The way I see it (my background is Austrian economics), the poor and the homeless are people who cannot afford to live in a city. City-living isn't a right, it's for those who can afford it. No one is owed anything for not having enough money to live in a city.
That means in general I am against helping the poor and the homeless stay in the city, since the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment.
You say you have been homeless. I'd like to ask you what you think of my idea: instead of giving the homeless shelter in the city, and having them drain resources from people who produce wealth, meanwhile not producing anything, why not give them a cheap house in a small farmland with some chicken or turkey, rabbits, a vegetable garden, etc?
That way we solve many problems. 1. the poor are now productive, they produce their own food instead and don't need to drain other people's resources to have food and shelter; 2. they are far from the city, which won't encourage laziness by sending people a message that they can't try and game the system by getting help while still living in the city as a non-producer; 3. it will teach these poor people good work ethics and how work is necessary for everyone to survive, and that they can't just rely on the fact that other people work.
I'd say that besides the farm life, they should have good public libraries nearby in case they want to learn something in order to be able to later join the city life again, this time as a productive member.
Am I being inhumane for trying to make producers out of every human being, and for thinking even the disabled can help pick fruit from bushes or wash them or otherwise contribute in a communal farm setting? Would you be for a program to send the poor and the homeless to farms and basically instate a rule where you can't live in a place you can't afford?
> You say you have been homeless. I'd like to ask you what you think of my idea: instead of giving the homeless shelter in the city, and having them drain resources from people who produce wealth, meanwhile not producing anything, why not give them a cheap house in a small farmland with some chicken or turkey, rabbits, a vegetable garden, etc?
I have been homeless, it's not something I just say.
I disagree with your entire post. It's based on this false assumption, "the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment".
Definition of a city: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City "A city is a large and permanent human settlement.[1][2] Although there is no agreement on how a city is distinguished from a town in general English language meanings, many cities have a particular administrative, legal, or historical status based on local law."
Nothing in there mentioned wealth, or welfare. Remove that personal bias/motive from your proposal and your proposal very quickly falls apart.
That is before one would progress to the more offensive part of your argument: That those with money and wealth have more right to live in a city than those without. That those who work in lower paid industries have less of a right than those in higher paid industries.
It seems horribly convenient as a concept, that you could put the poor and homeless on buses and drive them out of your sight.
I would like to see the idea of a city as 'wealth creating' proven. It does seem much more complex an establishment.
That said, if people don't own land in the city and can't afford to rent some then they should not have a 'right' to use other's land there. Land ownership is a pretty basic part of society and I'd be hesitant to give everyone 'rights' to land in a city.
Those are the easy arguments to make. Let me also make a hard and unpopular one: Spreading our resources to people who won't provide ROI is a waste. In defending this, let me first claim broad experience here; I've let homeless people I barely know stay in my house and given them my keys for weeks. I have given out loans without paperwork. I've hung out with a lot of segments of society from prison inmates to college students from small towns. Just anecdotally, I think the ones who can provide real value are already finding their way through the system. For example, owning a computer and occasionally an internet connection is pretty much the only capital investment for getting a median-income job programming. I've lost count of how many poor people won't even try. Is that their fault? The fault of their upbringing? The fault of their genetics? It doesn't matter. If we throw our value away on them no one will get anywhere. Even putting aside questions of morality and property rights, if this was a communist dictatorship, the optimal choice is to play favorites with those that produce good value. And naturally we do invest in the ones that can generate value. One day that might not be true, but it still is today. Just last week I read about Ortega using Zara to turn himself from rags to richest person in the world. That's incredible upward mobility. There is more opportunity today than ever before. We just have to accept that opportunity != reality for everyone, ourselves included. I have limits. I know I won't reach the that level because I'm not good enough. But I'm good enough to admit I don't want to bring down those that can.
Regarding your first premise, specifically the poor. If I live in a city, and work, but my work only pays enough for me to be poor, you are saying I should be shipped out to the country and given a farm?
Under Austrian economics, how would your plan pan out? If the city removed all the poor people, who would do the work they were doing? Does Austrian economics believe that suddenly the wealthy, or rather the people who can afford to live in the city will suddenly pay increased wages to people wash dished, clean streets, do people's laundry etc.?
I could see it might work if as you say, its illegal to stay in the city unless you make a certain amount, therefore making it illegal to pay less than a living wage. Is 'minimum wage' covered under Austrian economics? Would it be set higher for more expensive cities? Or would the wealthy just keep the status quo by busing in people from the mandatory farms and still paying them shitty wages?
Also, do you think that people would be able to learn enough from public libraries to become a 'producer' as you say? Not everyone is an autodidact.
Lastly, what would you do about someone like me? I was homeless and jobless in Hawaii for 6 months because of bureaucratic reasons (I am a US citizen who lived abroad for all my life, and when I moved to the US I had no Social Security Number, therefore couldn't work legally until one had been assigned to me) I have been homeless a few times, but I have never once had to claim welfare of any type.
Would your system have me picked up by the cops for breaking the law and shipped to 40 acres with a mule to til the earth until I have learned the error of my ways, and good work ethics?
Or would a system that tried to treat the root causes of poverty instead of symptoms be more effective?
Instead of small farms and deportation of the poor how about livable minimum wages? Instead of good libraries, how about free university education? Instead of making producers of every human being, what about addressing the people who benefit off the production of tens of thousands of people, yet give little back to the system that allows them to do this?
I ask this straight forwardly, as I do not know Austrian economics. But while I wait your reply, I shall look it up online and see what it is all about.
Surely you don't believe that subsistence farming is the maximally productive occupation for every homeless person!
I agree that living in a city is not a “human right”. While, problems 1, 2, and 3 are apparently the most important poverty related problems from your point of view (perhaps because you don't want to pay for them), it's not clear that they are the most important problems causing poverty or homelessness in cities. For example, I have had many years of education, but I have sometimes been unemployed. Without the ability to move or retrain I would have been homeless, but not because I was completely uneducated, or unwilling to work, or unable to learn new skills. I'm sure you recognize that the labor market is dynamic and not perfectly liquid.
Either you unnecessarily assume that the homeless must all be un-, or under-employed because they have no education at all, or prefer to "game the system" rather than work, which is not evidenced, or you don't care that most of them could be more productive in some occupation other then subsistence farming, which is not efficient.
Only if all poverty were cause by ignorance, stupidity, or sloth, would subsistence agriculture be the most productive conceivable use for the labor of all homeless people. This could be true of a few homeless or poor people, but certainly not all. Supposing that we care only for efficiency, and not a bit for human dignity or other peoples' happiness, wouldn't you and I still be better off if we chose to retrain or relocate people so that their skills offered some competitive advantage, rather than remove them entirely from the economy?
The idea that the poor are just too stupid to know how to work is insulting. And 'transporting' folks is what they did to criminals in Britain in the bad old days (usually to Australia).
The point of a city isn't anything like what is suggested. Its a place where a lot of people gathered to live. Some got squeezed out as prices and the job situation changed rapidly. Blaming them is pointless.
> The idea that the poor are just too stupid to know how to work is insulting.
I read it twice, and I didn't see anywhere in which planfaster suggested that the poor were stupid. Either I'm missing it, or you're reading in to something that isn't there.
> Some got squeezed out as prices and the job situation changed rapidly. Blaming them is pointless.
I agree that the point of cities is inaccurate, but the problem isn't that they've been squeezed out, it's that they don't have homes, but are otherwise still there. Perhaps I'm just being pedantic here, but squeezed out implies that they aren't there any more, and in the case of city homeless, they generally are.
That said, you've completely ignored the point of the post. Utah has had success in giving away vacant homes to their homeless, with the qualifier that if you're getting a free home, you don't also necessarily get to pick its location. Comparing it to penal colonies is a straw man, but regardless, the question is whether or not a homeless person in NYC would accept a free home, perhaps slightly upstate. If not, why not? There are currently more vacant homes across America than there are homeless persons, and it's not infeasible to suggest that if adverse possession were slightly restructured, we could completely solve the problem of involuntary homelessness within a decade, though of course any such solution will introduce new problems as well.
Vacant homes across America are there, because there are no jobs there. Many of the homeless in the city may have actually come from those empty houses, abandoned with their upside-down mortgages and no jobs, hoping to find work.
> The idea that the poor are just too stupid to know how to work is insulting.
If you think that is insulting, try getting your ideas attacked through a straw-man argument - that's even worse. What most poor people do not understand, however, is that in order for them to live off welfare, somebody else is personally sacrificing their own efforts, labor, life, money that could be saved for their kids, just to pay for some guy who not only has no skills to help society in building wealth, but has a strong enough sense of entitlement to demand that someone help them survive while they get to pick where to live. I want to help all the poor, but being mathematically literate I know this can only work if we put these poor people in a situation where instead of takers, they be producers.
> The point of a city isn't anything like what is suggested. Its a place where a lot of people gathered to live.
You are over-simplifying it to the point of being ahistorical. No, actually cities came about because farmers increasingly wanted to take their chances at being entrepreneurs or employees in an industrial setting. So if you fail at your chance of making it in the city, then you should go back to a farm. Sounds logical to me. That way everyone can keep trying to make it in the city without being a burden on anyone else.
> And 'transporting' folks is what they did to criminals in Britain in the bad old days (usually to Australia).
This reads like an emotional sophism to make me feel bad about giving the poor food and shelter that they can actually pay for themselves. Again, think back to our recent past pre Industrial age (1850 and before). Most people were farmers. That's the default. Living in the city, where you can't produce your own food and have to rely on other people's services (which costs money) is not the default. If everyone in the country can never be poorer than owning a small self-sufficient farm where one can live by oneself without needing money, then can you better point at the part of this plan that makes you be against it? I honestly see no problems here, not even an inkling of disrespect towards the poor.
You make it sound like living off the land with a small farm is a particularly easy thing to do, and I don't think that's true, especially for someone with no experience with that lifestyle.
I can't imagine that a person who is unable to keep a home or job in the city due to mental or physical health issues would be able to sustain themselves on a farm.
Though I suppose rurality could help with drug and alcohol addictions by limiting access, you can't just pick people up and move them like that.
If you receive a plot of farmland that you can live off of without any other citizen's help, and you don't owe anyone anything for having received that plot of farmland, then are you a serf?
Plus, after living in that farmland for a while, whenever you think you have the skills to be employed in the city, you are free to try again. But it would be illegal to be homeless in the city, so that if it doesn't work out, you'd have to go back to the farmland you own.
Is that serfdom? The answer is no, and contrary to your question, you are not really sorry you asked, you are just doing this coy exaggeration routine that people who aren't interested in engaging in argument but still want to poo-poo it do.
I like this idea of receiving free property - real estate, housing, animals, etc. - all for the low, low price of not renewing my lease at the end of the year and quitting my job to tinker on a farm during springtime, before getting another job, paying someone else to make sure my chickens don't die.
It's simpler than that. Past performance is something you get used to, and if you grow up around something working, you sort of assume it's always been like that. Part of the reason why every new generation wants to dismantle the systems set up by their grandparents.
You know what that means? That this tool understands Bezier curves better than Adobe Illustrator. Why? Because Adobe has never heard of the phrase "cusp node".
If you have Illustrator, I challenge you:
- Draw a box with 4 sides
- Try and curve the top line without causing the side lines to curve
Not to take away from how cool this site is, but that is actually really easy to do in Illustrator.
- Draw a box with 4 sides.
- Use the Anchor Point Tool (shift + c) to select the top line and drag it. The adjacent points will split their anchors.
You can use the Anchor Point Tool to convert points between corner mode, mirrored anchor mode, and split anchor mode. Not sure if those are the official terms.
If the anchor has its handles visible, you can also alt+click+drag one handle to automatically convert it to a split anchor / cusp / whatever the cool kids are calling it.
Forgive me for being a little skeptical but can you show us a screenshot of the "toast shape" done in Adobe Illustrator (showing the guide lines, please)? (I'm changing the challenge a bit because just dragging the top line isn't the same as bestowing the top corners with guides and this challenge now necessitates the guides):
And make sure to tell us how long it took you. In SVG Path Builder the toast shape above took me 10 seconds, and it never gave me grief by trying to curve the sides, while still giving me the guides for each of the relevant corner nodes. Drawing that in Inkscape is just as easy. Same for CorelDraw.
If you can manipulate the guides of your corner nodes and have them affect only the top side, then you've succeeded in making those two top corner nodes cusp. I have never seen anyone online showing cusp nodes in Illustrator.
Again, the anchor point tool is necessary here. First you drag the top line up to add split anchors (or cusp nodes, haven't ever used that term) to the two adjacent points. Then you can use either the anchor point tool or the direct selection tool to adjust the two new anchors.
One feature Adobe Illustrator is sorely lacking (afaik) is grid snapping for anchors. They will snap to objects, lines, and points, but grid snapping would be really helpful.
Speaking as a self-taught programmer since I was in my early teens: I have nothing against it, some of my coworkers are bootcamp grads and I make sure they know I am available to help them. I also pull them aside to show some tricks or things to pay attention to.
Who is the lifelong programmer that dislikes showing others what they know about their favorite thing? Not me.
> Who is the lifelong programmer that dislikes showing others what they know about their favorite thing? Not me.
I used to hide tricks I'd do to extract more performance. Not any more. I tell people till I'm blue in the face how to do it, and they never figure it out :-)
I'm one of those "some people" you mentioned. It is indeed about morals. Violence, in my view, is definitely a character trait inextricable from genetic makeup and early upbringing (which sets significant epigenetic markers).
That is exactly why people should be armed. There is no reason for violent criminals to be in prison, they should be dead either from their victim defending themselves, or those around the victim defending the victim. As for non-violent crimes, they shouldn't be in prison, they should be fined or made to work to repay their damages.
This is the rational mode. Your mode, being soft-hearted and wanting to find excuses for violence behavior just so that the criminal can't be blamed, is the emotional mode.
Ah, but that's hardly a claim that needs substantiating. Everybody knows that people can change, adapting to your environment is a basic survival instinct.
Anyone arguing that people don't... can't change obviously has a deeply twisted understanding of humanity.
Maybe because it directly contradicts the facts? If people can't change then why is the recidivism rate in humane prisons 20% and in punishment oriented prisons 70%?
A more likely explanation however is that there is another reason why he is downvoted: because he suggests killing all violent offenders.
And yet it seems resilient enough that European countries are importing low-skilled third-world people without any concern for the frafile framework of mutual trust and playing by the rules you speak of.
Not to mention your argument sounds suspiciously like Intelligent Design believers explaining how the universe was obviously created by god since it is built on a fragile interplay of fine tuned distances and sizes and if only they were slightly different humans wouldn't exist!
EDIT @TeMPOraL: I'm the one that argues that it is all within-the-system, without the need for an external omnipotent actor. You're the one that thinks we must introduce the government as an external (above the rules) omnipotent (law-making) actor to the system of human interaction that is originally solely comprised of people and rules that apply to everyone without exception (but you want to introduce the external actor "government" as an exception to this otherwise global rule).
Hence why I argue that what you said is akin to Intelligence Design arguments. You are saying this delicate societal balance is all thanks to the external actor called government, like ID-folks say the balance of the universe is due to god. Both of you believe systems would collapse without this external omnipotent actor. The similarities are not just superficial.
> And yet it seems resilient enough that European countries are importing low-skilled third-world people without any concern for the frafile framework of mutual trust and playing by the rules you speak of.
Well, it's a huge issue in Europe now, creating a lot of mess. The tension between member countries of the EU has increased, and some people worry that the whole issue may actually turn into a civil war. The world isn't limited to having only one problem at a time.
> Not to mention your argument sounds suspiciously like Intelligent Design believers explaining how the universe was obviously created by god since it is built on a fragile interplay of fine tuned distances and sizes and if only they were slightly different humans wouldn't exist!
Did not see that coming... I don't see anyting but superficial similarities. The difference is, we've seen how societies big and small form and evolve over time. We've been observing it for thousands of years, and we took notes. We know what happens when the rule of law breaks, how fragile it is. It's all within-the-system, there is no need to postulate an external omnipotent actor.
EDIT to reply to 'planfaster's edit:
I don't see where I introduce government as an external actor. Government is a completely in-system being, it's something that occurs naturally whenever a society grows past certain size, when it can no longer hold together by enforcing the rules directly through day-to-day interaction between its members. It's just a more formal form of in-group coordination, and a common pattern in all human organizations - companies, churches, clubs, etc. Hell, it's even the base of multicellular life itself (also note that we have a name for cells that refuse to coordinate with the rest of the organism and instead decide to grow as much as they like - they're called cancer).
A government is something a society forms that allows it to grow beyond a very small size. I implore you to show me a thriving organization or society with more than 500 members that doesn't have a formalized set of rules and governance.
My point against Uber would work the same way if "Uber" was just a village asshole with a horse, going against the "rules that apply to everyone without exception".
But if you want to play it as religious debate, then tell me please, who paid for the roads and the schools and police? How do you call the entity that orders those projects and distributes the resources to accomplish them?
> (also note that we have a name for cells that refuse to coordinate with the rest of the organism and instead decide to grow as much as they like - they're called cancer).
Right, like the government, which is always growing (like cancer) and never dwindling, always passing new laws and regulations but never deprecating any, all the while refusing to coordinate with the rest of the organism since it claims to be exempt from the laws and regulations to which it subjects its cells/people.
Just like all the cells in the body go by one rule (don't grow unchecked), and cancer doesn't (it grows unchecked), so is everyone under government forced by it to go by one rule (do not initiate force) that government doesn't need to (it may initiate force unchecked).
Do you really not see the similarities?
I am not against a formalized set of rules and governance, I am for it. You are the one who seems to be against it since you are for an actor that does not abide by those rules and governance, namely the government. I am for everyone, without exception, abiding by a set of rules and governance, and the first rule is the one we all agree on so much that the government enforces on us, namely, do not initiate force.
Roads in the US were started by cyclists and war veterans:
The problem of schools and police are not as hard (the government of South Africa uses only private police, non-Prussian school models do not require teachers, etc) as that of roads, so I leave them to you as an exercise.
Where does that "do not initiate force" thing comes from? I'm all fine with it if you can show me a system that would work without it. "Do not initiate force" means "do not punish defectors", "do not enforce coordination", means cancer. Seriously. Every human and animal society has members "initiating force" against people who defect, and that's what keeps those groups together. Even cells in your body often initiate force against ones that grow at the expense of everyone else, or intruders who risk destabilizing the system. We have a specialized branch of cells, called "immune system", that could be considered the police arm of the "government" of your brain.
It seems to me like you believe governments are aliens from outer space that land their alien militaries and alien parliment buildings on our planet and start doing the governing. Governments are actors created within the system; if they're extempt from anything, they're extempt from it by our own design. Like, you know, instead of everyone keeping everyone else under MAD stalemate, some time ago people agreed they'll let one group monopolize the violence, and it worked out for the better for everyone, and that group is by definition extempt from "no violence" rule.
> I am not against a formalized set of rules and governance, I am for it. You are the one who seems to be against it since you are for an actor that does not abide by those rules and governance, namely the government.
I honestly feel like you're trolling me at this point.
Alternatively, why would you not be OK with a system where the rule that everyone must abide by is "do not initiate force"? I wonder what problems you have with it. Is there something you'd like to do, that would be impossible for you to do under that system?
Again, I am for a formalized set of rules, and I am suggesting that the rule be "do not initiate force". You on the other hand, have not suggested any formalized set of rules, as something cannot be a rule if everyone is helpless to keep the biggest offender from breaking it.
> "do not enforce coordination", means cancer
You say things like that, and you think I'm trolling you? Not to mention, the word is "exempt", not "extempt".
> Governments are actors created within the system
This is meaningless when both good and bad are created "from within" according to you. If I pointed to US History and asked you were Central Banks on the good side or was Andrew Jackson on the good side, I'd say Jackson, but you'd still point out the Central Banks "are actors created within the system". So to me this is meaningless. It's better to talk about how much consent the government has. Recent Gallup polls show more than half of Americans fear their government. I'd say fearing and consenting do not go together. So it seems the people are saying they'd like to treat the cancerous government within our country.
> some time ago people agreed they'll let one group monopolize the violence
They did, or do you assume they did? If the people did agree to this, as you said, then please point me to the historical documents, like a social contract being signed by everyone in a given territory. Otherwise, don't make up facts while trolling me and calling me a troll.
"Yet the assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is a man-made, urgent problem is a fiction. The so-called consensus comes from a handful of surveys and abstract-counting exercises that have been contradicted by more reliable research."
If it's Science, why the lies? And why the push for government intervention? I thought Science was about reality, not policy.
Please stop taking HN threads on generic ideological tangents. You've been doing this a ton, and it's not what this site is for.
In fact, there's little that's worse for HN. Such tangents are predictable, which makes them tedious, and tendentious, which makes them prolific. Tedious plus prolific equals sludge. Moreover, such discussions only get worse as they proceed, never better.
How am I supposed to take seriously an article which believes a survey of meteorologists is in any way relevant to a claim about the opinions of climate scientists?
If climate "skeptics" aren't completely full of it, why do they constantly mix up climate and weather and otherwise constantly demonstrate fundamental misunderstandings of the topic?
The Tragedy of the Commons illustrates precisely the opposite: that if other people are messing up a common good (the world, or the atmosphere, in this case), that means you should mess up as well, or you lose (in every sense: productivity, sustainability, etc).
Cartoons use a myriad of figures of speech in order to build a setup-punchline structure that is actually funny.
One of the tricks of the trade is to use logical fallacies, as they are mechanisms for hiding premises or faulty logic, which is ideal to build assumptions in the viewer's mind that are then shattered by the punchline.
The figure of speech employed here is a fallacy called Begging the Question. When the character says "what if we create a better world for nothing" he is implicitly accepting the premise that the changes proposed by the presenter would create a better world even though he might not agree with the presenter's conclusions.
So the "funny" comes from pretending that we all agree that the list of things the presenter is talking about actually describe "a better world".
As for real life, I would say the cartoon, while funny, does not "sum up perfectly" the issue in real life, because in real life what is under dispute is whether governments taking more control for themselves, in order to carry out those things in the presenter's slide, is actually a better world than all of the alternatives, including taking care of the planet without giving more power to government institutions which have proven themselves incapable of seeing to completion endeavors several orders of magnitude simpler than "saving the world".
We already saw what happens when the government doesn't take control and lets industry do what they will. The result is massive pollution, widespread health problems, and global climate change.
And in fact we already saw what happens when government does take control. The result is vastly improved pollution, and without wrecking the economy.
> We already saw what happens when the government doesn't take control and lets industry do what they will.
Where? What's that place where the industry (short for "all private companies") can do what they will (your words), meaning, government cannot curb their will?
I've never heard of such place in all my readings of History and Economics. I'm ready for you to blow my mind!
> I was talking about pollution in particular, not every possible conceivable action.
Can you point out in your original post ("We already saw what happens") the wording you used to constrain the actions you are talking about to just pollution? I missed that. I don't want to accuse you of poorly wording your arguments, or fixing them up as you go along.
> For times and places where pollution was not regulated, look at just about anywhere before 1900 or so.
So now what you're saying is this:
We already saw what happens when the government lets the industry do what they will regarding pollution, but doesn't let them do what they will in numerous other aspects: the result is massive pollution (your example being, I suppose, US in 1880).
"And in fact we already saw what happens when government does take control. The result is vastly improved pollution, and without wrecking the economy."
Where is that place? What's the place that right now doesn't have a wrecked economy, whose government tightly regulates pollution (I want to know how often that government sends workers to collect samples from factories waste, test it in the lab, potentially sues the company for non-compliance, etc) and that had a horrible pollution problem that was vastly improved by government action?
I still think what we should try is a situation where a government lets the industry do what they will in every aspect (not just pollution). That, it seems, has never happened, and according to Rothbard, Hayek, Friedman and Nozick, would yield the most positive solution of all possible solutions (which in this case would be the cleanest environment).
By the way, this means that your original post did not refute what I said, because you only refuted the regulated-industries-excepting-pollution, whereas I was talking about unregulated industries.
The whole context of this discussion is "creat[ing] a better world for nothing" through government intervention on pollution. I didn't think I had to spell it out when it's part of the topic of the conversation.
I'm curious as to why you think completely unregulated industry would result in the most reduction in pollution, when industries with no pollution regulations (but with other regulations) have repeatedly shown to pollute enormously at every opportunity. What mechanism would cause industry to suddenly care about their pollution in that scenario?
> I'm curious as to why you think completely unregulated industry would result in the most reduction in pollution, when industries with no pollution regulations (but with other regulations) have repeatedly shown to pollute enormously at every opportunity. What mechanism would cause industry to suddenly care about their pollution in that scenario?
How could those industries not pollute enormously, when they have to quickly adapt to any new government law or regulation (or they will die) in an unpredictable political and legislative scenario? Even if a company had plans to contain their pollution (and therefore funds allocated for this), they would quickly have to divert those funds as soon as a new regulation impeded on their business. When companies are run in unpredictable, ever-changing scenarios such as being regulated by a government, they can't look into the future with confidence to make financial decisions for it in the present (such is the nature of not being able to predict the next rule coming down the pike).
As for your question, it's simple, really. The mechanism that would cause industry to suddenly care about their pollution is called private property - which, don't kid yourself, is not the "private property" extant in the U.S. where there are still taxes for land that is owned, there's eminent domain, there's civil forfeiture, etc. Which is crazy, considering the constitution really only allows the government to own 10 square miles of land, but that's besides the point.
With private property, industries would be very careful not to pollute, say, a nearby river they don't own, because the owner might sue them for having damaged their property (just like you can sue for someone driving a wrecking ball through your house by accident or with intent to damage). If the company in question does own their nearby river, they will still have to make sure that they are only polluting the river they own, and not any downstream rivers that are not their property, or they might get sued by those downstream-river owners.
The government's job, in this scenario, is to enforce contract law and property rights (via tort law) through its justice courts. Since the river owners and the polluting company (in our example) don't have a contract with each other, only tort law applies. Clearly the company damaged these owners' rivers downstream (let's suppose) so the courts will decide the company must either cease and desist (destroying the property of river owners) and compensate them for the damage caused, or offer to buy them out, or offer to draw a contract that the river owners would agree to instead of winning the lawsuit.
If the company owns the nearby river and there are no downstream rivers, they can choose to pollute that river without consequences. If people aren't happy with that, they have many choices: they may bring awareness to the cause, stage a boycott, pool money to offer to buy the river (though the company isn't required to sell, its shareholders nevertheless like money and will be forced to weigh between 1. selling the river and finding some place else to store their waste and byproducts, and 2. continuing to pollute the river that causes them so much grief they have people offering them money to stop - the company will have to find a way to solve that impasse). Most probably this would be solved swiftly since the options outlined do not need the government.
I'm sure this will probably raise more questions for you than answer them, but having gone through that same path I can tell you all those questions have satisfying answers scattered all across many books by Rothbard, Nozick et alii but most of them have been compiled nicely by a very smart and helpful lady called Mary J. Ruwart.
> The government's job, in this scenario, is to enforce contract law and property rights (via tort law) through its justice courts. Since the river owners and the polluting company (in our example) don't have a contract with each other, only tort law applies. Clearly the company damaged these owners' rivers downstream (let's suppose) so the courts will decide the company must either cease and desist (destroying the property of river owners) and compensate them for the damage caused, or offer to buy them out, or offer to draw a contract that the river owners would agree to instead of winning the lawsuit.
The governments job in the present US system includes that, and its demonstrable that that function of government alone is not sufficient to encourage polluters to take great pains not to pollute others property, especially with pollutants that are difficult to trace to a single source such that ascribing liability to a particular polluter is difficult.
You suggest that things like property tax, eminent domain, etc. are problematic to your vision of "private property" (which seems a lot more like sovereign territory than private property), but you don't actually trace any causal link between the features you complain about and companies' propensity to pollute, and the avenues you point to as solutions in a "private property" (by your rather atypical definition of the term) system are, in fact, avenues that are equally present in the existing system and which have proven insufficient to the task.
The lawsuit answer is the standard one I pretty much always get for this question. The problem I have is transaction costs.
Your example is very good for the lawsuit approach, because there's one polluter and one pollutee and it's very clear with liability, cause and effect, etc.
I accept that this solution works for cases like this. Indeed, it's why I mostly don't have to deal with people dumping trash on my front door and such. Property rights work fine for that sort of thing.
The problem I have is when both pollution and harm is much more diffuse. You might have thousands or millions of polluters, and millions or billions of victims. For any given polluter-pollutee pairing, the harm is far below the cost of litigation. Yet the total harm can be enormous.
For example, let's say there's a city with ten thousand factories and 20 million people. The factories are polluting the air like crazy which makes it unpleasant to be outside and causing all sorts of long-term health problems. (I just got back from Beijing so this is a particularly significant example for me.) Someone living in this city wants to sue the polluters for the massive amount of harm they're causing. How does this work?
Here's how I see it not working. They can't sue every factory because they can't afford the legal fees for ten thousand lawsuits. They'll have to pick one, or maybe a few. Now they get to court and have to prove damages. Well, the defendant's pollution is causing about 0.01% of the total pollution affecting the plaintiff. It's negligible. Even if you say that the total harm to the plaintiff is, say, $10 million, the defendant's share of that liability is $1,000. Hardly worth the time to litigate. And will you even be able to prove to the court that that particular factory is responsible for any of the pollution harming that particular plaintiff? Particles don't have serial numbers, after all, and neither do cancer cells.
Maybe you manage to put together a class action lawsuit so all 20 million citizens can band together. You still have the same problems of going after an individual factory.
Maybe the legal system is structured such that all 20 million citizens can band together and sue all 10,000 factories simultaneously. Aggregate harm can be demonstrated and liability apportioned even though no individual factory can be blamed, and no individual plaintiff can conclusively trace any ailment to the pollution. This works, but all you've done is reinvent something identical to modern environmental regulations, only they're ad-hoc regulations dictated by courts rather than concrete regulations dictated by the legislature.
And this is a relatively simple example. How would this deal with, for example, atmospheric mercury pollution that has already caused seafood to be dangerously toxic to children and pregnant women if eaten in large quantities? How would it deal with greenhouse gas pollution which won't cause any catastrophic effects for decades?
> Maybe the legal system is structured such that all 20 million citizens can band together and sue all 10,000 factories simultaneously.
Yes, this is the scenario that would occur. It's obvious, in retrospect, you've debated this before. ;)
Are you familiar with the concept of DROs? I would need to introduce the concept of Dispute Resolution Organizations and Polycentric Law in order to explain this fully, which I am afraid would take far too long. The gist is that, due to many advantages I will skip over here, people would subscribe to DROs (like they do today for life insurance) which would mediate disputes through negotiation with a view to establishing new contracts that will repair the initial damage that is under scrutiny. People would choose DROs based on the promises and rules that DROs make and abide by when they sign their contracts with those they represent, and based on the process they have for negotiating and establishing new rules, and also their tie-breaking process.
There would be DROs for people in general, DROs for specialized trades (like medical doctors and engineers due to different liabilities), and of course DROs for companies.
If several companies are polluting the air in a given city full of people, and those people want to sue those companies for their smog having caused them bodily harm (under tort law, since your body is your property), then they could notify their DROs of their intent; those DROs already talk to each other on a consistent basis since that is how disputes are solved between people that belong to different DROs, so they already have rules amongst themselves for how to deal with lawsuits that are many-to-many in relationship, as it were. Upon asked to effectuate this plural lawsuit, the DROs representing both plural parties would engage in negotiation amongst themselves on behalf of their clients and would need to find a solution that would make most of their clients happy. Here we have the DROs interests perfectly aligned with the interests of those they represent, because if the DRO makes an unpopular decision, it will lose clients.
> This works, but all you've done is reinvent something identical to modern environmental regulations
Yes, but now without the coercion that is sine-qua-non to regulations. That means a huge decrease in the initiation of violence among people.
> And this is a relatively simple example.
It is, and I hope my sketch-answer above has enough information to inform you that there are very good and well-fleshed-out solutions to this problem as discovered by the philosophers that explore this field. Nozick is particularly good at taking readers through complicated examples of real-life situations that at first seem hard or impossible to solve with a free market.
> How would this deal with, for example, atmospheric mercury pollution that has already caused seafood to be dangerously toxic to children and pregnant women if eaten in large quantities? How would it deal with greenhouse gas pollution which won't cause any catastrophic effects for decades?
I do not know if there are proposed solutions for those issues where there is a large delay between cause and effect. Here I am speaking from my own head and not remembering things I've read as I was above for the DRO answer: I would guess that for the first case, where a present issue was caused by something/someone(s) in a hazy past, that the tortfeasor may be impossible to track down to engage the plaintiffs. If the tortfeasor companies are still around and haven't engaged in this issue before, and proof can be established to link cause and effect to them, I imagine it could be treated as a normal lawsuit from here on (having identified both parties in the suit); their representative DROs will have to negotiate and come up with a solution that is satisfying for all parties involved; if rectification is impossible, then perhaps reparations would be in order. If there is a known method for fish-mercury removal (or the like), then depending on the pressure put on the DROs by their clients, the resolution could include the company having to pay to employ this solution, even though the person who was responsible for the mercury leak (let's suppose) might be long gone.
As for the greenhouse problem where the cause is in the present and the effect is in a hazy future, the DROs would first expect good evidence that there is indeed a cause of something going on, and sufficient evidence that this cause will result in a definable effect. Having established as much, there may be grounds for a lawsuit under threat of violence (threats of violence are considered initiation of violence by most philosophers in this area) since the noxious gases being dispersed now are threatening the lives of children and infant (we can't use "future generations") in the future, just like a threat to kill someone works.
This has been very enjoyable, and I hope you can take something away from this. Most free marketers I meet are well read and reached their conclusions from carefully reading the extremely counter-intuitive stuff that Nozick et alii put forth, or whoever else is their favorite Jew, since most of the best free market philosophers have been Jews for some reason [1] (my guess: high verbal intelligence coupled with propensity towards radicalization and high self-confidence and courage, or as they call it, chutzpah) and I feel like mentioning it because I owe my education largely to them (as an autodidact in economics), even though I am a harsh critic of their version of WW2 history (critiques which are purely based on science (especially chemical analysis) and not on any form of bigotry as many are quick to suggest).
[1] The current best jewish free marketer philosopher is unbeatably Walter Block. You owe it to yourself to listen to some of his arguments; you will undoubtedly catch a glimpse of the whole free market machinery at work through his astoundingly clear explanations. No one comes close. His defense of slander and libel are among my favorites - students that at first disagree with him are left speechless after having their contentions undone by Block.
> Yes, but now without the coercion that is sine-qua-non to regulations. That means a huge decrease in the initiation of violence among people.
I find it extremely difficult to take anything you say seriously when you make absurd statements like this. Environmental regulation is responsible for so much violence that its lack can cause a "huge decrease" in it?
Reading further, you are apparently using a definition of the word "violence" which is essentially unrelated to how normal people understand the word. What other words are you using your own definitions for? How am I to understand anything you're saying in any of this when apparently any word can mean anything at any time?
Regulation is intimidation by the exhibition of force (the regulatory body's authority is an exhibition of the threat of violence that backs its ability to fine and imprison).
If you break environmental regulations they'll just seize company assets, which just involves contacting your bank and such. No violence involved at any time, even hypothetically.
First of all, it is initiation of violence since the government has to threaten the bank in order to seize assets which the company had already contracted with the bank to keep safe and the company has not given the bank any power of attorney to transfer the property or otherwise relinquish it.
That is initiation of violence number one.
Second of all, it is theft since the government is appropriating goods it does not own without permission from the owner which in this case is the company that broke environmental regulations.
That is initiation of violence number two.
Now I must ask you, Mike Ash, after all this conversation and your refutations visibly fizzling out (first your silly "I refuse to look up 'violence' in the dictionary' and presently this 'I can't see the violence in threatening banks and stealing from them' grasping-at-straws move, and after having seen my arguments for what I am defending and after your not being able to offer substantive counter-arguments), are you ready to entertain the thought that we should give fully unregulated (-by the government or any other monopoly on violence) industries and private property law a try?
I am ready and willing to help you learn more as I hope to have demonstrated throughout this discussion where I wasn't disrespectful to you and treated your inquiries fairly. I must say though, that judging from your last replies, it might be that you do not possess the intellectual honesty I thought you did when we first started this discussion, because your last two responses have been intellectually dishonest (not looking up in the dictionary, and not being willing to see the violence in state coercion).
Smarter than 90% of the population would be an IQ of 120 (s.d. 15) which is pretty high. You can test yourself here: http://www.iqtest.dk/ . Let us know if you got your 120. :)
That means in general I am against helping the poor and the homeless stay in the city, since the point of city is to be a wealth-creation center, not a welfare experiment.
You say you have been homeless. I'd like to ask you what you think of my idea: instead of giving the homeless shelter in the city, and having them drain resources from people who produce wealth, meanwhile not producing anything, why not give them a cheap house in a small farmland with some chicken or turkey, rabbits, a vegetable garden, etc?
That way we solve many problems. 1. the poor are now productive, they produce their own food instead and don't need to drain other people's resources to have food and shelter; 2. they are far from the city, which won't encourage laziness by sending people a message that they can't try and game the system by getting help while still living in the city as a non-producer; 3. it will teach these poor people good work ethics and how work is necessary for everyone to survive, and that they can't just rely on the fact that other people work.
I'd say that besides the farm life, they should have good public libraries nearby in case they want to learn something in order to be able to later join the city life again, this time as a productive member.
Am I being inhumane for trying to make producers out of every human being, and for thinking even the disabled can help pick fruit from bushes or wash them or otherwise contribute in a communal farm setting? Would you be for a program to send the poor and the homeless to farms and basically instate a rule where you can't live in a place you can't afford?