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504 sats \ 4 replies \ @0xIlmari 3 Jan \ parent \ on: BuT, wHaT aBoUt ThE rOaDs? libertarian
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.
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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