Elon Musk makes a libertarian argument for carbon tax

Or would you call it "not letting coal plants externalize their costs on everyone else"?

Why are carbon emissions any different?

Still, means a carbon tax is just more of the same, not some evil infringement of liberties.

I think you are right that few people explicitly say that pure markets exist. But implicitly many people make arguments based on some kind of some unregulated state of nature, for example on this thread.

I mostly agree with this part,

> If you are a True Libertarian you should be in favor of the Government regulating air polluters

but take issue with this part.

As others have pointed out the libertarian position on air pollution, and similarly on other kinds of pollution, is it is a tortious trespass on property and is dealt with through the judicial system. Meaning no regulation or action is needed by government other than the recognition of property rights. This was the position of common law and was abandoned by American courts in the early 20th century.

Now, when you refer to the oceans, which due to government action remain un-ownable, it's more complicated and the libertarian position is that they should be privatized.

And if you know its a common tort or trespass, it is simpler to tax that tort/trespass rather than require every individual to sue every other individual.

> If you are trying to 'catch me out', your rhetoric won't convince me, nor is it likely to convince anyone els

I don't really care. I just find your doublethink curious and wanted to confirm it was what I thought it was.

I find Doublethink in general a very interesting subject.

I build my factory next to your land. A byproduct of my factory is a bunch of polluted water, which drains strait onto your land, causing much damage.

The tort system could deal with this fine [1]. You can easily prove that it was the pollution from my factory that damaged your land.

This may not be a good way to deal with it, because (1) it takes effort to take someone to court, which many small landowners may not have the time for and so will discourage them from defending their property rights, and (2) it assumes that only the monetary value of your land is important and thus it is OK for someone to damage your land as long as they pay.

• Scenario 2

I build my factory 1000 miles from your land. My polluted water runs into a nearby river, eventually makes it to the ocean, and some of it eventually ends up on your land.

The tort system is useless to address your injury. There are too many chaotic physical processes between the emission of the pollution at my end and the arrival of pollution at your end for you to prove that any of that pollution came from me. If you sue me, my defense is that there are hundreds or thousands of other factories polluting, and for all we know all of my pollution either stayed in the ocean or when it got back to land ended up on land other than yours.

If we modify the tort system so that in the case of pollution we turn the burden of proof around and require the defendant to prove that they did not pollute the plaintiff's property, then you can sort of make it work.

But if we do that, now we've just turned the problem around. It will be almost impossible for me to prove that my pollution did not reach any given plaintiff. Anyone who finds pollution of the type that my factory produces can easily and successfully sue me.

If that's the case, then as soon as you sue me, I'll be filing third party complaints against all the other factories that emit the same kind of pollution, alleging that they are equally responsible for the pollution that damaged you.

Of course, you won't be the only plaintiff suing me, since pollution spreads far and wide from the source. And all of the defendants will be filing third party complaints against all the other defendants. So we'll end up with a bazillion lawsuits, each consisting of one plaintiff with damaged land, and thousands of factory owner defendants. Someone will try and succeed in turning this into a class action.

The class plaintiffs will win, damages will be accessed will be accessed with each factory's share probably proportional to the amount of their pollution, and split among the plaintiffs proportionally to the damage to their land. This only settles things among those defendants and the plaintiffs that are in the class, so this thing will have to be repeated when new plaintiffs arise or new factories are built.

The net result will be that instead of a simple, straightforward, approach of the legislature creating a pollution fee or tax with the proceeds going to pollution cleanup, with the executive handling enforcement, we end up with an ad hoc sort of equivalent cobbled together from the tort system that is costlier, more time consuming, and has a lot more uncertainty (and still needs legislative action to create because it depends on changing the burden of proof in pollution cases).

[1] By "deal with it fine", I mean identify the party responsible for the pollution and make them pay monetary damages. One can make a good case that this is not actually fine, for at least two reasons. First, it assumes that only the monetary value of land is important. Land often has esthetic or sentimental value to people, which they would not give up even for much much more money than anyone else would pay for the land. Second, it takes time and effort to sue someone. Many small landowners would not have the resources for that, and so would have to just suck it up and accept the pollution.

Because no one can own the air and you do not have a right to pollute something you do not own... further more if you pollute on land you do own you cannot guarantee the pollution will go to land owned by other people. And if you can guarantee that it will stay on your property, win win, we solved global warming!

This would be the argument for creating more of a structured market approach to assigning the costs of these externalities: courts are inefficient and plagued with problems when there's a power difference between the parties, so creating a market structure allows those externalities to be compensated in a more efficient way, while still allowing market pricing to incentivize industry to resolve the externality in the most efficient way available.

The libertarian's argument against this (I imagine) is that any government market scheme will screw it up more, though I don't know why so much faith is placed in the court system as a magically efficient system that resolves property disputes fairly and cost effectively in cases like diffused externalities.

More foam-at-the-mouth anarchists tend to be empty vessels - louder, so they attract the disenchanted.