the local warlord or gang leader. Quibbling over exactly how you live your life in this lawless shithole doesn't seem very relevant to the actual situation.

Yes, I agree, but the argument that I responded to considered there was a distinction between capitalism and exploitation. My point is that exploitation is not the sole domain of government, if you had a capitalist society without government intervention then exploitation would still exist, but you'd have to rely on different methods in order to resist this exploitation, and those methods would not necessarily be an improvement over what we have now.

Gotcha, I must have missed the context and taken your comment too literally.

without government (i.e. socialist, for the greater good of the population) oversight

But the Indonesians have a government that claims to be operating "for the greater good of the population". Clearly, they're not doing so, at least in significant cases.

Political science and economics understands many of the reasons for such failures. And it's not due to the label you put on the government. Whatever *ist you choose to call it, it's operated by people, and they're subject to the very same incentives and motivations. Putting a sainted "socialist" hat on doesn't make the politicians immune to these. Look into the field of "public choice economics" for more understanding of this.

Indeed, the worst crimes against humanity in all of history have been perpetrated by socialist governments claiming to be socialist, and working for the good of their people. Giving the government additional powers to protect you is functionally identical to giving the government additional powers to exploit you. You'll need some way to guard against that, and the good intentions of those believing in an "-ism" aren't sufficient.

He's not wrong about the capitalism thing. These farmers own the land--why shouldn't they be able to do whatever they want to it, including burning it? At least, that's the libertarian formulation of it.

Because they're not alone on earth?

In a private property absolutist state, the farmers would be liable to all the damages caused to the surrounding properties (including to human bodies) in the form of spreading fire and pollution. They'd be sued to the ground.

Liable to who? This again presupposes government and non-market solution.

If you're interested, there is plenty to read on private courts on mises.org and similar websites.

Nobody is going to sue a single farmer for doing 10$ worth of damage spread across the entire globe.

No, many people would initiate a single lawsuit against many farmers. What makes you think a lawsuit can only have one defendant?

There is a large difference between suing 100 people and 100,000+ people. Feel free to come up with a successful single suit with more than 50,000 defendants. In then end mass lawsuits are really related suits where each defendant get's to defend themselves individually.

PS: It's a question of overhead, there are some downloading lawsuits with large numbers of defendants but they tend to be worth ~3k / person and are settled individually. With a max payout < 10$ it’s just not worth it.

Good luck suing a defendant on ten dollars. Hell good luck suing on ten thousand dollars. The transaction costs are too high compared to the damage.

Land and other finite natural resources as private property is antithetical to the principles of a free market because the former allows an infinite amount of something to be purchased for a finite sum. Just like money, land has a time value. Geologists and geolibertarians call it "ground rent".

If we're going to have capitalism, we should at least fix this. Natural resources belong to the commons, and capitalist should pay market rate rent on those resources, the proceeds of which should be distributed to all or be used to fund commons costs (government).

It's not antithetical, because in reality you could never accumulate enough of those natural resources in your very finite life to dent the context. The scenario is nothing more than a nearly impossible potential - like pretending that some rich person could bottle all the oxygen on earth.

The richest people in world history never came even remotely close to accumulating even a tiny fraction of global wealth. The same goes for the world's biggest commodity corporations.

There will never be a corporation more dominant in oil than Standard Oil was in its time, and even they couldn't corner the global oil market. Oil is far easier to corner than real estate. The richest / biggest private land-owners in the world, hold a comically tiny slice of land compared to what's out there.

I don't disagree at all, and I think Benjamin Tucker's (op)position on the Four Monopolies makes much sense, I just wrote based on the context of the previous post - that even with land as property, you can't just burn it willy-nilly.

What if everything is so diffuse that there's no single obvious target, but instead thousands or millions of them? How is a person living in Singapore, for example, going to sue a million different Indonesian farmers for polluting his air?

It's why numerous large organizations exist such as the WTO, UN and so on.

If you have a million farmers causing it, then it has to be elevated to a national level, as an enforcement issue. It becomes no different than if country A were allowing radioactive run-off to flow into country B's territory.

If you then say that those international bodies don't function properly, such that they can't or won't punish Indonesia for failing to stop the mass pollution that is directly harming Singapore, then that is a huge inter-governmental failure that obviously needs to be corrected.

Property rights are enforced at the government level (judicial, police, military), not by corporations. Any failure on protecting property rights, is inherently a governmental failure in one regard or another.

Why should anyone be allowed to create pollution? They are effectively stealing from all other property owners.

And what's worse--why is the libertarian's only recourse to sue people after they've done (possibly permanent) damage?

Who cares about the potential winnings from a lawsuit, in a world with no health inspectors (to pick a common "the free market would sort it out" theme), if a restaurant has poisoned your granny and she's in a coma?

just because you legally own something, doesn't mean you can do anything with it, especially immoral stuff, and super especially when it affects all of us.

Libertarians have the intellectual tools to deal with the negative externalities of air pollution and the positive externalities of environmental services. Although they frequently want to pretend externalities are minimal to nonexistant.

I'm not sure how to square those sentences with each other. If they have the intellectual tools, yet they frequently pretend the externalities are minimal or non-existent, doesn't that point to them not really having the intellectual tools, or worse the ability to interpret the what the tools say, in most cases?

If your screws never stay in after you hammer them then maybe, contrary to expectations, you don't have the right tools.

Libertarians have a lot of cognitive dissonance about things like externalities and information costs, it's true. They have to have considered arguments about externalities because externalities are quite inconvenient for lots of libertarian theory, especially because externalities are one of the most powerful rationales for government intervention in the private sector. It's easier to just handwave them away. But yes, then you're stuck hammering your screws and tapping in the nails with a screwdriver. But the problem there isn't the lack of hammer, screwdriver, nails, or screws.

My point is that while it appears we can all rationally look at evidence and make decisions, in reality there are far to many quirks of human nature to allow us to do so effectively. How can we expect people to individually come to useful decisions for the group when we've shown time and again that our reasoning skill are not just impaired, but impaired in a way that makes it hard to recognize they are impaired (e.g. confirmation bias, our poor reasoning about future risk/rewards). Our tools are broken, and we know it, yet we continue to assume there's no consequences of this.

I'm not specifically anti-libertarian, I think people of that mindset have a place (frontiers, in all senses of the word), but that putting personal rights on a pedestal in a highly civilized, industrialized and often urbanized society doesn't yield good results. That said, there's problems with the other end of the spectrum as well, where the group cannot focus on the important through petty squabbles, or even agree on importance, or worse yet focus on solutions that do not yield results (all rooted in the same reason as above, mind you). Our own nature is one of our worst enemies at this point.

You can own a gun but not be able to do whatever you want with it. Property doesn't mean absolute freedom.

Not even for libertarians.

>I agree that in 2015, there should be a solution in making a farmland productive without even to burn it

We may be discussing slightly different points here. In Australia, we control bush land (including farm land) by controlled burning.

It releases nutrients back to the soil. It stops build up of plant matter which can become dangerous and cause extreme bushfires.

I am not aware of a better solution than controlled burning that is cost effective. I was told that it's like several smaller natural bush fires than 1 big uncontrollable fire, so the environmental impact (eg. Smoke) is not increased. However seed pods of wildlife are preserved in smaller fires but destroyed in bigger fires.

Burning is a natural part of many ecologies in dry areas, but I doubt it happens naturally in rain forests and peat bogs - unless they've been drained as the article describes.

I'm a Singaporean.

> FYI, many of the companies are foreign ones including Singapore companies and Malaysian companies.

Most of those companies seem to be of Indonesian origin. The Singapore-related ones I know of:

* Sinar Mas and Singapore-listed Golden Agri-Resources are both owned by Indonesian tycoon Eka Tjipta Widjaja.

* APRIL is headquartered in Singapore but owned by RGE, an Indonesian group run by another tycoon.

* Even Wilmar International was cofounded by an Indonesian.

Honestly, if Singaporean landowning companies were really directly causing the haze, I think (hope) they'd be more sensitive to the damage they'd be causing to their homeland.[1] The impact is incredibly obvious to anyone in Singapore, which no doubt includes some of the top management of companies based here.

The chain of responsibility goes all the way back to the people starting the fires and the conditions motivating them to do it. The Indonesian government has to trace that chain and carry out the investigations and arrests. Singapore can only punish downstream companies in order to exert an indirect effect.

> What is sad is that it is the epitome of capitalism, that we can't do much about it. Palm oil is used everywhere and as long as there is a demand, supply will be there too.

No, we can do something about it - simply enforce the laws that are already in place against starting fires. Palm oil isn't the problem - the lack of ability or will to enforce the laws is. If the Indonesian government manages to do that (and even find a alternative way for the farmers to earn a livelihood), palm oil will be fine to use.

[1] The Singapore government and newspapers have been digging into the relationships of these firms: http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/indonesias-biggest-...

At the end of the day, it takes a person holding a match to the tinder to get these fires going. You can blame the government, laws, and corporations all you want, but someone still lit the fires. Surely these farmers (whether self-employed or not) must realize how shitty they are making their lives? And if not, could a grassroots effort to educate them help?

At a guess not really, because they are presumably making their lives better, not worse. Most people know about global warming but still turn on their heating in Winter.

This kind of accountability only makes sense in a functional and free society. But I agree with you on the grassroots. This is the poeples problem to solve. They have to fight for influence and for political power. And if they don't care, so be it. They are free to burn their whole country to the ground. I think it wrong to intervene from outside. The only thing we shouldn't do, is doing business with them. This doesn't seem to be a democracy, and we betray our ideals by doing so.

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