2773 sats \ 10 replies \ @0xIlmari 3 Jan \ on: BuT, wHaT aBoUt ThE rOaDs? libertarian
I think a more important question is, do we privatise also the forests and rivers? The air that we breathe? How do we, as a whole, care for the global environment if doing so is against the economic interests? (Because it costs money to do so and thus means higher prices in aggregate and most consumers will choose cheaper products.)
That's a fantastic point, and a valid concern. Like you mention, we do have something akin to a collective duty to care for the environment.
Unfortunately, government is often the one who makes economic interests and environmental interests diverge.
For example, in the US, the government will only lease land out to extraction projects, even though conservationists are often willing to pay more for the land than oil companies.
In fact, economic growth and environmental protection would naturally go hand in hand if not for government intervention. As nations grow wealthier, communities develop a higher interest in environmental protection, so much so that individuals and businesses are willing to pay through the nose for carbon reduction. Yet, governments still pore hundreds of billions a year into subsidizing oil and gas.
You're right that consumers will chose cheaper products. Yet, cost reducing technologies that live lighter on the land are constantly blocked by regulation. In an economically freer and more privatized world, the environment would flourish far more than in our semi-privatized yet government directed system.
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I am generally an anti-statist, but I must contend that governments are so far the best way we know (due to lack of empiric data on decentralised societies) of actually aligning the economy against the incentives (such as, protecting the environment against the exploitative capitalism).
That's not to say it actually works in practice.
And the reason it doesn't is that the consumers are actually taken out of the equation. Corporations are in bed with the government, lobbying for laws to be passed that they can corrupt. They invent opaque bullshit like ESG to pretend to govern themselves and greenwash their business in the eyes of the unknowing public.
Corporations should not have a say about it in the first place. Why? Because they will pass on any costs to the consumers anyway. It is the consumers that can vote with their wallets to say what behaviour they want from the corporations.
If something like ESG should exist (for the benefit of consumers, not the corporations), it should be run by an "open source" international body, with open standards and open reporting.
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That mostly sounded like an argument against putting governments in charge of controlling pollution and I agree with the criticisms.
You also left out that governments are themselves enormous polluters and the most authoritarian governments protect the environment the worst.
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True, a "good government", even if there is such a thing, is a social-utilitarian compromise.
The State is:
- violent, but we hope there is net less violence among the citizens,
- invasive, but we hope it better protects us from machinations of bad agents,
- polluting, but we hope that it keeps the corporations' pollution in check,
- wasteful, but we hope that the organization it brings creates large-scale efficiencies (structured commerce, cohesive public projects, eminent domain).
For me, the questions I ask myself are:
- Is the idea of a central government essentially bad?
- Or has simply every implementation so far been bad?
- Is a "good" implementation possible, then? (Here "good" means, its existence is a net positive force in society. How to measure "net positive" is another story entirely.)
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Is the idea of a central government essentially bad?
My answer is "yes", because of the items you listed above and my belief that those are all false hopes. However, I'm not a utilitarian, so I would still be anti-state even if those hopes could be realized.
You raised a good question though, that I don't know the answer to, about whether the incentives are better for a centralized state or decentralized localities wrt pollution. Here's the tension I see:
- A centralized state is easier and more valuable for industry to corrupt.
- Decentralized localities can more easily shift pollution costs onto their neighbors.
I think there's better potential for localities to cooperate in a repeated game type of environment, but there could also be lots of value in being the one defector.
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The environment is inherently a global/singular/central problem, because there's only one planet. I think that's why it's natural that people seek centralised solution.
It remains to be seen if we can:
- align incentives in government frameworks such that corruption by corporations is not possible,
- develop a decentralised solution with a global and cohesive reach - this may, honestly, require a Bitcoin-level invention to be unveiled.
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Great points.
I'm reminded of something I read about how there used to be much better recourse against polluters in the US, before the Progressive Era. That's when the government really started trying to advance industrial development and they removed liabilities from commercial interests who damaged nearby land.
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Economic interest is an abstract term for things people want. You demonstrate with your comment the well known value that people attach to nature. If we get the property rights framework correct, demand for a clean environment will balance with the cost of supplying it. If you value the environment more than others, then you might be disappointed that there isn't as much of it as you would like, but that's the same as my disappointment when a show I like gets cancelled.
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Yes, people do attach value to nature, as in, everyone would want to breathe clean air, drink clean water etc. But people also want the stuff they buy to be cheap. Those are opposing forces and every individual has a different heuristic to "solve" this.
In aggregate (billions of people), I believe we can treat people as stochastic functions. In this case, it becomes: "How much of my personal well-being am I willing to sacrifice to improve the environment?"
People will fall on a spectrum here. Most well-off people would probably be capable of sacrificing more. People living below the mean will have to make meaningful sacrifices. This opens up the following questions for consideration:
- Would the resulting function (sum of all of humanity's pro-environment actions) produce an output that's sufficient to prevent further degradation of the planet?
- Would transitioning to a Bitcoin standard mean that wealth inequality is reduced? Would that cause those lowest on the economic ladder to be able to contribute more (thus shifting the output)?
- Would transitioning to a Bitcoin standard induce a phychological shift in humanity? Would people become low-time-preference in other areas of life, such as care for the environment (again, shifting the output)?
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Implementation is the big problem, but conceptually I think many environmental issues fit into standard ways of thinking about property rights. Users of unowned air and water establish easements on their use. If someone pollutes the air or water that you have such an easement on, then you can hold them liable or issue a cease and desist order.
As I mentioned in another recent comment, people use to use mechanisms like that against industry to prevent air and water pollution. The objection to that free market property rights approach was actually that it didn't allow enough pollution for the amount of industrialization that the government wanted.
There are some issues, like ocean pollution, that might not fit so cleanly into that framework. I worry about ocean pollution more than most of the other environmental stuff, because it's so out-of-sight out-of-mind for people and might hit some unobserved point of no return.
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