[betteringred]

> mistrustful of arguments that the free market will sort things like this out. There's just no good mechanism to stop massive harm to common resources

Most arguments that the free market can handle these problems start out with the recommendation that the resources involved (rivers, lakes, ocean) should be privatized. Economist Walter Block and others have written about ways this could be done. To fault free market arguments for not working when the waterways aren't privatized is to misrepresent the arguments. Most people aren't arguing that the free market is going to solve problems relating to unowned, unownable, or government owned property without first recognizing private property rights in those resources.

Governments often protects polluters by limiting their liability. If that were changed, and assuming these resources (bodies of water) were privatized so non-governmental parties had standing to sue, if you have an argument why a class action lawsuit or something like that can't handle these problems, then that would be an interesting comment. But just saying the free market doesn't solve problems where there are no property rights is rather uninteresting, because free marketers agree with that.

Also it's pretty amusing that a failure of government (who owns the waterways, and most of the sewer systems) to solve this problem sooner somehow gets twisted into a failure of the free market (who doesn't own these resources). Without property rights there's no free market.

I agree that governments, who subsidize animal feed, water, land, and waste, and prosecute activists, do a great deal of harm to the environment by promoting and protecting animal exploitation. I'm fine with banning animal exploitation, even on private property, and I see that as no more anti-free market than banning slavery on private property.

[logophobia]

Yes, because a private entity completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests, will completely prevent those resources from being ruthlessly exploited. Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision, and certainly wouldn't exploit those resources until there's nothing left.

There's certainly merit in trying to make people pay for externalities (offsetting carbon pollution for example), but you can't do that for everything. Privatizing everything might be an appealing free-market pipe dream, but unless we can completely/mostly stop externalities from happening, such an experiment would be a disaster.

[Gibbon1]

I'm reminded of when hedge funds bought out old family owned logging companies via leveraged buyouts. The only way it made business sense was to clear cut everything and then close the mills down when the trees were gone.

[HiLo]

Can you link to something elaborating on this? This seems pretty odd to me.

[gutnor]

I guess it would work in the magical world of economists. In that world, there would be active competition for the ownership of the rivers (i.e. lots of players) and consumer have perfect information and are rational (i.e. they will avoid product that directly or indirectly cause pollution )

[ceras]

This doesn't reflect the content of any econ course I've taken, nor the views of any of my econ professors. There's a ton of study in economics about the types of effective roles government can play when dealing with positive and negative externalities, and "tragedy of the commons" situations.

Economists that believe everything can be sorted out in the free market are pretty fringe.

[Spooky23]

I don't see any evidence of that.

You can't take your wealth with you upon death -- Property owners of valuable resources nearly always maximize exploitation in the short term and could give a shit about the long term.

If they took a long term view, we'd still have old growth forest in the US.

[0_00_0]

I think that was his point as well.

[jychang]

> Yes, because a private entity completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests, will completely prevent those resources from being ruthlessly exploited.

The statement was heavily sarcastic.

[Houshalter]

I don't think this has anything to do with exploiting resources. If someone owned all the rivers, then they could sue the companies producing microbeads for any damages.

Not caring for the long term is still a massive problem for our civilization. I don't know if that has anything to do with privatization. I'm very skeptical that governments or voters care more about the long term than private markets. At least individuals care about leaving money for retirement. And even if you don't care, it's still senseless to deprecate your assets' value more than you gain from exploiting it.

[betteringred]

> completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests

They wouldn't completely own them, they'd have property rights in them. Depending on how the property rights are structured you could have many owners of say a lake or a river.

> Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision

If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s

[donatj]

If you actual had a vested interest to protect something though it would be more likely to actually end up protected.

[themartorana]

Or the polluting company with deep pockets would just buy the land and do whatever they wanted.

An unregulated free market is a terrible idea. It ends in massive monopolies and natural resource destruction at an absolute level.

It's not a bad thing that that's what a free market moves towards, per se, but that's why it needs to be and is regulated. Any worthwhile conversation isn't about whether or not to regulate it, it's a what level.

[pixelcloud]

Or you sell the right to abuse the land or waterways. Then turn around and when all the clean water is gone, purify it and sell it!

[geon]

Carbon rights?

[azinman2]

Doesn't sound very appealing for next quarters profits, the true driver of all decisions.

[SwellJoe]

I spent many years trying to work out how that could be made to work, in a world where the people with the most money and ability to buy those resources being destroyed are also the people with the most interest in seeing them destroyed without impediment. I just can't make the math work out. When the oil and gas industry can cause wars involving the world's largest nations, in pursuit of their profits, how can I believe empowering them to buy every river will save those rivers? In a world where they can literally buy armies (even more directly and with even less impediment than they have today), how can I believe there will be less violence over oil?

I've read the same authors you've read on the subject (believe me, I hear you, and I have made the same arguments you're making more times than I can count). I was for many years a libertarian (big L and little l...card-carrying member of the party, worked for ballot access, etc.). I just don't believe in the premises of libertarianism any more. At least, not the free market uber alles part of those premises.

Also, I can't reconcile the idea of unlimited capital accumulation in the hands of a few that spans generations (e.g. land, water access, etc.) in a world of limited resources with my own beliefs about fairness, justice, and human freedom.

[chillwaves]

How do you feel about the notion of breaking from our feudal tradition and advocating for basic income? What excites me most about the idea is people would be free to check out of the system and use their own creativity to survive and thrive. Soon, when intellectual capital is understood to be the most valuable, this investment will be returned with dividends.

[SwellJoe]

I support a basic income. Honestly, I think it is inevitable, or a lot of people will starve as we move past the need for a lot of unskilled labor. There simply won't be work for everyone...if we adhere to the old notion that everyone has to earn the basic necessities of survival, well, the results will be catastrophic. It's unfortunate that we'll have to wait until everything else has been tried before settling on the one thing that could actually positively change outcomes for huge swaths of people. There's already a lost generation of people who will never escape their school debt.

[legutierr]

> I was for many years a libertarian (big L and little l...card-carrying member of the party, worked for ballot access, etc.). I just don't believe in the premises of libertarianism any more.

What took you so long?

[SwellJoe]

Limited exposure to some parts of the real world. I read a lot, worked a lot, and didn't make time for travel. I had few friends who were significantly different from me in terms of money/education/class/race/etc. Kinda like most people. A few years traveling full-time, getting to know homeless folks and undocumented folks, and seeing how class and race plays out in our "free market" system changed my mind on a few things.

And, I think dismissing libertarianism out of hand, as though it has no interesting/valuable ideas, is somewhat silly. The LP was literally decades ahead of the curve on LGBTQ rights, ending the war on drugs, and opposition to war (of all sorts). All at a time when those ideas were extremely unpopular in mainstream politics. I disagree with the premises behind their economic policy ideas, but it doesn't mean I don't understand the allure of the non-aggression principle (I just think they're mistaken about capitalism being free of aggression).

So, how about you? What took you so long to come to your views? Why weren't you born with the correct ideas on every issue? Or were you? You reckon you're right on everything now? How embarrassing it'll be when you find out in five years you were wrong about something today.

[legutierr]

I think you misread my comment as sarcasm. It was an honest inquiry, if a little facetious. I should have written it differently. Thanks for sharing.

Given that you ask, my views on these things seem to be very similar to yours today, based on what you've written here. I've considered myself a small-l libertarian for most of my life. I think the difference is that I've never found the ideological purity of big-L Libertarianism very attractive.

That's why I asked the question. I really would like to understand what it takes to convince someone who buys into the Libertarian party line to embrace ideas like basic income, and to realize that privatizing everything simply will not result in the outcomes they think it will. I wonder if it's possible to convince them without their having had the kinds of life experiences you have had.

I think that libertarian ideas and libertarian activists could be a effective force for reform in this country--if only the most motivated (people like you who are motivated enough to work on things like ballot access) were willing to make the kinds of ideological compromises and embrace the kinds of ideas (like basic income) that could make libertarianism more broadly appealing.

[SwellJoe]

My inquiry was also sincere, even if the tone seems harsh online. I was joking, on the assumption that most folks here are at least willing to examine their views on occasion.

The answer to what it takes to change minds on any subject?

Not taking a tone of "you're clearly an idiot". I do it all the time (particularly on issues I'm passionate about, like the horror that is animal agriculture), but it doesn't convince anyone, it just puts them on the defensive. And humans have somewhat broken brains such that defending a position makes one believe that position more strongly and more fiercely (even if it is demonstrably ridiculous; e.g. anti-vaccine folks).

Convince them to get outside of their comfort zone. Travel, activism, and volunteering, is what did it for me. Activism and volunteering probably need to be with and on behalf of folks unlike oneself to have any impact.

Ask questions rather than arguing. If someone discovers the uncomfortable points of their position on their own, they'll be willing to change their mind. One of the founders of CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality) once asked me a few questions that may have even planted the seeds of my change of heart when we happened to meet in NYC...specifically, she asked about the source of property rights, since I don't believe in gods, so I can't simply handwave it away as a " god given right". That stuck with me, because it's clear to anyone who is sincere that property is merely a fiction we all agree on, and it is a fiction that can be taken to unhealthy extremes. Asking the right questions is harder than ranting, but it actually works to change opinions, and serves to keep the conversation on a level of friendly chat rather than two ideologues bloviating.

And that's, maybe, all I know about that.

[afsina]

I think you just went to dark side. The side of snub deuche baggery people. Sorry could not help :)

[legulere]

Those arguments are based on the premise that the free market can solve all problems. Thus when something fails it's because there's not enough free market.

The other explanation is that the premise is wrong.

If the free market doesn't work together with anything that isn't organized as a free market then it's a flaw of the free market system. There always will be things that aren't a free market.

[fennecfoxen]

More specifically, a free market system can solve most problems it is applied to, given:

1. Property rights exist and are enforced. 2. There are minimal barriers to entry. 3. Transaction costs are low.

(#2 is of less interest here.)

The classic market failures all involve a violation of one of these. The tragedy of the commons is a property-rights failure, monopolies are a barrier-to-entry failure, and lots of other miscellaneous exploitation and big-corporate-player centralization issues are related to transaction-cost issues.

In this case, it's quite clear that property rights do not exist and are not enforced on things like the Atmosphere or the Ocean (good luck doing that internationally), and even if they did, imagine the transaction costs of tracking exactly how much in microbead pollution a given person has flushed down the drain? Anyone crying 'free market solution!' is being quite silly.

[pmoriarty]

Those three conditions are not enough.

What would prevent someone from, say, buying up all the water and then not selling any of it, or selling just a little to a handful of rich people?

What would happen to the rest of the people who couldn't afford any water?

[betteringred]

> What would prevent someone from, say, buying up all the water and then not selling any of it, or selling just a little to a handful of rich people?

First, no one has enough money to buy up all of the water. Second, even if they did, it wouldn't make sense not to sell it. Most people like making a profit and having more money. It wouldn't make sense to only sell it to wealthy people, because they don't use enough more water to exhaust supply in most places people inhabit and they'd be forgoing a lot of profit from selling water to normal people. Also governments also often sell water to politically connected business and agriculture groups at a lower rate than they sell to normal people.

[pmoriarty]

It sounds like you see profit as the sole motivation of people's actions.

If someone owned all the water, they would have not just profit-making potential, but they would have a lot of power. In particular, they would have the power of life and death over virtually everyone on the planet.

In a free market utopia, these people could kill as many people as they liked by simply refusing to sell them water, and believers in a completely free market wouldn't lift a finger to stop them -- because, after all they're just freely doing what they like with their own property.

The world is full of people with malicious motives. The prisons are full of them, and there are plenty more outside of prison. Wars, ethnic cleansings, and genocides have killed people by the millions. Some of this was done for profit motives, but some done for other motives.

Don't for a moment think that people like that would hesitate to use the power in their hands to harm those they hated or wanted dead for whatever reasons of their own.

Then there the sociopaths, who would let others die simply because they think giving them water would be worth their bother, or maybe because they were just more interested in other things.

Also, you don't have to buy up all the water in the world to be able to wreak havoc. All the water in a particular water-scarce region might be enough.

Of course, water is just an example and an analogy. The fact is that free market believers have very little to nothing except faith in the free market that would prevent the concentration of wealth and power (in whatever form) and the subsequent abuse of such at the whims of those who wield it.

[abstractbeliefs]

A world in which 100% of water was owned by a single (or several in a cartel) company would violate rule 2 - no easy barrier to entry.

If the barrier to entry were lower, another company would form to sell cheap water at high volume.

[pmoriarty]

It sounds like your interpretation of rule 2 would require everything being cheap enough for anyone to buy without the price being a burden on them.

[HelloMcFly]

I appreciate your post and line of thinking, but am not at all convinced that our natural resources and spaces would end up better off being owned by a private company for financial gain. I don't trust private owners to take the required long-term view on those resources and spaces. And in cases where some benefit is derived (i.e., quicker action against microbeads), I think there are likely accompanying outcomes that are even worse (e.g., decreased access to fresh water or natural parks).

[username223]

> am not at all convinced that our natural resources and spaces would end up better off being owned by a private company for financial gain

Your faith is weak. If your opinions were subject to a Free Market, we could solve this problem.

[lotyrin]

Unfortunately it seems the current market for public opinion that is the modern media is too inefficient, we need a high frequency bid/ask system that can implant ideas directly.

[azinman2]

Free market can't prevent short cited assholes who don't understand what they're doing.

Smart people with the public good and long view can, however, do better in public policy that sets limits on wreckless actions.

If you want to see what happens when people don't give a shit look at China where Beijing recently had to close schools for several days because of the pollution.

[vinceguidry]

He was joking.

[jacobr1]

> being owned by a private company for financial gain

This doesn't necessarily follow. Private ownership can be structured as something other than for profit. Non-Profit Land Trusts are big thing in many areas of the US for example. But even industry motivated groups might be a choice. Think a home-owners association of beach property owners (including resort hotel conglomerates) or fishing rights cooperatives. If either had stronger property rights and standing to remedy damages they would be motivated by longer term aims to ensure water quality. You might be right that this could have adverse consequences but I wanted the raise the possibility of options other than BigWaterCo.

[betteringred]

> I don't trust private owners to take the required long-term view

If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s

[cpursley]

> Governments often protects polluters by limiting their liability.

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

As an environmentalist and libertarian, I can't stress enough how government is more often than not a partner in crime when it comes to polluters. One of the big reasons places like China are so polluted is the advance of industry is considered to part of the common good. Therefore, the polluters are given immunity and protected by the political system - giving no recourse for regular citizens.

Here's some more reading on that: https://mises.org/library/libertarian-manifesto-pollution

[bduerst]

China's pollution because of coal powerplants left over from industrialization, not special favors to industrial leaders or under-the-table deals. The Chinese government is also the largest green energy producer in the world.

[ZenoArrow]

> "giving no recourse for regular citizens"

What forms of recourse would citizens have against polluters without government intervention?

I hope you're not going to suggest 'they can shop elsewhere' as it's been proven time and time again that most citizens don't choose what they buy based on the greater good.

[cpursley]

Sue them in court for damages. Folks sue corporations all the time for various reasons and often win. We should be able to sue polluters as well, but governments often protect them for various reasons (like tax base, campaign contributions, etc). Oil spills are a great example of corporations having immunity thanks to government.

[ZenoArrow]

The court system is an arm of the government. Are you saying the government should pass regulations and/or set out citizen rights that limit the potential behaviour of corporations?

[cpursley]

No, I'm saying corporations lobby and have laws passed that protect them from (as well as from competition), making them immune. Going full-libertarian is not even necessary, just roll back those laws.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/29/supreme-cou...

[koube]

I think if you're going to claim that we're not taking one part of a philosophy into account, that part needs to be remotely possible, or you need to show how we can privatize the ocean.

[bpodgursky]

Selling ownership of fishing rights over tracts of the ocean, while it has flaws, would be infinitely better than the free-for-all we have now, where nobody has an incentive to preserve any fish stocks.

[bduerst]

The free-for-all exploitation of ocean resources that we have now is from the free market.

Fishing quotas that are enforced by regulatory bodies are what still prevent it from running rampant within the waters of said organizations.

[bpodgursky]

What are you talking about? This is the absolute definition of the Tragedy of the Commons -- when you have a public resource it is in everyone's interest to exploit.

The free market does not just mean "anarchy! take everything!" There's no market here!

[bduerst]

You comment is an appeal to extremes fallacy.

If you're resorting to arguing the semantic meaning of Free Market, then it is definitively "an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses."

With natural resources, the free market is certainly an unrestricted first-come first-serve market. Fishing quotas are restricted competition and price influential, which makes it not a free market, despite your attempts to redefine it as such to fit a narrative.

[jonknee]

Fishing quotas, seasons and permits have been well established in the developed world for a long time.

[bpodgursky]

Quotas, seasons, and permits aren't really as good. As a fisherman you have no incentive to catch below your quota, since you aren't rewarded for leaving anything on the table. And the quotas are usually too high for political reasons, to avoid losing votes. Either way, they are centrally planned.

A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.

[TeMPOraL]

> And the quotas are usually too high for political reasons, to avoid losing votes.

This is a problem with some of those quotas - they're not being set up right. That's the failure of democracy though, not of central planning per se.

> A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.

That may work, in a type of business with big inertia (i.e. where you can't go out of business over a single season), if we could parcel water like that. Sadly, fish colonies don't respect arbitrary lines we draw on maps. I don't know if such a market solution is ecologically possible; fish need space, and they often need to travel.

[koube]

Adding onto that, I can't imagine the logistical nightmare of privatizing the entire ocean including international waters, besides the root of the issue in which it solves nearly no problems.

What if I buy a 1 meter by 1 meter parcel of the ocean and charge bottom of the barrel prices to dump industrial waste in it? What if that square of ocean was 100 meters off shore from a beach in Los Angeles? If you don't want that then we're right back to government regulations.

[WalterBright]

Iceland does this fairly effectively (use market based solutions).

[justsee]

It's possible to determine negative externalities before a product goes to market, and this 'pre-filter' regulatory framework and barrier to entry is decidedly not 'free market'.

Any solution that does not implement the above is a 'post-filter' approach which can result in permanent, irreversible damage to a system.

Even if we accept your post-filter scenario (which is not rational from a system design perspective), your 'privatize common resources' suggestion relies on the erroneous idea that public property rights are not equivalent to private property rights from a legal perspective.

Either type of right can be reduced to a legal right which gives the rightsholder standing to take legal action. Whether a rightsholder enforces those rights is simply a matter of whether the rightsholder is competently managing those rights, and both public and private entities can be good and bad at this.

In a situation where there are shared resources used by all actors in a system the simplest and logical solution is to have one entity which represents all actors managing those resources.

Your suggestion of transferring ownership / management of shared resources to a narrow subset of beneficiaries seems unavoidably complex, convoluted and illogical to me, having surveyed various arguments online for 'privatize all the things'.

What is the best resource you'd cite online? I've reviewed Walter Block and to be honest he seems like a total lunatic, but that won't necessarily stop me evaluating his arguments.

I just don't want to read a 494 page book on privatizing roads to get the gist of his arguments.

[betteringred]

I wasn't actually arguing for water privatization, but rather I was arguing against blaming the free market for the current situation, one where the government owns most bodies of water and allowed this pollution.

I'm no expert on water privatization. I know a few economists have written about it, but it's unrealistic to expect them to come up with a great solution on their own. A good solution would have to evolve over time with decisions by judges etc.

AFAIK most proposals don't have a single entity owning a river, but rather people own rights to a certain amount of water from the river at a certain quality.

I wasn't referring to Walter Block's book on roads, but this one: "Water Capitalism: The Case for Privatizing Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, and Aquifers." I haven't read it.

[nitrogen]

AFAIK most proposals don't have a single entity owning a river, but rather people own rights to a certain amount of water from the river at a certain quality.

Isn't that pretty similar to how things work now, minus the quality part?

[chillwaves]

The problem with the government is that it is beholden to market actors.

Corruption.

[room271]

There is a common idea in economics that explains the problem with what you say: externalities. This is when my behaviour affects you in a way not captured by the market.

For example, if a forest is privatised and cut down the owner might be acting in their best (market) interest, but people living nearby will be negatively affected.

We could try and put a price on these negative effects, but it's very difficult so the better solution is normally to keep things private.

Essentially, you're arguing the solution to one set of externalities is to privatise, but that very privatisation will create a whole host of even worse externalities.

We see with climate change and carbon emissions that ensuring companies pay for their externalities (pollution) is very difficult post the event because there are strong vested interests against this, and the people affected negatively are many but spread out, there is little incentive on an individual level for them to go to the vast effort to fight against the polluter.

[ende]

You are conflating privatization with free market economics. The two are not mutually inclusive, even though there is surely a large commonality among the respective advocates of each. Free market economics has more to do with the state intervention disrupting competetive markets. You're still correct that it has nothing to do with the government failure described in the link.

[kijin]

If the government "owns" a bunch of lakes and rivers, and someone else is polluting those lakes and rivers, then the government should sue them for damages (cost of cleanup) in addition to ordering them to stop doing it. After all, that's exactly what I would demand if I owned a swimming pool and someone kept dumping trash into it. Simply telling them to stop is not enough. They should pay for the cleanup as well.

So yes, I agree that this is a failure of government. The government should be a lot more zealous in protecting the value of all the natural resources that it claims for itself, perhaps even more so than private landowners.

[serge2k]

> Most arguments that the free market can handle these problems start out with the recommendation that the resources involved (rivers, lakes, ocean) should be privatized. Economist Walter Block and others have written about ways this could be done. To fault free market arguments for not working when the waterways aren't privatized is to misrepresent the arguments. Most people aren't arguing that the free market is going to solve problems relating to unowned, unownable, or government owned property without first recognizing private property rights in those resources.

So the arguments are lunacy. Gotcha.

[eru]

> Most arguments that the free market can handle these problems start out with the recommendation that the resources involved (rivers, lakes, ocean) should be privatized.

Either that, or you need to use the tax system to internalize the externalities. (Think carbon tax or London congestion charge.)