| 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. |
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.