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Comment by logophobia | Hacker News Reader

Yes, because a private entity completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests, will completely prevent those resources from being ruthlessly exploited. Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision, and certainly wouldn't exploit those resources until there's nothing left.

There's certainly merit in trying to make people pay for externalities (offsetting carbon pollution for example), but you can't do that for everything. Privatizing everything might be an appealing free-market pipe dream, but unless we can completely/mostly stop externalities from happening, such an experiment would be a disaster.

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I'm reminded of when hedge funds bought out old family owned logging companies via leveraged buyouts. The only way it made business sense was to clear cut everything and then close the mills down when the trees were gone.

Can you link to something elaborating on this? This seems pretty odd to me.

I guess it would work in the magical world of economists. In that world, there would be active competition for the ownership of the rivers (i.e. lots of players) and consumer have perfect information and are rational (i.e. they will avoid product that directly or indirectly cause pollution )

This doesn't reflect the content of any econ course I've taken, nor the views of any of my econ professors. There's a ton of study in economics about the types of effective roles government can play when dealing with positive and negative externalities, and "tragedy of the commons" situations.

Economists that believe everything can be sorted out in the free market are pretty fringe.

I don't see any evidence of that.

You can't take your wealth with you upon death -- Property owners of valuable resources nearly always maximize exploitation in the short term and could give a shit about the long term.

If they took a long term view, we'd still have old growth forest in the US.

I think that was his point as well.

> Yes, because a private entity completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests, will completely prevent those resources from being ruthlessly exploited.

The statement was heavily sarcastic.

I don't think this has anything to do with exploiting resources. If someone owned all the rivers, then they could sue the companies producing microbeads for any damages.

Not caring for the long term is still a massive problem for our civilization. I don't know if that has anything to do with privatization. I'm very skeptical that governments or voters care more about the long term than private markets. At least individuals care about leaving money for retirement. And even if you don't care, it's still senseless to deprecate your assets' value more than you gain from exploiting it.

> completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests

They wouldn't completely own them, they'd have property rights in them. Depending on how the property rights are structured you could have many owners of say a lake or a river.

> Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision

If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s

If you actual had a vested interest to protect something though it would be more likely to actually end up protected.

Or the polluting company with deep pockets would just buy the land and do whatever they wanted.

An unregulated free market is a terrible idea. It ends in massive monopolies and natural resource destruction at an absolute level.

It's not a bad thing that that's what a free market moves towards, per se, but that's why it needs to be and is regulated. Any worthwhile conversation isn't about whether or not to regulate it, it's a what level.

Or you sell the right to abuse the land or waterways. Then turn around and when all the clean water is gone, purify it and sell it!

Carbon rights?

Doesn't sound very appealing for next quarters profits, the true driver of all decisions.

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