When Murray Rothbard argues about pollution, conservation, and the environment, one of the anarchic mechanisms he refers to is that the damaged party takes out an injunction against the company or person polluting, for instance. So, let's say the polluter ends up not complying with the person's injuction and is requested to pay damages. What is the polluter's incentive to pay the damages?
Furthermore, if the company provides a very good product at a very good price, yet pollutes a small stream that affects 2,500 people, and they take out injunctions against the company. What is the company's incentive to pay 2,500 cases of damages?
If it's nothing other than reputation, I think there is a problem. Let me know, thanks!
Anyone?
Rothbard supports violent retaliation. So ultimately, you could sick police on the polluter. But to me that's just statism under a libertarian banner, and I think Rothbard is inconsistent for not acknowledging this.
Really, the mechanism determining whether you decide to stop polluting, and whether you decide to compensate for your damages, is society. It's automatic brain activity causing millions of people to organize. No violence is necessary. Society is perfectly capable of ostracizing you nonviolently, without any contracts or contract enforcement, or "libertarian" courts or police. And Rothbard supports this option too, the option to personally punish people for violating your property, and he rightly acknowledges that you will have to put up with society's judgement of your actions.
It is simply the notion of putting people back in the spot they were, were it not for your aggression. As for police (private presumably, of some non-statist form) being "statism under a different banner", well no. The state exercises a monopoly over all final questions of legal disagreement between itself and any of its subject-parties and also reserves for itself the right to resolve all disputes between them and to unilaterally set the rate at which it parasitises off them. You may disagree with the right to retribution (as opposed to restitution) and violence outside of immediate threats to person/property, however delegating that right is not inherently statist for any reason that I can see.
The OP may find this of interest. Rothbard didn't go into any great depth about justifying libertarian ethics (and he referred the reader to other works for this), though he made some good arguments in its favour.
Freedom of markets is positively correlated with the degree of evolution in any society...
In a voluntaryist society, I think the parties to a dispute will contractually agree to be bound to the terms of the judgement rendered by the court which hears the dispute. So if a ruling is made against the defendant, his refusal to abide by that ruling would constitute a breach of contract and thus be an actionable offense itself. Furthermore, by ruling in favor of the plaintiff, the court is authorizing him to acquire the compensation by force if necessary.
The keyboard is mightier than the gun.
Non parit potestas ipsius auctoritatem.
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