I don’t see how air and air pollution can be separated in this case.
Furthermore, the externality of air pollution is not about consumers, it is about third parties affected by it. To use an example, if you cruise around in a town that is not your home town, you pay for your car, your gas and anything else you might need for doing so, but you will not be charged for the air you pollute with your vehicle. Theoretically, a road owner could charge you for it - but that would put him at a competitive disadvantage with anyone who doesn’t. The main party interested in stopping air pollution would be local citizens. How do they achieve that? Regulation, either preemptively by enacting laws against air pollution or retroactively by suing polluters.
But, as scineram mentioned, how is the social utility of suing someone after you have suffered severe physical damage from pollution higher than simply banning it preemptively? The free market may have a solution for reimbursing the victims of externalities, but it has yet to be proven that this is more effective than simply outlawing the source of damage before it causes any more harm.
So do we not then have a maket price for said pollution? I’m addressing only this point because it is at the heart of what we were talking about: a market price for pollution.
No. A road owner may not care about pollution because he is not affected by it. Residents do. But residents cannot directly influence the price of driving, i.e. the price of polluting.
As far as I can tell, this deals with direct pollution, e.g. a factory spewing smoke on my lawn. What about indirect pollution, i.e. climate change caused by GHG emissions, assuming that the theory of man-made global warming bears some truth?
Because he is affected by them, the potholes negatively affect his revenue since presumably people want to drive on good roads. In this case property rights are well defined and the price mechanism is able to work. But other times prohibitive transaction costs stop the enforcement and monitoring of property rights, simply put, it’s extremely expensive, and technologically difficult, to measure and track the output of a given car.
Yes, but that’s quite besides the point. We have too countervailing effects, the increase in standard of living provided by cleaner air and the loss associated with banning a product, and we need to decide which effect is greater in magnitude (and possibly identify any other effects of banning Hummers). Look, if you do policy work you’re going to have to come up with some numbers, humility is certainly required with regards to how meaningful these numbers are, but it’s better than commiting ourselves with a nihilism about saying anything meaningful about the real world.
Well, I’m sorry if I’ve misrepresented you. I’ve asked you your opinion on this and you refused to answer, for whatever reason. So if you’d like to set me straight and elaborate your position on externalities, that’d be much appreciated and may lead to some productive debate. Otherwise I can hardly be blamed for not understanding your position.
When I wrot “sound Money like Gold” - I was already making clear that Gold itself was not the point. Of course even “pure paper money” might work well as sound money as long as Money is not instrumentalized to create wealth for people (states/institutuions) that did not create much more than just “paper money”.
And this is again the point. Creating money is creating power. As you can see right now in the fishing-debate where Japan is able to “persuade” smaller Nations with (fresh printed - carry-trade-cash) to oppose to limitation of fishing of several species.
Of course we can say: The question what to hunt or to fish can be left to the market - because even hunters/fishermen do not want to destroy their own wealth through over-exploitation.
But this way of thinking works just under the condition that Money (“pseudo-wealth”) cannot be produced out of nothing without limitation.
Let´s say it in the case of fishing: If the Japanese Governement could not “just print money” - their possibilities to “persuade” others to decide in an economical insane way would be very limited. In this case: It would be more ecological. As it is in the “Hummer-Car-question”.
People can afford this cars mostly not because of pure marked-conditions but because they do not realy have to create value themselves in order to reach such a car.
If I would go to my bank - I might easily get the money for a car that I actually could not afford. So I could cruise around with a car that costs more and consumes more fuel that I actually can afford. This is the very problem created by “fiat-money”.
And here I´m not jet talking about the question that the exhaust-pipe is just at the wrong place in cars. Immagine it would end in the air-conditioning-system… I think that we would think very different this way. Because even here it is some sort of “privatisation” of the benefits of driving - while the disadvantages are “socialized”.This is actualy as stupid as the “communist-way” of trying to socialize wealth by taking it away from a few.
It might work. But if it does, and road owners will regulate emissions anyway, what is the problem with the government doing that. It’s just the same, as now they own the roads.
It’s a bizarre thing to say “but how will the market do it?”, to then give a way and then to get the response “but then why shouldn’t the gov’t do it?” They claim to own the roads (and they definitely don’t allocate usage by way of profit and loss.) Very big difference. And that claim will only be tolerated for as long as people see any legitimacy in the government… if you mean a second-best type argument whereby it assumes the role of lowering pollution till roads are privatised, then yes, but I am generally suspicious of these arguments.
Something to bear in mind is that road ownership should the gov’t dissolve will devolve upon HoAs, residents along streets &c. Suits may not even be necessary in some cases.
You could just as well imprison people for pre-emptively planning (or even thinking) to murder someone. How is the social utility of letting them go free higher than just imprisoning before the fact? The point is for punishment to gradually, over time, act as a disincentive for performing the activity (whilst still maintaining the semblance of justice.) Now the justice system in place need not be premised on punishing for utilitarian reasons like that, but it will have the effect regardless.
It isn’t. That’s why preemptive arrest occurs when there is sufficient reason to suspect that criminal activities are being planned.
Of course, it is very difficult to assess this in most cases, but I think we can agree that it’s better to catch a terrorist before he blows stuff up than to wait and punish him after the damage is done.
No, that actually is the point. You are trying to pull cost/benefit analysis out of a black top hat like you would a magical bunny. You have no way of quantifying consumer desires in the first place and you further your arbitrary nature by trying to set a scale as to what is good for protocol and what is bad, namely if the benefits outweight the cost then it is good.
Who wants policy? Are you speaking of an institution outside of private interests?
Well I think you misspeak with your term ‘ourselves.’ You seem to be heading down a road that does not include the Austrian school. If commonsensical praxeology does not appease you and your values of ‘meaningfulness’ which seem to be aimed at creating some grand system of economic policy cogs, then I wish you well and hope you find what you are looking for or that it finds you.
There’s a very thin line between thinking of doing it and planning it. In fact, say you could read minds and saw someone developing a detailed plan of murder in their head, why not pre-emptively arrest them for it? Of course in the case of pollution it is merely an assertion that the utility of pre-emptively banning it altogether is higher than letting courts first punish for it and over time for reductions to occur.
People behave differently when observed, so clearly they will develop thoughts in the privacy of their minds that they would never transform into action.
I’m not suggesting we should put everyone on a lie detector to find out if they’re up to something wicked. But in some cases, such as an individual credibly threatening to go on a shooting spree, preemptive arrests can be warranted. Or would you disagree?
You know, this is actually very interesting. We don’t know what the opportunity costs would be of arresting a suspect or preemptively banning toxins. We don’t know the extent of the damage that we would be preventing. We don’t even know the cost that a trial or diminished transportation through emissions regulation might bring upon us. This might be why Austrians are so opposed to this kind of policy; but again, as Giles said, if we limit ourselves to a hands-off approach just because we cannot accurately calculate, we might end up with seriously increased costs in the long run.
Or we could just lock up everybody, thus lowering the murder rate to 0%? How do YOU decide how much of other people’s freedom to destroy in return for YOUR perception of the social benefit to be achieved?
The problem is not your inability to accurately calculate, but the VARIETY of formulas anyone could use in order to justify ANY freedom limitation of others. And just like with everything else in a free market, it will be the costs (prices) reflecting the subjective preferences of ALL agents that heuristically derive the “accurate” calculation.
Wait a minute. Does the NAP not extend to threats of violence as well? Or does it merely cover violent physical aggression? And if this is so, would it be okay for me to go around and intimidate others into giving me their money - after all, I merely “persuaded” them to do so?
This is the point in question. How would, for example, the preferences of global warming victims be integrated into the price structure? Whom should they sue in order to have their damage counted?