Yaron Answers: Capitalism and the Environment

[Attritive]

@nightpotato Yaron Brook*. In a laissez-faire country, if you can prove someone poisoned your lungs, you can take them to court. In our current society, you will usually only win if a majority deems it appropriate; in a laissez-faire society there are objective laws, property rights, and the respect for the individual on your side.

[TeaParty]

>define pollution.

Modern art. Liberal babbling. Progressive education.

[nightpotato]

@fab006 Why should I have to abandon my house (my property), in order to maintain the integrity of my lungs? That is the same as saying that my neighbors have a moral claim on the use of my lungs, and that if I don't like it I should leave. Its the "love it or leave it" argument which can justify any rights violation.

Sure, if some people establish a town and contract with one another to allow pollution, thats fine. But that's just a nice hypothetical, not how LA or New York were founded.

[carbonmd]

I was eating up everything he was talking about until I heard this

[Jazzper]

Great video. It is all about improvement... in a laissez-faire society people would find a way to minimize polution and compete with other cities for the lowest polution. Cities with high polution would not be so popular and the factories who polute a lot would have difficulty in hiring people, so it would be to their self-interest to do something about it.

[javiertrevino]

this is actually reasonable, he admitted that there are certain extreme scenarios where the government could intervene in regards to pollution, to me this sounds like a truly libertarian ideology and not entire anarchy as some more extreme libertarians seem to preach

[dougieslats]

The American body of law covers it already. Tort law, contract law, property law, our vigilance of existing law through constant review of precedent cases, and well-developed consideration of available remedies: all are at our disposition. It’s simple: prove damages and arrive at a remedy. No new pile of rules is necessary.

[stlouisix]

Brilliant 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏 👏

[garchard]

How does he propose poor people on other continents resolve their legal disputes with companies/governments in the West? He seems to think pollution stops at borders of legal jurisdiction.

[akrylic_]

While property rights have helped many endangered species such as the American bison, animals which yield no potential value to humans are still at risk when environmental restrictions aren't imposed. For example, the American and Canadian wolf populations are incredibly low due to over-killing. Wolves are usually a harm to farmers and ranchers, why should they be allowed to live if they are harmful to a land owner?

[TeaParty]

Agreed, coal miners have long known of the risks and the high pay. They made their choice and no one has the right to force them away from it. Should we ban commercial fishing, the most dangerous job?

[Attritive]

@nightpotato He says that in a laissez-faire society the government could only shut down an industry if it was on the whole harmful; he did not say you couldn't seek compensation in a court of law. This is consistent with what I said previously and with Yaron Brook's statements.

[fab]

@nightpotato We're moving in circles. You don't have a right to intrude into a pre-existing situation (an urban lifestyle, here), and demand that everybody else adjust to your wishes. If you acquire property inside a city, or decide to live in one, you are quite aware what it is you're buying, and that there is a certain amount of pollution that goes along with that. If not, you are perfectly welcome to acquire property out in the wilderness where there is no human pollution.

[dougieslats]

The law is expanded in the courts adjudicating the new cases. That the law that we have is not being applied well is not a case for MORE law. More law would be handled just as dishonestly as current law. Pragmatism and postmodern/marxism are in the way of rational law. For the time being, we are stuck. Present law, properly applied, can handle environmental negligence and criminality. If you doubt this, recall that the world's most eminent pragmatist (students all know this) held that "The truth is whatever your contemporaries will let you GET AWAY with. Sick, and a rationalization that we can spot every day. What we need is a philosophical revolutionary return to Aristotle, Rand and reason. Those start before the law and, for that matter, before everything in life.

[fab]

@nightpotato I see how that might seem to be a different situation, but on second thought, why would it be? When you grow up, it is your parents who are making these decisions (where to live, what kind of pollution/life standard to maintain etc.) for you, and quite properly so. Once you're an adult, it is up to you to choose the further course of your life, including where and under which circumstances you are going to live. And now you're in the same exact situation.

[TeaParty]

His mystical significance transcends my evaluation of reality. And I have just swatted a fly! I may drip chocolate on it and devour it. Yummm!

[tommydhammer]

The state encodes provides and enforces laws which override and obscure property rights and thus fail to protect them adequately. Laws governing tort claims provide polluters with immunity from tort claims, or interfere in such a way as to make it difficult to legally sustain them. Best way to protect the environment is to use tort and contract laws governing and protecting property rights. If affected parties can compel polluters to compensate them they will reduce or eliminate the externality.

[hellcat]

This is what happens when an economist starts talking out of his ass about ecology because he his trying to defend a system which he is profiting from. He simply disregards all of the ecological problems we are facing such as plastics in the ocean, climate change, top soil degradation, loss of biodiversity ect, as "non-human environment." All of these are necessary for the earth to maintain homeostasis, which human or not we need for survival. What a dope.

[richardtaylor]

This is another one of the areas where this guy's philosophy really falls short.

I know Libertarians don't like the idea of a commons but it doesn't matter, because the atmosphere is one. There is no way to privatize the atmosphere, short of putting up giant domes everywhere. This means that we must treat it like a commons. And in order to avoid a tragedy of the commons the government must step in and prevent destructive behavior like increased carbon emissions.

Global warming negatively effects everyone and will cause things like mass extinction of species (especially in the oceans due to acidification) and rising sea levels that will destroy the property of people who live by the oceans, as well of a slew of additional and unpredictable problems.

Why should we have to wait for the damage to be done and then *allow* those who where negatively impacted (which eventually would be pretty much everyone) to sue those who caused the problem?

It makes much more sense to proactively prevent it from happening in the first place.

[nightpotato]

@fab006 "why should I have to abandon civilized life in order to maintain the integrity of your lungs?"

Because my lungs are my body and I didn't consent to letting you pollute them. If you think that in order to live a "civilized life" you need to put toxins in my lungs without permission, thats too bad. It is the polluter in this case who thinks he has a claim on those around him. You don't have a right to use a car. I do have a right to prevent you from putting unwanted objects in my body.