I’m not an ancap and by no means a legal expert but shouldn’t they be able to sue whomever they can prove has in fact damaged them? If a farmer in Indonesia can prove that my factory in USA has in fact contributed to the average temperature rise of 1deg Celsius on his farm leading to a drop in his crop yield by 10%, then by all means he can take me to court and sue me for my 0.003% part in the contribution, and then go on and sue all the remaining polluters proportionately to their contribution for his trouble. You’d only need a single farmer succeeding in such an endeavor to make EVERY polluter take note and consider measures to minimize such provable damage to others.
The above is just my opinion and I admit that I haven’t read up much on issues like these.
What are you actually saying? Look, I’m not trying to pull anything out of a hat, but at the same time if we want to make an informed decision on whether or not we should ban hummers we need to know if the losses associated with banning Hummers can hypothetically be compensated by the gains from cleaner air. Is it completely scientific? Not for a second, I don’t think I’ve claimed otherwise, there’s always going to be some amount of arbitrariness and normative issues involved.
By the way, I’m not necessarily advocating banning Hummers for cleaner air. I think there’s a great danger in this sort of piecemeal social engineering, and abstract rules such as liberty have a great deal of importance. But I don’t see any reason in committing ourselves to some sort of nihilism regarding the benefits of cleaner air.
Well, I’d say that you’ve greatly misjudged me, as I alluded to in the above post, I think there’s a great deal of danger involved in presuming sufficient knowledge on behalf of the central planning authority. But I just don’t think your point about the subjectivism of desires is valid. Plenty of Austrians who pay lip service to praxeology, subjectivism and the like talk about the money supply expanding or decreasing, well guess what? You can’t quantify the money supply either by your standards, because ultimately money is subjective. The reality, of course, is that we need to make certain abstractions and simplifications to do empirical work.
Because we all know, we live in a world without transaction costs.
The same productivity gains, progress, and global interconnectedness that have entangled my factory with the Indonesian farm will be the ones making it easier (cheaper) for the farmer to prove my damage to him and to receive compensation. Cost per transaction is inversely proportional to the volume of transactions, and the latter is proportional to market freedom. By your argument, a suffocated, controlled, transaction-poor market would (should?) forever be kept that way because high transaction costs would dis-incentivise trading. The exponential growth in global trade and exchange volume in parallel with the decrease in transaction costs is proof enough that such an argument is false.
I get the idea, but isn’t this like saying that some time in the past it was extremely expensive and technologically difficult to produce an internal combustion engine?
By announcing or discussing plans to terrorize. Most terrorist attacks are planned long in advance, and terrorists usually leave some kind of paper trail in doing so. If a connection can be established between an individual and such a plan, it would be irresponsible not to at least take him in for questioning.
Did you or did you not say that we need to quantify subjective consumer value?
What are you talking about? We can know the number of US fiat currency in exist or at least give a rough estimate. Money is a general medium of exchange. It’s not something that one individual just suddenly picks up and say’s ‘Oh my gosh! I found a G.I. Joe soldier! I’m rich!’ I mean isn’t that the whole point of the regression theorem? That money can only originate through a generally traded community and not through legislative mandate [ which is a way of making it purely subjective ]? If I recall correctly, it was some months ago but you said we never discuss this theory on the forums or other in depth theories. Now you’ve seem to have dropped that as well.
What are you talking about? This has nothing to do with the regression theorem. Maybe you should see “A Subjectivism Perspective on the Definition and Identification of Money” by L.H. White.
Maybe you should better explain yourself. You just got off the statement that unless we can put Austrianism into policy and make it about the ‘real world’ then it is nihilistic. Now you are claiming that the concept of money is subjective. Money has a clear definition, it is a general medium of exchange. How money comes about is through Mises regression theorem. Where is the subjectivity? Do you mean in the choices of whether to use gold or silver? Yes people can choose between gold, silver, cigarettes, whatever but that doesn’t make the concept of money ‘subjective.’ If it is not a general medium of exchange then it is not money.
Of course it isn’t. But the implication of the OP is that the Hummer has no redeeming social value because its only use is giving the appearance of having more wealth than one actually has (which is indicative of high time-preference).