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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Because they're not alone on earth?

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.

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.

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