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Comment by crc32 | Hacker News Reader

A good example of government regulation improving quality of life!

Can one of the HN free-marketeers explain how this sort of thing would arise "naturally" through market forces, without regulatory intervention?

If you were allowed to sue polluters for damages to your property is a common example I've seen. So for example you notice your building is being blackened and sue the coal fired plant down the street for the cleaning fees to restore it's facade.

Sounds good but it is totally impractical if you've had any experience with the legal system.

What if there are many factories owned by different businesses producing the pollution? Do you sue all of them?

What if the cost of cleaning is smaller than the cost of changing business practices to protect health and the environment?

Yes, one of the many reasons it is totally impractical.

Great, if I'm dying of poisoning I can sue, at least. Helpful.

It's not possible, because pollution is an externality[0], something that's well known to destabilize free markets. Without regulation, purely profit driven actors have no incentive to reduce pollution one bit, since doing so gives them an economic disadvantage against their polluting peers.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

I think biology would have "solved" the problem in this case. Without regulation and sustained pollution, the population would eventually decrease enough (through migration and increased mortality rate) to reduce pollution.

Pollution can harm quality of life for everybody, but mostly kill elderly people who've already had children.

https://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution

Or rather, how this sort of thing happens because of the ‘wrong sort of’ government action

Or more explicitly - governments choose to deny citizens certain property rights with the aim of increasing economic development (possibly run by friends of, or contributors to, those in government). So citizens harmed by externalities such as pollution cannot sue for redress

Tort law. It was the government, that prohibited suing polluters in the first place (in the name of a progress). Free-market cities probably wouldn't have ICE cars or fabrics nearby, because it would be prohibitively expensive to buy a permission to pollute from each land-owner in a city.

This is just cleaning the facades! Edinburgh prohibits this kind of cosmetic work in ordr to keep the historical character of buildings (tho sandstone doesn't go as black as limestone).

Are you sure - most buildings in central Edinburgh seem to have been cleaned in the last couple of decades?

I remember the cleaning of the Scott Monument was a very contentious issue - which was eventually abandoned. Nowadays you can see the contrast between the old/dirty stone and the new pieces used for restoration.

I'm actually sitting in an office in George Street looking out of my window at a stone wall where I can see that the entire one building has been cleaned and the next door one hasn't! :-)

The National Galleries near the Mound was cleaned entirely a few years back - it's actually starting to collect dark marks on it again.

When I was small most of Edinburgh looked exactly like these photos, and they didn't start washing it until the late 80s.

(edit: come to think of it, entire central Edinburgh area still smelled of coal smoke in the mornings until about then, too, though Musselburgh even more so)

Well, it would have happened sooner and more efficiently if the invisible hand of the market were only permitted to operate freely.

See! It is possible to identify sarcasm in pure text.

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