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Comment by thinkingkong | Hacker News Reader

There's a war being waged on whether or not we're going to allow certain institutions to belong to the commons. If certain industries had their way, every sip of water and every breath of air would have an associated cost and market value.

Can't afford to pay? It's unfortunate, but that's your own fault.

Every time we encode and reinforce these systems through laws, market mechanisms, and now AI, we tacitly agree that people who cannot afford such things do not deserve them. If you can't afford private healthcare before the 0 cost system was implemented to decide that well... best of luck!

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> If certain industries had their way, every sip of water and every breath of air would have an associated cost and market value.

For those of you who think this isn't happening with basic resources like water, let me point you to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochabamba_Water_War

In principle, if we paid MORE attention to property rights around these resources, we wouldn't be in the situation we find ourselves with respect to air and water pollution, carbon emissions, and so forth.

If there were an owner, somehow, of the air, or the air over my house, or something, then when other entities are trying to externalize their own costs (by way of dumping carbon into the air, say), then we'd be able to use vanilla tort law to recover those costs as damages.

I'm not saying we should necessarily do that - obviously there are big questions about just whose bit of water this is, and how to determine who's causing the damages. But if we could somehow answer those questions, it seems like the market could supply the answer. That, to me, suggests that moving in the opposite direction is not obviously the best answer.

If you allow private ownership of all these things, why should we expect the result any different from what happened elsewhere, with most of everything owned by a few rich people?

And if it ends up being the same people who own the factories that dump carbon into the air, it seems to me that it would be much more profitable for them to arrange for a small private paradise. The air around your house, though? That's more valuable as an industrial dump, sorry. And if you don't consent, well, you are free to look for another house elsewhere, right? It's not the air owner's fault that can't afford one inside a climate controlled bubble.

That seems to be more or less the approach we've taken to date and it's set up a whack a mole game that we appear to be losing.

Get in trouble for air pollution, convert to water pollution, the media gets upset about some chemical you release, then convert it into something no one's thought to regulate yet.

We don't have infinite time to play like this.

That seems to be more or less the approach we've taken to date

I can't see this at all. Can you provide any example of property rights actually being vested in air or in water?

By comparison, if we talk about pollution of the soil, we don't have very much of a problem there. I mean, it happens. Like people's oil tanks leak, but that's a big part of the reason that we no longer build houses with oil-fired heat. I knew an environmental attorney who talked about the horrors of the liability when a homeowner's oil leach into the soil. This has taught us not to do that anymore.

But precisely because no particular entity owns the atmosphere, or (in most cases) the water, there's nobody that has standing to recover those externalized costs of pollution. So we haven't gone that route, and the problem remains largely unfixed.

The first result for a quick Google yields this case where 3M is being sued because a chemical they made contaminated a privately owned reservoir (some towns are also suing, because they also own water supplies contaminated with PFAS): https://whyy.org/articles/n-j-towns-sue-makers-of-forever-ch...

Water contamination lawsuits are as common as water.

Regarding air, in the town I live a cannabis product manufacturer is about to be sued by nearby property owners because their warehouse is emitting a noisome smell. I seem to recall the Siracha factory was hit with a similar lawsuit. It would not take much research to find other lawsuits that allege air contamination. I'm sure air contamination has been part of thousands and thousands of lawsuits.

Suing someone takes massive effort for uncertain results. Even if you have a slam dunk case you have to have some basic wherewithal regarding the legal system and not be afraid to show in court (say you have a minor warrant or are an undocumented migrant, or a documented migrant from a country with a history of deporting people who make probablems for big business).

It's far from ideal, and is also only possible once damage has been done.

Although I don't know what it looks like, I believe the next step has to include baking environment stewardship into the DNA of high risk companies. This might involve giving an EPA officer a board seat, requiring positive proof of emission safety and active monitoring of nearby populations rather than just waiting for the cancer patients to show up, etc.

> But precisely because no particular entity owns the atmosphere, or (in most cases) the water...

This is an emergent property of the systems of power we allow to prevail, where sufficiently dilutive responsibility and/or authority over decisions almost always falls under our threshold to effectively regulate, and shows the power of corruptive processes.

It still boggles my mind to this day that we knew a long time ago that burning coal dumped methylmercury into our waters and is incorporated into aquatic life that we harvest for food. And yet we haplessly continue even after seafood has been so globally contaminated we went from a baseline experience our ancestors enjoyed of "eat all the seafood you care to eat in your diet", to "watch your methylmercury intake when you eat seafood". If you were able to tell your great-great-great-grandparents that we've contaminated our seafood to the point we cannot eat certain fish more than X times a year, and there is no part of the world left unaffected, they'd be horrified or think you're a fabulist.

> I can't see this at all. Can you provide any example of property rights actually being vested in air or in water?

You use companies as a vehicle, but their measurement is not "how clean is the water?", it is "how much profit?" You will need to change this, otherwise, as long it is about profit / money, you've lost that very moment, and the only way to deal with that then is via regulation.

Keep in mind property rights can have the opposite effect too — impinging on the greater good in favour of the property rights of the few. The obvious example being NIMBYism; for example higher density construction that would benefit the city gets blocked by low-density homeowners who don't want their property negatively affected.

If you haven't, check out the musical "Urinetown". Private toilets are banned, and all of the public conveniences are owned by a megacord - the UGC (Urine Good Company).

I love that pun. It's pronounced exactly the same as "you're in good company".

TBH The ending of that musical ruined it for me; The people 'take back control' only to squander the water and die of thirst.

Sooo... Corporations are bad, but people are bad anyway so it doesn't matter? IDK. Might be a product of it's age (bitter endings were big back then, right?)

I read the ending differently - it's got two distinct parts.

The first is a warning on populism - it falls apart quickly in the face of reality. Promising easy solutions to hard problems.

The other is the Malthusian trap (explicitly nodded to with the "Hail Malthus") line.

Maurice Godelier is a very interesting anthropologist according to me. I remember reading from him that one thing that he observed in all societies he studied is that some things are meant to circulate, to be sold, give, whatever, and some other things are meant to be kept/preserved.

Maybe it's ok to keep some things out of the market's reach

We don't tolerate that kind of commie-talk round these parts.

They already do this in some areas, in the US. There are places where you cannot legally collect rainwater that falls on your own property. The only reason they haven't started charging for air yet is because they haven't figured out the logistics to enable doing so /s

Ah yes, the conclusion the terribly government run health care system is that it's the private industry's fault and we should give that same inept institution more power over our medical care.

Makes total sense.

Everything costs something, it's just a matter of who you force that cost on to.

Medicare Advantage plans are run by private companies. I think you might be confusing Medicare Advantage with traditional Medicare.

No, I understand that. You realize the government approves the plans right? You also realize the government still thinks the ACA was a god send?

Traditional Medicare sucks too though.

The fix for our medical system is to bring pricing down, while incentivizing innovation and not allowing your medical system to get overwhelmed by individuals that aren't contributing any money into it. You can have an argument about how to best do that but the current government backed options aren't cutting.

> not allowing your medical system to get overwhelmed by individuals that aren't contributing any money into it

So your proposal is that we let the poor die?

No. But until we acknowledge that we can pay for it directly, pay for it indirectly with packed ERs and dubious means testing and bureaucracy, or let the poor die are the only options we are never going to solve it

Your proposal is that we wave a magical wand and suddenly medical care costs nothing and doctors, nurses, etc. don't need to be paid well?

If we're going to play this silly game of absolutes, you're envisioning a utopia that cannot exist.

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