[riskable]

How does libertarianism deal with shell companies and dumping?

It only takes five minutes to setup a shell company under a false name, sell your toxic waste to it for $1 (or some amount that "looks real") and just dump it all under the new company's name.

You can't really sue to recover damages in such a situation and you can't assume that a paper trail will be accurate or even kept.

You could hold the people at the tail end of the pipeline responsible but they may have been deceived as well. Also, what do you do when it's all robots?

[analog31]

How does libertarianism deal with shell companies and dumping?

The easiest way would be: No corporations. If the owners of a business are liable for the debts of that business, then they will have much more of an incentive to behave themselves.

Granted, I'm not a libertarian, but I can't see how the concept of corporations (a government entitled class of investors with special privileges) could emerge under libertarianism.

[angry-hacker]

I'm not a libertarian either but that would kill businesses. Who wants to trade when all possible variables can are ALL of their life. Or maybe there is an insurance :))

[analog31]

I think that without liberal institutions such as corporate regulation and entitlements, and the money system, great ventures such as energy and food distribution, transportation, semiconductors, etc., would be impossible.

Even despite the recent election results, I still have faith that society would not voluntarily accept an ideology that necessitates a cataclysmic drop in prosperity. Thus, a "libertarian" society would probably accept at least a bare minimum number of liberal institutions.

[maxxxxx]

That actually makes sense. Or maybe there should be prison sentences for corporations. If you mess up you are closed for a few years.

[analog31]

My thought is that a corporation would not be an entity. It would simply be a partnership of individuals, so the penalties would fall on the individuals. They could have some sort of a contractual arrangement with one another for things like mutual support if someone sues them.

I also suspect that without corporations, businesses would be a lot smaller, limited to whatever the owners can personally monitor and control.

[maxxxxx]

Makes sense. I just thought if a corporation would be taken out of business for a while instead of just paying a fine as they do now, a corporation couldn't grow very big either because the risk of somebody doing something wrong would be too high. Your approach is probably simpler.

[nommm-nommm]

Good luck getting anyone to ever start a business then.

[nickik]

Well, first of all, with the exception of anarchist libertarians still support policy. This seems to be a case of illegal dumping. If the person that is harmed needs to go to the policy and they need to investigate. Once you find out who it was, they need to pay.

Also in cases such a pipelines and rivers, everybody can sue the person higher up and you will eventually arrive at the source.

For rivers this system has actually worked quite well. River property rights system were quite common in Britain and in the US. There is also direct comparison of rivers without such system and rivers with such system, and the property rights based once were much cleaner.

This of course changes when we are talking about dumping in the ocean. That another problem.

[nommm-nommm]

You seem to believe everyone has infinite time to spend in court.

[nickik]

The hole point of a legal system is to prevent people from doing something because they fear being sued. So by definition you only sue in special cases.

Also if somebody dumps huge amounts of waste on your property, or waste flows threw your river, then you have a intensive to go to court.

Also, in a well designed legal system you can do much better. Take the river example. If I don't like the waste flowing threw the river but I don't care all that much since I just use it as a cooling source, I might never bother to actually sue.

However if somebody wants to make a water sports related thing, he has a huge incentive to sue. So he sues the guy who uses the water for cooling. The cooling guy will say, he 'its not my waste, how about I give you my legal claim'. In some cases you might sell the legal claim for money.

The cooling guy improves his situation and makes a small amount of money for little effort and then does not have to be involved anymore. The water sports guy now has double the incentive to win the lawsuit, because if he wins he has two claims.

This is actually historically quite common. Most of the time you don't do much yourself, you just hand of your claims for a specialist.

[nommm-nommm]

I'd rather have the government use its power to proactively prevent rivers from being turned into toxic waste dumps rather than let it be a free for all and end up with a toxic waste dump and maybe a few dollars if I'm lucky. You're assuming that you'd actually be able to collect on that judgement. You can't if the plaintiff doesn't have the funds. For a real life example, a civilian shipyard worker named Casey Fury intentionally set a fire onboard the USS Miami that destroyed it. Part of his sentence was paying back $400 million to the Navy. Do you think the Navy is going to ever get anywhere near $400 million from some dude who will spend 17 of his life in jail and is stupid enough to set a fire onboard a submarine? The only chance of collecting even part of that is if he wins the lottery.

You're basically giving a company who is tanking permission to do whatever the fuck they want. Companies bankrupt and go out of business all the time.

There's going to be enforcement no matter what. I'd rather be proactive than reactive.

[riskable]

...and the shell company that has no assets doesn't even show up in court. That's the problem I wanted to know how to fix.

Courts can't solve everything and they certainly can't prevent a great many things. Especially when there's such a simple way to avoid responsibility (shell corporations).

[nommm-nommm]

Pollution to a river usually can't just be undone like that. "Water sports guy" still cant do water sports even if he wins a lawsuit. Look at the Hudson River for a real life example. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollution_of_the_Hudson_River

[logfromblammo]

You're metaphorically asking how to make things fall at 9.8 m/s^2 on Mars.

Shell companies are an artifact of how government courts assign legal liability. As courts would work differently in a libertarian society, unethical and criminal actors would almost certainly have different circumvention methods, tailored to the established rules of each different system. It's like asking how libertarians would deal with patent trolls. Patent trolls are an artifact of the existing system. They would not exist in the same form under a different system. The people who currently operate patent troll businesses would still exist, and they would undoubtedly still be opportunistic locusts, but threatening some other crop.

So how do you stop clever assholes from committing a series of offenses without meaningful consequence, in any system of civilization?

Most libertarian schools of thought are very heavily dependent on public reputation systems. A shell company with no established reputation, and no reputable person to vouch for it, would likely be entirely unable to rent or buy the boat or truck necessary to perform significant quantities of dark-night dumping in a manner that is not easily traceable.

And no matter how many fictitious name intermediaries you have, eventually a warm body has to do the dirty deed. If you can catch that guy in the act, you can hold him personally responsible unless he can provably pass the buck to someone else to share his blame.

In any case, I'm not certain how useful it is to say that libertarian theory does not solve a problem that is already not effectively addressed by existing social systems.

[nommm-nommm]

What if the boat and truck company are also fly by night operations?

[logfromblammo]

What if? They certainly could be. You can change variables in the hypothetical as much as you please. But you'll have to explore that new thought experiment yourself.

What if all of civilization is one giant scam?