A Question I got via PM

[Borodog]

I got this question via PM:

[ QUOTE ]

How would an anarchist society deal with environmental concerns? Take pollution leading to global warming/other problems. What force in the market would hold companies responsible for not creating harm to the environment. I think pollution has a cost to it, but it's not one that the offending company has to bear. It's likely that the current generation wouldn't even be affected by it.


[/ QUOTE ]

This was my response:

While I don't have time to write a treatise, it comes down to the same thing that all worsening problems come down to: it's the government's fault. It used to be that you could sue over air pollution, and because property rights were respected, the courts would find in the favor of people who's property had been damaged from pollution. This was the norm through the first half of the 19th century, and the effect was that the costs of pollution were internalized. Simple market competition then acted to minimize pollution, just as it acts to minimize all costs. Fast forward to the latter half of the 19th century when activist judges, influenced by progressive pro-industrial nationalism, began finding that pollution was not actionable, as industry was "in the common good". Hence pollution costs were no longer internalized, and were in fact explicitly externalized (if not outright subsidized, as happened largely during wars, as government printed money to gain access to factory capacity to build tanks and destroyers and such, and cared not a whit for pollution), so of course pollution increased greatly.

Fast forward again to post WWII, when government protected externalization of pollution and pollution subsidy had really made quite a mess. As productive capacity was re-directed to the private sector, the environmental outcry from consumers began to be felt, and companies began responding by cleaning up their acts (purely in response to consumer preferences in the market mind you; it was still illegal to sue over air pollution). Well, this same outcry inspired government Johnny-come-latelies to began passing environmental regulations. Mind you, they didn't simply make it legal to sue over pollution; rather they claimed that the market had "failed" and instituted a bizarre system of pollution quotas, wherein some level of pollution, i.e. violation of someone else's property, is "ok", and does not have to be paid for, but above that level fines must be paid (which do not go to the damaged parties; oh no, they get spent on government programs).

Another effect is government refusal to allow private property rights to form or to recognize them in government monopoly courts, resulting in tragedies of the commons. In America, rivers and waterways cannot be privately owned; hence they became very polluted. Contrast this with the UK, where fishing rights to waterways could be privately owned, making pollution of them actionable, leading to UK waterways being very clean; with the notable exception of those waterways where the rights were NOT privately owned, for example the Thames.

Add to this that the largest polluter in the US is, by far, the Federal government itself. It exempts itself from all of the regulations it foists on everyone else, of course.

Then there is the public road system, especially the system of freeways around urban centers. By building roads that are supposedly "free", people are of course incentivized to drive (duh). The problem is that the gas tax on gasoline, while being far too high in most places, is actually much too *low* to internalize costs around major urban centers. So what you get is capitalist provided cars on "free" socialist provided roads, with the result that people sit in traffic jams wasting gasoline and churning out smog in the cities.

There are many other arguments and mountains of evidence, but this should at least get you thinking about the fact that the entire purpose of competition is to minimize costs, that this is the purpose of property rights, and that when the market is allowed to operate correctly, costs are internalized via property rights and then minimized by competition.

Here's an entertaining lecture by Walter Block on the topic:

http://www.mises.org/multimedia/block/Block-CKVU.wmv

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I realize that I did not specifically address global warming, but that takes basically a different argument, since people aren't going to be suing over increased C02 content in the air. I do have an answer for this, but I don't have time to write it up right now, so it will have to be a separate OP.