By looking at the forum and the daily articles, you’d think the BP spill never happened. Just curious.
We had a big thread about it. Benjamin thought it happened cusa capitalism. Tragedy of the commons actually. Water socialism and all that. Its a big event but its theoretically unchallenging.
We decided to play cards in the lounge area of the hotel we were staying at a couple weeks ago, and CNN was on the TV. It was amazing that they were covering the oil spill nonstop. It was 95% of the coverage. I felt like I was in Sartre’s No Exit.
Doug French and I have both posted about it recently on the blog.
“I felt like I was in Sartre’s No Exit.”
Hell is other people… on television.
links Grayson?
The LRC blog has a bunch about it.
What do you think were the legal contributing factors? who do you think is to most to blame? What would you say is the best solution?
“What do you think were the legal contributing factors? who do you think is to most to blame? What would you say is the best solution?”
1.) No more limited liability for corporations - I know it sucks, but people should actually have to do their homework before deciding what stock to buy
2.) Privatize the seas - They are now a tragedy of the commons, and don’t have any owners to bring suit against BP for polluting their property. If they did, BP would have to carry insurance against this contingency, and the insurance company would have great incentive to ensure that BP was observing proper safety protocol.
One thing that this BP spill has made me think about is externalities. Namely, that if you are in a business, and are benefitting from a positive externality, it would behoove you to at least gain a minority stake in that property. Say you are a hotel, but not directly on the water, but people only go to your hotel so that they can later visit the water, yet want to stay on the cheap. If something happens to that water or beach like an oil spill, you are shit out of luck. You have no claim on your lost income, you only have a claim on the reparations of damaged property. So when I hear about a potential lack of investment in things that have positive externalities for other businesses, I think this would manifest itself in minority stakes.
But what does privatizing the seas mean? One can certainly ‘homestead’ fishing spots*, tourist destinations, beaches, oil platforms, and whatever structures one places on the sea floor or surface. But outside of that, I don’t see how one claims ownership to an area of a body of water. If I am not missing something here, then libertarians need to rethink some of their arguments regarding the oil spill. Those who do claim property rights in the Gulf, like fishermen and tourism businesses, are able to seek compensation, are they not? BP, Halliburton and TransOcean will be expected to pay for their damages, just as we would expect them to pay in a free society.
But then I don’t think it’s all that important, and propertarians get too caught up in the whole privatizing the commons issue. We can assume that, in a free society, those wishing to drill will be restrained by the damages they would have to pay for a spill, the price of insurance and cost to their reputation if they damaged a huge body of water, as well as their own desire not to destroy their pricey capital goods. And they would not be able to turn to the state for protection or a cap to their liability. But mistakes can still happen, with or without political regulation.
*Which provides another interesting question. Much of the fishing industry in the Gulf is due to the oil platforms - they serve as reef for schools of fish, as the Gulf floor is barren. What might the libertarian response be to an oil company that, for whatever reason, wants to remove a retired platform? Have the fishers that relied on the concentration of fish homesteaded the fishing spot? I can certainly see peaceful solutions to the problem, such as the fishermen offering compensation to the oil company so that they leave the platform, but would a libertarian expect the oil company to compensate the fishermen if they remove the platform and thus destroy the fishing spot?
Legislative causes of the oil spill include regulation in general, which will force BP to allocate resources towards ensuring that things are done legally rather than ensuring that things are done safely. Another legislative factor has to due with the clean-up. Government regulations relative to cleaning up oil spills is so complicated that when one group sat down and figured it out, all the oil companies were willing to buy the same plan from that one group because figuring out the regulations themselves would have been too much of a pain. Lo and behold, the clean-up isn’t going so well.