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by dpark 1509 days ago
> leaded petrol cannot really be handled by a market as it is in its nature a bodily harm and there is the criminal code for that.

This is the same fallacious thinking “libertarians” fall into when they think civil court will solve for most regulations/codes. The burden of proving harm is too high. Probably hundreds of millions were spent proving that leaded gasoline was unsafe. No criminal prosecution could have accomplished that. They simply don’t have the resources.

And who would they have prosecuted anyway? The gasoline companies weren’t actually the ones causing the harm. It was the billions of people driving around burning the stuff.

There’s a reason we end up with laws regulating specific things like this. It’s untenable for the courts to handle otherwise.

1 comments

In case you are actually asking a question - most environmental guidelines in today's EU cities are the result of court cases. Both my hometown and the city I currently live in have been found guilty of neglecting air quality multiple times and ordered to take action. And yeah - in a libertarian (actually an-cap) world it wouldn't be a city, but a municipal services corporation with participatory ownership (a la UK Premier League).

But then again I am not really an anarcho-capitalist, but an extremely mild minarchist (imagine Raegan without his naiveness or Thatcher without her inferiority complex). So even this doesn't represent my opinion.