[hookahboy]

That is NOT what Coase was about - his proposition was that if you have well defined property rights, the parties would transact and price out any negative externalities efficiently, without govt. intervention. In this case, the bodies of water are owned by the public, polluters need to pay the public an amount equivalent to the harm caused by the pollution.

[tptacek]

We are saying the same thing. I'm not saying polluters have a countervailing right to utilize all public resources! That would be a crazy thing to say; obviously, we have laws against various forms of pollution.

[AtlasBarfed]

"His proposition was that if you have well defined property rights, the parties would transact and price out any negative externalities efficiently without government intervention"

Typical crock of shit thinking from economics. Assumes perfect future prediction combined with absolute awareness of all activity occurring at the molecular level, perfect attribution and ability to rewind time to determine causality/responsibility, that people are generally respectful of the law.

And above all, assumes that economics will price the value of human life (to say nothing of non-human life with emphasis on the word "nothing") as anything but "zero".

The obvious extension to this is that FLoridians have no right to a sustained future existence of humanity. All that remains is to determine how fast capitalism can consume humans and the environment into fictitious unicorn horn currency until nihilism triumphs and we pass into the void.

Like the tree falling in the forest, what is the monetary value of all human bank accounts when all humans that would observe the value of the bank account value are dead?

[hookahboy]

Here's a more fleshed out version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coase_theorem. He did acknowledge things like transactions costs etc., which like in can-opener fashion, is typically assumed away by mainstream economists.