You could theoretically ban pollution. That actually used to be the law in the 1600's. E.g. if you owned land on a river, the water had to leave your property as clean as it came in. As the industrial revolution happened, this rule was relaxed, because as it turns out it's impossible to make industry that doesn't pollute. The best you can do is balance the harms from pollution with the underlying beneficial activity. How do you achieve this balancing? The market doesn't work, because the parties aren't in contractual privity. You can use private litigation (sue someone for poisoning you) but that is wholly impractical. The litigation system is very well suited for resolving "you versus me" disputes based on tangible harms. It is not at all suited for resolving disputes between huge numbers of people based on statistical harms.
Think of a suit against a leaded gasoline refiner. Two key things any plaintiff needs to prove in such a suit is: 1) what was the harm; 2) how did the defendant's activity cause the harm. How does a plaintiff prove her kid would have been 3-4 IQ points smarter but for the leaded gasoline produced? How does the plaintiff prove that her kid's harms weren't the result of say lead in pipes rather than lead in the air? Scientists can do models and experiments and tell you that the statistically a given type of pollution will cause certain kinds of harm in a population, but they can't tell you whether any particular injured person was injured from a particular type of pollution. The science here is statistical causation, but the law requires provable, traceable, causation.
This (http://old.ccer.edu.cn/download/7874-1.pdf) is one of the most important papers in the economics of the law. It's also, incidentally, a fundamental paper of libertarian economics. Ronald Coase received a Nobel Prize in economics, partially for this paper. On Page 29, he basically explains why we use regulation rather than property rights enforced through litigation to address environmental harms.
The EPA generally doesn't ban things. Leaded gasoline was an unusual case because it was so harmful and also, in the grand scheme of things, quite replaceable. Usually what they'll do is specify that polluters that emit particular kinds of air pollution (sulfur, etc) must use a certain level of control technology. This creates certain market incentives for polluters to make this control technology as cheap as possible. However, this approach doesn't really reduce pollution as much as it should, since the EPA is usually quite sensitive to cost issues. But as a practical matter, some polluters should go out of business if the cost of thoroughly cleaning up their emissions outweighs the revenue from the polluting activity.
Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future. If your business model requires you to cost the society more in pollution than the value of your product, you should not be in business, regardless of how fine history your company has.
Instead just quantify the total harm caused by emissions the best you can, divide by total emissions amounts, and levy that as a tax per pound of emission. In such a system, not a single coal-fired plant would be in operation in the US.
They're more similar than you seem to think. Both internalize cost to the production of pollution. In a tax, the cost is fixed and the total amount of pollution is market-determined. With a cap it is the reverse. However, at the point where the prices agree, they are, in principle, equivalent.
> Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future.
Allocating pollution licenses to past polluters is only one possible way of distributing them. A cap-and-trade system could also to hold yearly auctions for each year's permits. The former is used many times in part because incumbents are less likely to oppose regulation. They may even be able to achieve efficiencies and sell their allocated permits at a profit because of cap-and-trade. But note that even though the incumbents are receiving the permits for free, they still have an incentive to reduce pollution when the cost of the efficiency is less than the cost of the permit.
> Instead just quantify the total harm caused by emissions the best you can, divide by total emissions amounts, and levy that as a tax per pound of emission.
Two problems is that the harm may be difficult to quantify in a price and more importantly the harm may not be linear in the amount of pollution. You could argue that the optimal solution would be for the government to estimate the harm as a function of the amount of pollution and hold some sort of complicated auction where the price depended on the quantity of pollution permits sold. However, I think this is too impractical for any real-world regulation.
I believe that's exactly why they are "preferred" by our political system. Whenever the political body starts to consider laws about pollution, the lobbyists for the polluters go into high-alert to influence the outcome. They don't want a straight tax, because that'll become a simple cost which is difficult to avoid. Instead they prefer a complex scheme that can be sold as if it has the same impact as the straight tax, but in reality it will provide ways to game the system to either avoid the costs or even make a profit for the polluting companies.
I'll never understand how people can suppose that a government solution, which consists of a massive nation-wide bureaucracy as well as an immense violent army of what I endearingly call "the conflict resolvers" (law enforcement, courts, etc.) funded mostly by compulsory financial levies on working residents, is by any definition or stretch of the imagination "more efficient" than private litigation.
... And if, after looking at the example of lead, you still don't understand the role of regulation, it's likely that you never will.
It's pretty clear to me that you have never been involved with "private litigation".
Litigation cannot exist without your so-called 'conflict resolvers'.
Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't like you, and since there is no actual way for you to enforce me paying you out, I just won't". Again, if the insurance company decides not to pay, they are enacting bad things on someone and not honoring an agreement. Fortunately since they have lots of free money and no expenses (other than those required to manipulate perception -- cheap payouts etc), they can just have their newspaper buddies out-shout anyone else and not actually be harmed by bad practices.
Why? Retail stores don't become the government or merge into one. Neither do private security agencies. It's unlikely that any organization could "become the government" unless a vast portion of society accepts them as the sole legitimate purveyor of violence, which is precisely what I don't want to happen.
> Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't like you, and since there is no actual way for you to enforce me paying you out, I just won't".
Then what would you do? Personally, I would stop paying them (and probably switch to another insurance company), and I suspect a vast majority of their customers would do the same thing, and probably long before it got to the point where it "became the government."
The only ways for a private insurance company in a free society to remain dominant while consistently not honoring their agreements would be if society as a whole didn't care about the agreements being honored (which seems unlikely), if they gather enough power to physically oppress an entire region (which also seems unlikely these days, since very few governments are even able or willing to pull that off), or if they convince society that they should be allowed to have a monopoly on violence. That last one is a pretty good definition of "becoming a government," and it's certainly possible, but the whole argument I'm making is that society should not recognize any organization as having a monopoly on violence.
I guess I could hope for one reporter to be nice... but all the others making crap up about me for a few $K would make the other customers not actually pay heed. No penalty for the shady insurance.
Similarly you are making a big fuss over the difference between physical and economic violence. Yet you adamantly refuse to explain how a bunch of economic policies via collusion of the players, resulting in a scenario of "play by our rules or else get no way of eating or sheltering yourself" is any less violence than "do what we say or we shoot you". To me the difference is a false one: forcing me to do something with one death threat really isn't different than with another.
Finally, you somehow are confusing free market with "open and transparent operation of all economic players". We already see that isn't the case - most business hide most information about themselves the best they can, and rebel against any attempt to shed light on them. In fact government is more open about operations than almost all businesses, yet somehow there will be magic knowledge transfer between consumers and business about what those businesses really do once you take away government.
How do people find out that certain automobile are crappy? How do people know to avoid certain hospitals or certain doctors? I would never make the ludicrous claim that any arrangement of society would be utopia. People will get ripped off and bad things will always happen. It would simply be less common without government.
> you adamantly refuse to explain how a bunch of economic policies via collusion of the players, resulting in a scenario of "play by our rules or else get no way of eating or sheltering yourself" is any less violence than "do what we say or we shoot you". To me the difference is a false one: forcing me to do something with one death threat really isn't different than with another.
In the former situation, the "collusion of the players" is offering a crappy deal (with no physical violence) as an alternative to starvation. That means that if you truly would starve without the crappy deal (which would require you to be incapable of growing your own food), you are genuinely better off taking the deal. I don't see how this qualifies as "violence." You could make a decent argument that it is exploitation, which is a different argument altogether.
Except for the most part, there's no such thing as "the long run", since the entire concept depends on the universe being relatively stationary (from a probabilistic/statistical perspective). In fact, the universe, and especially the economy/culture/society, is highly non-stationary, making the entire notion of "the long run" fallacious.
In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still" long enough for bad actors to get weeded out. But this is an empirical claim, and one that has been shown to be frequently false. Indeed, its falsehood is in part responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.
The world is always changing deeply and unpredictably. In the imagined scenario above, your needs for insurance wouldn't remain constant, and neither would the base of providers. Indeed, the entire ontology of the marketplace would be constantly in flux, making "in the long run" free market approaches mostly impotent as compared with collective action that directly deals with the problems we face right now.
Don't be silly. The world would still be a horrible place. Heinous acts would be committed every day. People would be murdered, tortured, and raped. There would still be a lot of violence—it would just be a lot less than what we have today.
> In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still" long enough for bad actors to get weeded out. But this is an empirical claim, and one that has been shown to be frequently false. Indeed, its falsehood is in part responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.
Of course there is truth in all of this. But how is the government a better solution?
> The world is always changing deeply and unpredictably. In the imagined scenario above, your needs for insurance wouldn't remain constant, and neither would the base of providers.
Again, that's true of insurance just like it's true of cell phone providers, automobile manufacturers, etc. Again, how does government solve any of this?
Further, a society without government is much harder to imagine, because the idea of rules enforcement is sort of built into every society I've ever heard of - your proposal is "no rules enforcement at all, everyone do what they want in all cases". Sounds frightening - I would have to treat every single person I encounter as a terrible person, and they would have to do the same for me. If you think that is really not different than what exists now, you have the following issues: 1. you are too paranoid to do anything, 2. you must be extremely rude and agressive to people if they always treat you that way. 3. you must be terribly lonely. I pity you.
The point isn't that "government will solve any of this", it's that laissez-faire economics can't. Bad actors can skip from exploitation to exploitation -- if there would be less government, then everyone would need to look out for themselves all the time and there would be less social trust, with all the attendant effects.
It's the possibility that laissez-faire could do a much worse job than regulations that libertarians refuse to accept.
I think you have no idea what you are talking about. None.
What if I can't afford private insurance? What if I am not allowed private insurance?
Seems like decrying a 'monopoly of violence' and replacing it with a 'vibrant violence marketplace' is quite a few steps in the wrong direction.
What can anything do for you if you are killed? I don't understand the relevance. You could still have private life insurance to provide for your family, but that's no different than today.
> What if I can't afford private insurance?
What if you can't afford the fees associated with litigation in the government court system? I never claimed that my suggestion would suddenly make everything fine for poor people. It's always going to be worse to have less wealth, just like it is in our current society.
> Seems like decrying a 'monopoly of violence' and replacing it with a 'vibrant violence marketplace' is quite a few steps in the wrong direction.
I don't understand how. Neither system is a utopia, but a competitive system motivated by profit would probably be cheaper (because customers like lower prices) and less violent (because violence is expensive and risky) than a government monopoly.
> Then the security companies would start enforcing rules in their zones (remember property doesn't exist without someone there to enforce the property). Those security guys could take over the zone next door. Oh and prevent people from living. Repeat for larger and larger groups. Suddenly we have government of the feudal or warlard kind all over again.
There are so many leaps there that need justification.
What is to keep someone from killing me to get their way? Private insurance? Are they going to go to war for me after I'm dead?
>What if you can't afford the fees associated with litigation in the government court system?
Well, if the conflict 'resolution' involves the other party resorting to violence or theft, I can turn the matter over to the into the State whether I can pay for it or not. There are hard limits placed on how far the other party can go in getting what they want.
>violence is expensive
I don't see how violence is expensive. Violence is cheap. Bullets don't cost much. Rocks are even cheaper.
In fact, violence can be very profitable. Got $10 in your pocket? Just paid for my bullet and then some. Got a $30,000 car? Well now, that should pay for a few rounds.
What you propose is a fantasy, pure and simple. And not even a very plausible one.
Yes, that's the idea, although "going to war" is hyperbolic. Private insurance would be strongly incentivized to seek out and punish murderers, assuming of course that potential customers would find that service valuable. The leap from the government's monopoly on violence to a competitive alternative is no more drastic or complex than the leap from the government's monopoly on postal service to a competitive alternative. Features that customers valued would almost certainly abound, and ones they didn't care about or like would be less common. The key difference is that the competitive systems get their revenue from willing payers, while the government coerces money from every single employer.
> I don't see how violence is expensive. Violence is cheap. Bullets don't cost much. Rocks are even cheaper.
I don't mean the cost of weaponry. I mean that you have to pay thugs well, mostly because of the inherent risk I mentioned earlier. There is also risk of massive retaliation which can end up causing a lot of damage to humans and property.
> In fact, violence can be very profitable.
It can be, sure, but it's extremely expensive and extremely risky. That was my point.
It can be, sure, but it's extremely expensive and extremely risky. That was my point.
Violence is only risky because government makes it risky to commit violence.
Reality does not bear out your claims that turning everything over to private parties would magically solve the violence problem. In fact, places like Somalia and every conflict in Africa and the Middle East are strong evidence that violence would increase tenfold without a strong government. In contrast, the places with the lowest levels of violence are frequently places like Singapore or Europe with the highest levels of government.
Not true. Government law enforcement obviously contributes, but the tendency for people to defend themselves (and for third parties to intervene against perceived injustice) is the primary source of risk.
> In fact, places like Somalia and every conflict in Africa and the Middle East are strong evidence that violence would increase tenfold without a strong government.
I'm glad someone finally mentioned Somalia. Unfortunately, your beliefs are incorrect, and are in fact the opposite of the truth. See http://rkba.org/libertarian/maccallum/MacCallum-Somalia98.ht... and http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf .
I can't see what they have to do with this argument though. The first one is basically a speculative essay with little to support its ideas, interesting though they are.
The second one is more rigorous, but it seems to me that it works against your argument.
It contends that Law and Order is provided by Xeer, Somali customary law, which is a tribal artifact that has developed over centuries, and depends on people being recognized as having loyalty to a tribe because it makes the tribe responsible for harms done its by members to other tribes. Thew piece also states that although private courts exist (funded by successful businessmen), Shari'a courts perform an instrumental function in creating legal order.
Both pieces also state that the Somali central state, when it existed, was weak, rampantly corrupt and never successfully displaced these tribal and religious institutions.
All this really seems to be saying is that, just like everywhere else before the emergence of the nation state, Somalia was governed by tribal law and religion. In the case of Somalia, a functioning nation state never really emerged, and so it fell back to tribal law and religion.
This turns out not to be as bad as the failing central state, or the horror stories portrayed by the mainstream media, but although falling back to tribalism and religion might not be as bad as the media portrays, it hardly seems like a model for how to improve on what we have.
If that were true people wouldn't be killed over pocket change today.
It seems to me that your position is only maintainable if you take many questionable assumptions as a given -- here are a couple:
-People are rational actors. -People will operate in an environment with good enough information available to make good decisions. (This would be tough to begin with but with overlapping rules in place this could really be a crippling burden in your purely market driven world.)
Keeping just those two assumptions intact seems...improbable.
There is no organization of individuals which routinely kill people over pocket change, is there? Obviously, single individuals can and do commit nearly any physical act you can conceive of. That doesn't mean that all acts are affordable to deploy on a massive scale, especially when you're worried about earning a profit.
I chuckled at your assumptions, because they apply equally (or I might argue, more so) to a challenge of the desirability of government. Remember, what we call "government" is really just a bunch of people that society recognizes as the sole legitimate purveyors of violence—that's the only difference. The only change I'm proposing is for society to recognize no individuals as the sole legitimate purveyors of violence, rather than a select few. The fact that people irrational and ignorant is all the more reason to not allow any of them to become the sole legitimate purveyors of violence.
Yes, there are. Frequently over nothing at all.
Suppose I kill someone. Now you'll turn to a private law company to judge/punish me. I then proceed to kill that company's employees. Will you now invoke a third private law provider in their name? Who will pay for it? Even if all the law providers were mutually insured, in this arrangement, as long as I can overpower each private entity, there is no effective law.
Why? This is an unsubstantiated claim, and I don't see why it's any truer than claiming that competition in the retail industry will be worse than a government-owned retail monopoly.
> Suppose I kill someone. Now you'll turn to a private law company to judge/punish me. I then proceed to kill that company's employees. Will you now invoke a third private law provider in their name? Who will pay for it?
All you're arguing here is that my proposition would not be a perfect utopian society, which I would never be foolish enough to claim. It's no different than asking "What if I kill someone, then kill the cops that show up, then kill every other law enforcement agency that shows up, then kill the entire national military?"
Wrong. They are a group of people acting within a common framework of rules. These rules constrain their behavior, especially violent behavior. Part of this framework works to ensure no one person, small group or even large sub-group can act independently of these rules.
>The only change I'm proposing is for society to recognize no individuals as the sole legitimate purveyors of violence, rather than a select few.
This opens violent action to anyone who cares to engage in such behavior by whatever rules they see fit.
>The fact that people irrational and ignorant is all the more reason to not allow any of them to become the sole legitimate purveyors of violence.
I disagree. I think this is a fine argument for having a common set of rules for violent action agreed upon and enforced by as many people as possible. The irrational and ignorant will be held in check according to the common rules by everyone else with that responsibility.
No, but people agreeing to the tenants of the document do. This would be no different in your proposal only there will be exponentially more documents (agreements) to keep track of.
> and voting is not a realistic way to keep government accountable to the people.
Voting is not the only way to keep government accountable (legal action being another -- revolution or threat of revolution being yet another, civil disobedience etc, etc.), but as far as a basic way to make sure government will reflects the governed's will, voting does a decent job. The evidence for this is that more extreme and direct action is relatively rare...at least in the West.
>An individual simply has no recourse to everyday government injustices (like taxation or prosecution for drug possession).
Taxation is an injustice? How so? I don't find it to be unjust. I get a lot of value, personally, from the taxes I pay. And drug possession? I personally don't feel that drugs should be considered contraband but many people have. Those laws are changing, however, through voting no less, as public opinion shifts.
>If you insist that government represents the people, fine, but it's still tyranny of the majority/plurality.
I live in the United States. It is a Republic. This means that while most laws flow from the majority and everyone must live under those laws the rights of minorities are protected. Thus tyranny is held in check. Also, minority and majority are fluid terms. They are not so much tied to an individual as a gross bloc, but to individual opinions held by those individuals regarding the laws, rules and regulations under consideration. The same person will find themselves in the majority on some issues and the minority in others. In short, individuals often don't find their will wholly repressed by the rules of the majority. Also, the rules tend to be slow to change and cannot be applied arbitrarily. This is opposed to a tyranny where the rule is absolute, arbitrarily applied and make no room for unassailable rights.
Then pay the government voluntarily. I would have no problem with that. The problem is with taking people money when they aren't okay with it. I consider threatening someone with violence unless they pay you money to be unjust, which I don't think is that bizarre of an opinion.
> I personally don't feel that drugs should be considered contraband but many people have.
The error you're making is trying to represent government action as something voluntary or up to personal opinion. Just like with taxation, you say that you don't consider drugs contraband, but many people do. That would be fine if it was left at that. The problem is that the group people who do consider drugs to be contraband have implemented a vast organized system of violence against the other group. I don't have a problem with the difference in opinion. The problem is with the violence.
> I live in the United States. It is a Republic. This means that while most laws flow from the majority and everyone must live under those laws the rights of minorities are protected. Thus tyranny is held in check.
Did you go to public schools in the USA? I did, and I was repeatedly taught that as well. Later, when I actually looked into it myself, I realized it's simply not true. The USA government was founded in an attempt to create one of the smallest centralized governments in history, and in a relatively short period of time it has grown into one of the largest centralized governments in history. Just because a legal document, your school, and you yourself say that rights are protected doesn't mean they are.
> The same person will find themselves in the majority on some issues and the minority in others. In short, individuals often don't find their will wholly repressed by the rules of the majority.
Sure, no one is "wholly repressed," but that's a pretty low bar. I would prefer that no one be violently oppressed by the majority at all.
> This is opposed to a tyranny where the rule is absolute, arbitrarily applied and make no room for unassailable rights.
Have you followed the legislation, ongoing attempted legislation, and executive action regarding the "war on terror" in the past decade or so? American citizens have been assassinated in drone strikes without any pretense of legality. Alleged criminals or "terrorists" have been tortured and detained indefinitely without being charged. Prominent political leaders have explicitly said that the rule of law does not apply to people who are considered by the government to be a threat to the government.
Ok. Then would you keep the non-payers from enjoying the benefit of the infrastructure put into place by the payers?
> I consider threatening someone with violence unless they pay you money to be unjust, which I don't think is that bizarre of an opinion.
It is bizarre because it rarely comes to that. The threat of violence is quite a few well understood steps down in the process. What you propose is to replace those well understood steps to violent action with an overlapping, ever changing patchwork of rules. And wishing for violence to simply not exist is not an option.
>I would prefer that no one be violently oppressed by the majority at all.
Violence exists. It will always exist as long as people are mortal or can feel pain. The trick is controlling and limiting it's use. What you propose is replacing the potential of violent action by rules laid out by the majority by rules created by any individual or group that cares to fashion them and with the resources to carry them out against anybody or group that cannot muster a reprisal great enough to make the cost outweigh the benefits to the violently acting group.
>Just because a legal document, your school, and you yourself say that rights are protected doesn't mean they are. >Have you followed the legislation, ongoing attempted legislation, and executive action regarding the "war on terror" in the past decade or so? American citizens have been assassinated in drone strikes without any pretense of legality. Alleged criminals or "terrorists" have been tortured and detained indefinitely without being charged. Prominent political leaders have explicitly said that the rule of law does not apply to people who are considered by the government to be a threat to the government.
These things stand out because they are not the normal course of business.
Violence is always a specter (a potential action) in any conflict between people. The question is; How do we minimize the role of violence in coming to resolutions to conflicts? I think the rules we've evolved to answer that question of the course of human history have done a decent job.
Do you have a different set of rules that you think would better optimize this minimization problem? I'd love to hear it.
And sadly you are dealing with a Libertarian and you will.
Express them like this? yeah. Well, libertarians and Jehovah's witnesses.
On Hacker News comments? What in the world are you going on about?
Of course not. It was already false, long before I declared it so.
> Violence is always a specter (a potential action) in any conflict between people. The question is; How do we minimize the role of violence in coming to resolutions to conflicts?
I agree completely.
> I think the rules we've evolved to answer that question of the course of human history have done a decent job.
I disagree completely.
Show me how it is false. I am a very reasonable person who is prone to change his mind when presented with a solid argument. I am inviting you to make that argument.
You are the one claiming that litigation can exist without government. Litigation has never, in all of recorded history thus far, existed without the backing of government. Thus, the burden of proof is on you.
But anyway, Medieval Iceland is always cited as the closest thing to a nation-wide private legal system. Admittedly, it's not exactly the system I would prefer, because there are still some roles that are not open to competition. But it's fairly close, and it should be close enough to help you imagine such a system.
If you can look at social arrangements smaller than entire nations, there is plenty of private (and voluntary) dispute resolution all around the globe. In fact, that method of conflict resolution is often chosen voluntary by both parties to avoid the inefficiencies or perceived unfairness of government.
You mean private litigation which employs gov't judges to adjudicate and the gov't police to enforce? If so, you have a confusing definition of private.
The only private litigation I'm aware of is the mob, which has a self-contained judgement and enforcement arm. I would agree with you: They're damn efficient.
No, I mean private litigation and conflict mediation that is private. There is a lot of that already.
And what happens when the private company doesn't agree with the arbitrage result?
Eliminating atmospheric lead may have been a consideration, but in my recollection it wasn't the primary consideration; people were more concerned about unburned hydrocarbons producing smog.