21 sats \ 2 replies \ @Undisciplined OP 3 Jan \ parent \ on: BuT, wHaT aBoUt ThE rOaDs? libertarian
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.
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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