Greetings,
I'm new to posting here but I've been reading along on and off for quite a while.
I'm writing my thesis and was asked by my promotors to also include a chapter on externalities in an absolutely free market, since they feel that I haven't adequately covered the subject in my proposal papers about how a free unregulated market is supposed to cope with for example factories in one location polluting water supplies around the globe or thinning out fish supplies on which others might depend. The main thing here perhaps is that it is impossible to point out which particular factory polluted which particular fish which lead to poisoning a food chain and possibly another person a few years later who ate a different fish that was higher up the ladder and still had concentrations of the pollution in its system.
Another one of the top of my head; when I build a house somewhere and 5 years later somebody builds a chemical plant right next to it on land which they rightfully bought and what have you, but which might or might not cause increased likelihood of cancer and which severly decreases my property value, how do we go from there (not the same as buying the land with the factory already there, it came after you paid the full price for the property). Or what if an airport opens nearby causing excessive noise, etc. What about sour rain passing over, or nearby farmers shooting up thunderstorms which maybe ends up with you having less rain. Perhaps ludicrous examples but I feel that there is and should be a good way of refuting them, I'm just not sure on how to do this in a sufficiently satisfying manner.
To be clear, I'm not the one that needs convincing, I'm as die-hard laissez-faire as it gets, but I don't know a good way to go about really tackling the problem clearly and properly instead of just saying "the market will fix it and that's all you need to know", because that's not going to cut it and I can't really blame them to expect something more.
I searched the forum but I can't seem to find that much precise information about externalities as such (possibly looked over some of it, please feel free to direct me to other threads as well or copy-paste something here if you don't feel like typing something out, although it would be very appreciated).
So I wonder, what are people's thoughts on externalities here?
Edit: a bit off topic, but I don't want to spam new topics all over the forum: I sometimes run into some problems when I on the one hand say that there should be little to no taxation, but people reply by asking how I am then going to uphold a military against foreign invasion of organized states and how the courts and police will be paid for.
"Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy."
http://www.last.fm/group/Anti-Socialism
Christophe:I'm writing my thesis and was asked by my promotors to also include a chapter on externalities in an absolutely free market, since they feel that I haven't adequately covered the subject in my proposal papers about how a free unregulated market is supposed to cope with for example factories in one location polluting water supplies around the globe or thinning out fish supplies on which others might depend. The main thing here perhaps is that it is impossible to point out which particular factory polluted which particular fish which lead to poisoning a food chain and possibly another person a few years later who ate a different fish that was higher up the ladder and still had concentrations of the pollution in its system.
I have such little patience for critics who accuse the market of creating externalities.
The government is nothing but one giant externality.
A crack head over doses, I pay for it.
G.W. Bush starts a war, I pay for it.
Someone lights their house on fire, I pay for it.
Someone loses their job, I pay for it.
Someone steals a car, I pay for it.
General Motors loses money, I pay for it.
Property rights is the mechanism humans have created to deal with externalities, so its no surpise that the government, which always ignores property rights, does nothing but create externalities.
Peace
DD5: If one agency does become criminal and manages to overcome the market, then you end up where you want to be anyway.
Too funny.
JonBostwick: So externalities are where its difficult to enforce property rights... unless you use the magic of government violence. So in order to avoid a lack of property rights we will arbitarially violate property rights in the way we hope will yield the best outcome. And by we, I mean whoever happens to be head of State at the moment of course.
So externalities are where its difficult to enforce property rights... unless you use the magic of government violence.
So in order to avoid a lack of property rights we will arbitarially violate property rights in the way we hope will yield the best outcome. And by we, I mean whoever happens to be head of State at the moment of course.
I posed a question and didn't answer it. You're reading things into my post that I didn't write.
BTW, I was once a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist. I attended the Mises University. I changed my mind because I didn't find their arguments convincing anymore.
consequentialist.wordpress.com
DD5:Because people like you end up supporting it, or even advocating for it!
So you agree with me. Individuals or small groups can form governments by convincing other people to support them.
Jake McCloskey:BTW, I was once a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist. I attended the Mises University. I changed my mind because I didn't find their arguments convincing anymore.
You haven't made a convincing argument yet.
liberty student:You haven't made a convincing argument yet.
Actually, what argument have I made on this post? I only offered some advice to the original poster and then made a half-joking comment that some people took too seriously.
Look amigo, internet is serious business, ok?
liberty student: Look amigo, internet is serious business, ok?
Market anarchist, Linux geek, aspiring Perl hacker, and student of the neo-Aristotelians, the classical individualist anarchists, and the Austrian school.
Christophe:Another one of the top of my head; when I build a house somewhere and 5 years later somebody builds a chemical plant right next to it on land which they rightfully bought and what have you, but which might or might not cause increased likelihood of cancer
i think a free society would have some little mechanisms to deal with some of lifes small inconveniences, alas it is not perfect and not utopian. Either way, whats a chemical plant supposed to do? should we live in a world where toxin spewing firms are completely isolated from creating any externalities, an almost hyper-sterile environment? its unrealistic, we need some people to spew toxins, just like we need viruses and bacteria to strengthen our immune systems, its not like toxins make us better, but that we need the byproducts of some hazaderous materials in order to maintain a high standard of living.
do we get free cheezeburger in socielism?
I've not mentioned morality once TBH. It's irrelevant as to whether a free market anarchist society can provide law or not, and merely pertains to its justifiability (an important issue but I don't hold to what is typically taken as "natural law".) None of the books you mentioned specifically cover the topic, hence I suggest you acquire a couple which do and get a better handle on the topic, because it is not an easy topic to approach if one of the interlocutors has not taken the time to research materials specific to it, and if you want to incorporate the topic in academic writing I emphasise that all the more. I am generally aloof, so please don't take it as impoliteness on my part.
Freedom of markets is positively correlated with the degree of evolution in any society...
I was once a minarchist. I changed my mind because I didn't find their arguments convincing anymore. Funnily enough, Rand made me an anarchist.
Its useful to consider why illegal dumping is not considered a classic externality, but water pollution is. What seperates these two actions is how they are treated by the legal system.
For typical dumping, since its illegal to dump, its also difficult to make yourself better off by polluting someone's property with your trash. While water pollution is a problem precisely because its not illegal, as courts have looked the other way for more than a century in the name of "progress." Even today the EPA solution to pollution never even considers the rights of other property holders. The monopoly legal system has forced a set of values onto people different then those that they actually hold.
I don't have too much time at the moment and will be back tomorrow, but to recap my current position (please read the entire thing before replying to it if you plan on doing so, as it's essential to see it as a whole) :
Purely ideologically I'm what you might consider an anarcho-capitalist, where the military, police and courts are indeed provided by private enterprises and we all live in anarchistic bliss. That's the end conclusion of liberal and individualistic ideology when you follow it through. It's the utopian ideal that I too aim for.
Having said that, here's the kicker: the ideal requires that human beings are rational agents. I have absolutely no illusions about that. If you do you need to get out more. Most people are irrational and the masses crave for somebody or something (= a state) to tell them what to do and how to live their lives; therefor anarchy (in the political sense that you use it as compared to the metaphysical sense) has no practical feasibility in the real world and it's also why socialism, communism and fascism will never die out. The best you can do is fight it, but you can't ever kill it due to the moral and mental weakness of the vast majority. You need basic rules to be enforced against irrationality which under assumption of rationally would be unnecessary. You can't have Sharia law alongside Western law in the same geographic region, multiculturalism simply does not work, it's not a question of whether or not you are willing to accept this, reality doesn't care about your feelings, deal with it, it's a fact and all you need to do to see it with your very own eyes is to take a stroll through just about any city and see the havoc it creates even under 1 system of legislation.The arguement for the existence of different legislations in the same area being possible falls flat on its ass by just looking at current reality: what's stopping you from setting up your own system of legislation at this exact moment if supposedly different laws can coexist in the same geographical territory? The simple reason is that this is impossible because the stronger group will supress the weaker one, just like what's happening now. You can yell about your natural rights as much as you want, the stronger group has you by the balls. I use this kind of language to illustrate my point: the reason why constant anarchy being possible is out of the question is because the stronger group dominates and a single de facto uniformal system is thereby installed which keeps the rest down, and the only right that counts in reality is that of the strongest.
Also, I feel that the internal opportunity and conversion costs (not just monetary) also are too high for anarchism not to automaticly structure itself. You want another example? At first there were thousands and thousands of languages, causing high conversion costs due to translation creating inefficiency. Whether it's time that's needed to learn new languages (I speak Dutch, French, German and English myself if you leave out Flemish as a separate language; I know a thing or two about the effort that goes into learning new ones) or the monetary costs of hiring translators and the cost of time that is being wasted by translating or errors that occur due to misunderstandings. These evolved and are evolving into fewer and fewer languages, first towards regional linguistic powerhouses, and now on a global level with English probably becoming the lingua franca. Perhaps as a native English speaker you don't feel this as much as somebody like me does; but ask anybody who lives in non-English speaking countries about this type of evolution: local dialects steadily disappear and drift towards uniform regional languages, and those regional languages are themselves slowly being replaced by English vocabulary. If you're unwilling to recognize facts like these (the evolutionary drive to lower conversion costs and the dying out of multitudes of languages because it's inefficient to have them and inefficiency gets eradicated) then I guess there isn't much to talk about. Replace "language" by "set of laws" or "form of state" and there you have it.
True to "free market operation" this also happens in the civilizational sphere, anarchy evolved into something "more efficient than no structure" in the form of a (preferably small and limited) state, due to the irrationality of the individual agents and the conversion costs of heterogenity being a cause of relative inefficiency and the evolutionary process' amorally "blindly recognized" need for the factoring in of irrationality in order to survive. This is what history has done, we started in anarchy (how could it have been anything else; structure did not just pop into existence) and ended up with states, just like we're slowly ending up with fewer languages and 1 dominant language which gathered the most force behind it slowly blocking out all others, so did city states turn into national states and now are turning into geographicly larger entities like the European union. There is no other way about it in the long run: the only question is what kind of state you make of it and which direction you will try to force it. So, practically I'm a libertarian/minarchist. To save some time, straight from the wiki: "Minarchism refers to the belief in a state limited to police forces, courts, and a military. In minarchism, the state neither regulates nor intervenes in personal choices and business practices, except to protect against aggression, breach of contract, and fraud. Both market anarchists and minarchists oppose the idea of persecution of "victimless crimes" (like drug use), compulsory education, and conscription at all levels of government. However, minarchists often disagree on the level of government centralization. This ranges from the centralist minarchists who support the enforcement of laws at the global or national governments, to the middle-ground minarchists who advocate states' rights or increased autonomy at the state level, and to the decentralist minarchists who think that every city or town should have its own government."
The level of centralization is again a matter of taste and degree; personally I'm for the most basic rules being on supra-national levels (like the EU) and the details and specifics taken care of by directly proportional smaller regional bodies. I am in support of a constitutionalist limited state that provides courts, police and military; nothing else. The pay for it would come from extremely low income-based flat taxes, which would be possible because of how limited government spending would de facto be.
You might wonder then how I am able to combine and justify a certain ideological and theoretical point of view (full laissez-faire and no state in any shape or form) with a slightly different practical aim (minarchism). I don't know whether you have ever read Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche, it's in part about the interaction between the striving after the (for now unattainable) ideal of the Ubermensch and the resulting inspired struggle for excellence as a human being. In essence, this inspiration is a political philosophy manifestation of what Rand considered to be "romantic art": "Art serves a human cognitive need: it allows human beings to grasp concepts as though they were percepts. "Art" [here is defined] as a "selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments" - that is, according to what the artist believes to be ultimately true and important about the nature of reality and humanity. In this respect art is regarded as a way of presenting abstractions concretely, in perceptual form. Art of this kind does not have to be propagandistic: even though it involves moral values and ideals, its purpose does not have to be to educate, but possibly only to show or project. Moreover, art need not be, and usually is not, the outcome of a full-blown explicit philosophy".
From a moral standpoint everything is "beyond good and evil": any and all value judgments are arbitrary preferences as felt and expressed by the individual or group unless you can come up with absolute truth to use as a starting point, which you have not done and which I personally do not claim and even deem impossible. That's what I meant when I said that to me it would be a different story entirely if everybody involved would just say "that's how I'd like it, and the only thing I have to back it up is my own personal preference and will" instead of talk about universal standards of right and wrong outside the realm of concrete reality as shaped by force. The whole struggle to try and prove natural law then at once becomes a non-issue: will and the force it can summon to shape reality as it wishes is the only thing that matters.
The only justification for any view then becomes the pure force that a given idea is able to summon, reality being the only judge of failure and success, where in essence might - in all forms combined - makes right, in its truest universal sense.
It is in other words of no concern that full achievement of the deontological ideal is practically limited by being "all too human" and there is no contradiction in still holding on to your value judgments in spite of this: by striving for the ideal and using it as a guiding light, even if you never reach it, it inspires to transcendent above what would have been possible without it.
I think you guys would benefit tremendously from reading some more Nietzsche. Moral relativism does not imply absence of morality or the inability of setting of standards, in fact it implies the complete opposite.
Christophe:Purely ideologically I'm what you might consider an anarcho-capitalist
Christophe:Having said that, here's the kicker: the ideal requires that human beings are rational agents.
So it's a good idea to put some clearly criminal and violent irrational agents in charge with the guns?
What is Act II? Genocide?
Christophe:It's the utopian ideal that I too aim for.
Anarcho-capitalism is only utopian because you're uncomfortable with the reality of human existence. When you stop holding ancap up to be a utopia, that is when it will not only be desirable, but possible.
DD5:In a Stateless society, people can opt out of one defense agency and switch to another.
In the theorized Rothbardian, stateless society this woud be true; but, in the theorized American constitutional republic the power of the government is tightly controlled by the Constitution, and it is history that the theorized state of affairs did not last. We have no true knowledge of how a stateless society will function, just as we had no true prior knowledge on how the constitutional republic would last, and we can indeed only make problematic hypotheses.
Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, is not to be found.
- Edmund Burke
if it's contingent, then those hypotheses are problematic and not problematic... don't leave that second one out...