A Question I got via PM

[Phil153]

The history of private enterprise in unregulated regions makes the "private owners look after their land" argument kind of laughable.

People and companies are often greedy, short sighted and lacking in broad skills. Hence, when McDonalds wants to buy beef, a rancher in the Amazon clear fells a large area of his land, to grow grass for cattle. The land turns worthless after a decade; but he doesn't care - he made his money. And he goes on to buy some other cheap land. That the land is much more profitable in the long term through managed timber extraction, forest plantations and other means, doesn't matter. He wants cash money NOW.

The idea that private owners have more incentive is theoretically true, on the ASSUMPTION that land prices represent close to their true productive value, that land is scarce, that almost all people are rational, think about the long term, have sufficient perspective, and aren't taken by greed. Needless to say these assumptions aren't often borne out in the real world, least of all in the places that most need protection.

I don't find litigation compelling, it will only be effective on some things. How do you litigate for acid rain? How about dead or contaminated fish in the ocean, that a poor fishing community relied on? How on earth do you litigate something like CFC usage? There is no direct link to that particular polluter and no direct damage. If the Smith company is struggling and can power their fridges with CFC at half the price of alternatives, why wouldn't they use them? Isn't that the very premise of capitalism? To this, ACists often argue that reputation will keep companies in line. I don't think that's evidenced in the real world, with the exception of few marginally effective boycotts. Most consumers have no idea where their produce comes from, and what conditions it was made under, and many just don't care. This becomes even more true the more you decentralize a market system.

[tomdemaine]

The land in the amazon isn't owned it's supposedly controlled by the government.

[pvn]

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How can this not be clear after 30 seconds of thinking about it?

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Because while there is value in preserving a resource, there is often much greater value in exploiting it. When a forest is controlled by a private landowner, he may see the forest as nothing but valuable lumber. If he sells the lumber, he will become wealthy. If a regulator sells the lumber, he doesn't even get a bonus (barring corruption).

The private landowner may choose to preserve the forest for future sale and hope the asset appreciates, but the value of that forest is likely tied up in the lumber available, so the next owner will also have strong incentive to exploit it.

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And he can make *even more* money by selling the lumber, then replanting. Duh.

Plus, young trees are much, much better carbon sinks than old trees. Using MORE wood is *good* for the environment.

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/n...b-28492a462651

[Phil153]

I did a quick search of Brazil's ownership rights, and came up with this:

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In Brazil, colonists and developers can gain title to Amazon lands by simply clearing forest and placing a few head of cattle on the land.

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SOUND LIKE AC MUCH?? :lmfao:

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Brazil

Non-Brazilians can buy almost any property in Brazil, enjoying similar rights to nationals of this country. There are only restrictions for foreign ownership of property situated in or near areas of national security, near the coast, and near borders with other countries.

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So I'm not sure your statement is accurate.

Certainly countries like Ecuador allow land ownership, and they have also suffered terribly at the hands of greedy corporations seeking a quick buck. Note also that where land is already owned in these poor countries, companies use tactics of intimidation and rely on the native's naivety to gain legal rights to the land.

That's not to say that government policies can't and don't hurt the situation. Some do. But "land ownership" is not a magical solution to environmental destruction, especially when poor people are involved. To suggest that land ownership will do away with or even lessen environmental problems is terribly myopic. Certainly it helps with some types, but there are many types it doesn't, or even worsens the problems.

Borodog is extrapolating his basic concepts so far that he's once again running out of air. For anyone reading his OP, this should give you pause: "it comes down to the same thing that all worsening problems come down to: it's the government's fault."

What sane person claims that there would be no worsening problems without government?

[Borodog]

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Borodog's summary of the history differs from my understanding. I'm not familiar with any judicial decisions restricting the right to sue for pollution, but I do know that it is possible to sue under common law nuisance and trespass "causes of action" for pollution to this day. I'm unsure how recent this is, but the common law dates back hundreds of years to colonial times. It is most definately possible to sue over the types of "pollution" problems someone in the 18th century would encounter: someone spilled their crap on my yard, someone makes too much noise, etc. It seems to me that lawsuits have been a potential remedy all through the 19th and 20th centuries. Indeed, government has made it much easier to sue for polluting by passing statutes designed to encourage those types of lawsuits.


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It is important to realize that this failure has not been a question purely of ignorance, a simple time lag between recognizing a new techno*logical problem and facing up to it. For if some of the modern pollutants have only recently become known, factory smoke and many of its bad effects have been known ever since the Industrial Revolution, known to the extent that the American courts, during the late?and as far back as the early?nineteenth century made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial smoke. To do so, the courts had to?and did?systematically change and weaken the defenses of property right embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law. Before the mid and late nineteenth century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages and against which he could take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property rights. But during the nineteenth century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary practice of fellow polluters.
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As factories began to arise and emit smoke, blighting the orchards of neighboring farmers, the farmers would take the manufacturers to court, asking for damages and injunctions against further invasion of their property. But the judges said, in effect, "Sorry. We know that indus*trial smoke (i.e., air pollution) invades and interferes with your property rights. But there is something more important than mere property rights: and that is public policy, the 'common good.' And the common good decrees that industry is a good thing, industrial progress is a good thing, and therefore your mere private property rights must be overridden on behalf of the general welfare." And now all of us are paying the bitter price for this overriding of private property, in the form of lung disease and countless other ailments. And all for the "common good"!17
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That this principle has guided the courts during the air age as well may be seen by a decision of the Ohio courts in Antonik v. Chamberlain (1947). The residents of a suburban area near Akron sued to enjoin the defendants from operating a privately owned airport. The grounds were invasion of property rights through excessive noise. Refusing the injunc*tion, the court declared:
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In our business of judging in this case, while sitting as a court of equity, we must not only weigh the conflict of interests between the airport owner and the nearby landowners, but we must further recognize the public policy of the generation in which we live. We must recognize that the establishment of an airport? is of great concern to the public, and if such an airport is abated, or its establishment prevented, the consequences will be not only a serious injury to the owner of the port property but may be a serious loss of a valuable asset to the entire community.18
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To cap the crimes of the judges, legislatures, federal and state, moved in to cement the aggression by prohibiting victims of air pollution from engaging in "class action" suits against polluters. Obviously, if a factory pollutes the atmosphere of a city where there are tens of thousands of victims, it is impractical for each victim to sue to collect his particular damages from the polluter (although an injunction could be used effec*tively by one small victim). The common law, therefore, recognizes the validity of "class action" suits, in which one or a few victims can sue the aggressor not only on their own behalf, but on behalf of the entire class of similar victims. But the legislatures systematically outlawed such class action suits in pollution cases. For this reason, a victim may successfully sue a polluter who injures him individually, in a one-to-one "private nuisance" suit. But he is prohibited by law from acting against a mass polluter who is injuring a large number of people in a given area! As Frank Bubb writes, "It is as if the government were to tell you that it will (attempt to) protect you from a thief who steals only from you, but it will not protect you if the thief also steals from everyone else in the neighborhood?"19

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Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty. References included.

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Second, it is false to say that the government exempts itself from environmental regulations. I would say that the government is much more conscious of the environment than private industry.

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Ask the people of Vieques and get back to me on that.

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It lets huge tracts of the West lie fallow to protect the environment.

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Except that this harms the environment more often that not; for example by refusing to allow underbrush to be cleared from public lands those lands have become prone to enormous wildfires.

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It buys hybrid and natural gas cars at a much higher rate than the private sector and spends billions on.

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Which is incredibly wasteful and harmful to the environment, since a hybrid Prius has a larger environmental footprint than a Hummer.

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When I was working for the feds, we spent most of our time complying with state regulations that under the supremacy clause we didn't even have to comply with.

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Thank you.

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The reason why the feds are the biggest polluter is not because they don't care, they are simply the biggest organization in the country.

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You say this like its an excuse. They foist those pollutants, those costs, off on the public, and here you are constructing apologetics for them. Sometimes I really don't understand your knee-jerk defense of evil just because it is undertaken by bureaucrats, Iron.

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Third, everything that Borodog likes to claim about how ownership of resources solves the problem can be applied to government as owner. Essentially, the government owns resources like the atmosphere, rivers, etc. And unlike a private landowner, the government's actual goal is protection of the resource.

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No it isn't. Government officials cannot sell the resources and keep the procedes. They don't care at all about protecting the capital value of the land, water, air or other resources they supposedly "own". All they are interested in is the current income that can be generated.

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Finally, determining who is responsible for pollution and therefore prosecuting a lawsuit is very difficult. See this post for more on that.

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That's because the field of environmental forensics was euthanized in it's crib over a century ago by government actions already discussed. Why bother to figure out who is doing the damage if you can't make them pay for it?

[Kaj]

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Third, everything that Borodog likes to claim about how ownership of resources solves the problem can be applied to government as owner. Essentially, the government owns resources like the atmosphere, rivers, etc. And unlike a private landowner, the government's actual goal is protection of the resource.

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The government may act as an owner by denying others the ability to own the resources, but that doesn't mean those running the government have the same types of incentives as an owner does and the fact that this isn't clear to you is a bit scary. Elected officials can be out of office after only one term so the incentive can be to plunder what you can while you can. Private owners have the incentive to preserve their resources either for their own consumption or to sell to someone down the line. Government officials do not bear the direct consequences of their actions upon the resources they "own" as private owners do. There's no internalization of the costs of government action. How can this not be clear after 30 seconds of thinking about it?

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"Private owners have the incentive to preserve their resources either for their own consumption or to sell to someone down the line."

Exactly. Private owners have two goals -- consume or make money off the investment.

"There's no internalization of the costs of government action."

Exactly. Which is why government can often do a better job than private sector in taking care of the land. Because it doesn't have a profit-based bottomline. Which is why your national parks are so well cared for.

Those seeking profit are the ones who are more likely to plunder while they can. Not too many local governments are plundering the parks and forest reserves. Unlike the private sector, elected officials are accountable to the people who actually live in the area. Corporations are responsible to their shareholders -- they don't live in the area being affected by the corporation's actions. If Councilman Bob authorizes the metropark's ecosystem to be encroached or destroyed, he'll have a whole city calling for his head, if they don't want it. If Chairperson Bob authorizes the company backyard's ecosystem to be encroached or destroyed, he probably is improving the bottomline for his shareholders and will get a bonus, and the local residents affected by his actions are not those he is ultimately accountable to.

Your whole analysis is 180 degrees off.

[slickpoppa]

Private lawsuits cannot effectively prevent air pollution. It is as simple as that. Let's say I step out on my porch and test for hazardous substances and find some cancer causing agent in the air. How the hell am I supposed to know who to sue?

[Borodog]

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Private lawsuits cannot effectively prevent air pollution. It is as simple as that. Let's say I step out on my porch and test for hazardous substances and find some cancer causing agent in the air. How the hell am I supposed to know who to sue?

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Call a lawyer. They will investigate. They would probably use an environmental forensics company to discover the source of the pollution. Perhaps they would employ computational fluid dynamics modelling. You know, like the EPA does.

Why does everyone assume that private individuals are too incompetent to figure anything out yet assume that bureaucrats are infallible?

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[WordWhiz]

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People and companies are often greedy, short sighted and lacking in broad skills. Hence, when McDonalds wants to buy beef, a rancher in the Amazon clear fells a large area of his land, to grow grass for cattle. The land turns worthless after a decade; but he doesn't care - he made his money. And he goes on to buy some other cheap land. That the land is much more profitable in the long term through managed timber extraction, forest plantations and other means, doesn't matter. He wants cash money NOW.

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There seems to be a simple solution. A greedy capitalist could buy the land off the farmer for a lump sum payment &gt; what the farmer could earn, but &lt; the total value of the land if it is profitably managed.

You seem to anticipate this objection in your next paragraph when you say that the free market only works when people act rationally, have complete information, etc. But the same objections apply to govt regulation, only moreso. In my example, all it takes is 1 greedy capitalist in the world to fix the problem. In a regulatory world, one weak link anywhere can lead to imperfect and even perverse outcomes. The idea that govt will act rationally and correctly is rarely "borne out in the real world, least of all in the places that most need protection."

[slickpoppa]

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Private lawsuits cannot effectively prevent air pollution. It is as simple as that. Let's say I step out on my porch and test for hazardous substances and find some cancer causing agent in the air. How the hell am I supposed to know who to sue?

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Call a lawyer. They will investigate. They would probably use an environmental forensics company to discover the source of the pollution. Perhaps they would employ computational fluid dynamics modelling. You know, like the EPA does.

Why does everyone assume that private individuals are too incompetent to figure anything out yet assume that bureaucrats are infallible?

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But if there are several companies which release that pollutant it is essentially impossible to prove which one released the particles that are in your yard. What are you supposed to do if the pollutant is something produced by the hundreds of millions of [censored] unregulated cars being driven in China?

Moreover, there is the problem of proving damages. Lets say you notice the pollutant really quickly and somehow are able to prove how released the particles that ended up in yard. How much money are you going to be able to collect for being exposed to a cancer causing agent for 1 week? Probably not much. And probably not enough to incentivize you to take up the costs of hiring a lawyer and filing a lawsuit. So the polluters will keep on polluting because of people catching them is so prohibitively high.