Stereotypes associated with Libertarianism and Ron Paul

There will always be some oversight. Libertarians simply propose that private industry and those with money make those determinations. Sorry to sound simplistic, but when you take apart all the arguments, their proposed system is identical to the current one. And that's leaving out all the likely negative ramifications - just taking it at face value.

It seems like it's an article of faith that centralized government = tyranny. And it's such an old argument (250 years going strong) and being repackaged every two decades or so.

Agree with that. but Libertarianism in America have often gone far beyond that, there even go beyond what Hayek would. Hayek will agree that polluting common resource like river is legitimate gov project, Libertarian paid by Cato and Koch is more extreme than that.

Hayek was a moderate. Generally, Libertarians tend to favor Rothbard or Mises.

Actually, Libertarians do believe in environmental protection. It's called free-market environmentalism. [1]

edited 8th Oct '11 3:20:11 PM by secretist

The problem with Free Market environmentalism is it assumes companies will give a shit about the environment unless they can find a way to shave dollars off their operating costs by being eco-friendly.

In other words, just like with everything libertarian, it hopes for the magic of capitalism to somehow fix the world even when all logic and data says it wont.

edited 8th Oct '11 3:46:53 PM by Midgetsnowman

Actually there's a whole green market of saps who buys stuff just because they're organic, recycled, or other stuff says otherwise. Look up any company website and you could see how they use it as a marketing tool incentivizes good behavior. People buying green products is a huge market. Evian Fiji Fiji Environment Fiji Community Voss Voss Environment Voss Projects Voss Social

edited 9th Oct '11 2:46:50 PM by secretist

All that means is that they made sure the package was green.

Basically what chains said. The Prius? It was not environmentally healthy, because they shipped the resources used in its production just about all over the world, and the battery had to be disposed of in a more complicated way. Companies can tack on "green" stuff all they like, but most consumers don't have the information required to tell the difference between an actually economical car and a hideously inefficient car made to look economical.

The links say more than just the package. Delivery fuels, charity, manufacturing, etc. being green as well as whole list of ways businesses voluntary use green practices for marketing and karma.

See Green marketing.

edited 9th Oct '11 3:38:57 PM by secretist

Thats the point though.

Theres no economic incentive to actually being Green. But theres a lot of incentive to bullshit into claiming you're using green tech while actually polluting the fuck out of everything.

edited 9th Oct '11 5:30:38 PM by Midgetsnowman

Green Marketing, aka. greenwash. Adopt a fancy new logo, start a grand sounding enviromenal project and put up a few signs about not wasting water, and boom, eco-credentials. Doesn't amtter that in the core of things you're still just as wasteful.

Most companies actually aren't harmful to the environment. They keep extremely good care of the property they own as well as property near where they do business. They actually don't go around polluting. People once they buy stuff may litter, but that's their pollution, not the companies.

There are accidents like BP, but they don't happen that often. Number 3 goes into effect here.

1. Overexploitation occurs to the extent of the lack of ownership incentives to care for the property, and that this communalization effect occurs to the extent of multiplicity of ownership. Overexploitation reduces the intrinsic and retail value of the property, the effect of which is most clearly felt by individual owners or through limited co-ownership. 2. Pollution occurs where and to the extent that victims are prevented or hindered from seeking tort restitution for such aggression. Legislative and Judicial authorities have tended to favor heavy industries over individual or class action in favor of public property and the common good. 3. Pollution clean-up also occurs naturally in a free market, because reducing the negative value of a property is a net gain, again leading to a higher intrinsic or retail value, and thus marketability. 4. Overconsumption is a flawed concept, because it assumes that resources are non-renewable. The market, through supply and demand, regulates consumption by adjusting it according to supply. For example, if a resource becomes more scarce, its value increases and thus also its cost. This forces consumers to redirect their purchases to alternate resources which are in more plentiful supply. In addition, the higher market value of the resource creates an incentive to create more of the commodity, and allows for a greater expenditure in doing so.

Number 2, actually goes with the fact that gov'ts themselves due to sovereign immunity are the biggest polluters. Environment

Who's the greatest polluter of all? The oil companies? The chemical companies? The nuclear power plants? If you guessed "none of the above," you'd be correct. Our government, at the federal, state, and local levels, is the single greatest polluter in the land. In addition, our government doesn't even clean up its own garbage! In 1988, for example, the EPA demanded that the Departments of Energy and Defense clean up 17 of their weapons plants which were leaking radioactive and toxic chemicals — enough contamination to cost $100 billion in clean-up costs over 50 years! The EPA was simply ignored. No bureaucrats went to jail or were sued for damages. Government departments have sovereign immunity.

In 1984, a Utah court ruled that the U.S. military was negligent in its nuclear testing, causing serious health problems (e.g. death) for the people exposed to radioactive fallout. The Court of Appeals dismissed the claims of the victims, because government employees have sovereign immunity.

Hooker Chemical begged the Niagara Falls School Board not to excavate the land where Hooker had safely stored toxic chemical waste. The school board ignored these warnings and taxpayers had to foot a $30 million relocation bill when health problems arose. The EPA filed suit, not against the reckless school board, but against Hooker Chemical! Government officials have sovereign immunity.

Government, both federal and local, is the greatest single polluter in the U.S. This polluter literally gets away with murder because of sovereign immunity. Libertarians would make government as responsible for its actions as everyone else is expected to be. Libertarians would protect the environment by first abolishing sovereign immunity.

By turning to government for environmental protection, we've placed the fox in charge of the hen house — and a very large hen house it is! Governments, both federal and local, control over 40% of our country's land mass. Unfortunately, government's stewardship over our land is gradually destroying it.

For example, the Bureau of Land Management controls an area almost twice the size of Texas, including nearly all of Alaska and Nevada. Much of this land is rented to ranchers for grazing cattle. Because ranchers are only renting the land, they have no incentive to take care of it. Not surprisingly, studies as early as 1925 indicated that cattle were twice as likely to die on public ranges and had half as many calves as animals grazing on private lands.

Obviously, owners make better environmental guardians than renters. If the government sold its acreage to private ranchers, the new owners would make sure that they grazed the land sustainably to maximize profit and yield.

Indeed, ownership of wildlife can literally save endangered species from extinction. Between 1979 and 1989, Kenya banned elephant hunting, yet the number of these noble beasts dropped from 65,000 to 19,000. In Zimbabwe during the same time period, however, elephants could be legally owned and sold. The number of elephants increased from 30,000 to 43,000 as their owners became fiercely protective of their "property." Poachers didn't have a chance!

Similarly, commercialization of the buffalo saved it from extinction. We never worry about cattle becoming extinct, because their status as valuable "property" encourages their propagation. The second step libertarians would take to protect the environment and save endangered species would be to encourage private ownership of both land and animals.

Environmentalists were once wary of private ownership, but now recognize that establishing the property rights of native people, for example, has become an effective strategy to save the rain forests. Do you remember the movie, Medicine Man, where scientist Sean Connery discovers a miracle drug in the rain forest ecology? Unfortunately, the life-saving compound is literally bulldozed under when the government turns the rain forest over to corporate interests. The natives that scientist Connery lives with are driven from their forest home. Their homesteading rights are simply ignored by their own government!

Our own Native Americans were driven from their rightful lands as well. Similarly, our national forests are turned over to logging companies, just as the rain forests are. By 1985, the U.S. Forest Service had built 350,000 miles of logging roads with our tax dollars — outstripping our interstate highway system by a factor of eight! In the meantime, hiking trails declined by 30%. Clearly, our government serves special interest groups instead of protecting our environmental heritage.

Even our national parks are not immune from abuse. Yellowstone's Park Service once encouraged employees to trap predators (e.g., wolves, fox, etc.) so that the hoofed mammals favored by visitors would flourish. Not surprisingly, the ecological balance was upset. The larger elk drove out the deer and sheep, trampled the riverbanks, and destroyed beaver habitat. Without the beavers, the water fowl, mink, otter, and trout were threatened. Without the trout or the shrubs and berries that once lined the riverbanks, grizzlies began to endanger park visitors in their search for food. As a result, park officials had to remove the bears and have started bringing back the wolves.

Wouldn't we be better served if naturalist organizations, such as the Audubon Society or Nature Conservancy, took over the management of our precious parks? The Audubon Society's Rainey Wildlife Sanctuary partially supports itself with natural gas wells operated in an ecologically sound manner. In addition to preserving the sensitive habitat, the Society shows how technology and ecology can co-exist peacefully and profitably.

The environment would benefit immensely from the elimination of sovereign immunity coupled with the privatization of "land and beast." The third and final step in the libertarian program to save the environment is the use of restitution both as a deterrent and a restorative. Next month's column will feature the second part of the Pollution Solution, answering the question: "How would libertarians keep our air and water clean?"

Anyone for Separation of Business and State?

Yea, I am for it separation of state and a lot of stuff.

No, invisibleman. If the state does not regulate businesses, then the businesses will fuck us all over ala the trusts and monopolies of the early nineteen hundreds.

Anyway, secretist, all that doesn't mean we shouldn't regulate the pollution caused by businesses. It just means we should also regulate the government run sites. We're supposed to be doing both anyway.

@Aceof Spades When I said Separation of Business and State, I didn't mean "no regulation" of businesses. Obviously, it is the role of government to make sure that businesses do not initiate force, theft or fraud against private citizens - or do anything that may endanger its citizens.

The idea is that we should make it as difficult (and illegal) as possible for government and businesses to collude with one another. The problem is that the roles of government and private enterprise are becoming more and more blurred when the roles should be strictly defined.

The proper role of a government is to defend that country's national sovereignty, defend its borders, maintain order, provide essential (essential as in essential to the stability of the country and the protection of its citizens) services, and to protect the lives and rights of its citizens. On the other hand, the proper role of a private enterprise is to provide goods and nonessential (but not unimportant) services in exchange for money.

Simply put: governments should not be artificially doing things that the market does naturally (setting prices, deciding which businesses should fail and which should be bailed out, telling people what they may (or may not) buy or sell, etc.), and businesses should not behave like de facto governments (determining national policy, using police and military to protect their interests, manipulating the law to limit or destroy competition, starting wars, etc.).

edited 11th Oct '11 1:34:52 PM by invisibleman

I do not trust corps one bit to protect the enviornment. Free market environmentalism is bullshit.

Read Collapse by Jared Diamond. He has a large section about the situation in America. It's bullshit, this "free market solves everyting!!!!!!!!11!" because the populace can be tricked very easily.

[1]◊

The state will still regulate things that violate the non-aggression principle.

Like driving a car. The pollution coming from said car can be thought of as an act of aggression against fellow citizens.

Which is a lot on the ridiculous side, but it really shows the problem with that line of thinking, when it comes to "no-force" absolutism. When should be about providing a workable balance/framework that actually keeps society running.

It displays the biggest problem I have...it neglects power differentials in terms of acceptable aggression. Just as an example, the fact that pretty much needed contracts are often unilaterally editable, is a HUGE act of aggression/fraud, and it's one that generally the Libertarians that I read are uninterested in dealing with, or at the very least, it's at the back of the list.

No sir. Put that at the front of the list, responsibility for the powerful, and I might listen to them.

A question to Libertarians: forget about thought experiments and first-aggression ethics; what sort of existing laws, regulations, or policy do you agree with? Part of the image problem with Libertarians is they're seen as destructive elements, always wanting to dismantle laws and regulations that are seen as necessary for a non-cohesive society to function.

As an example, Property Rights are all well and good, but they're worthless without means of enforcing them. What's good policy to enforce them, in a way that the Environmental Protection Agency as it currently exists would not be necessary.

It depends on what car you drive actually. There are electric cars like one you can buy from Tesla Motors for example. Even gasoline and hybrid cars don't actually pollute. Not everyone agrees on classifying carbon emissions as pollution.

Just because Joe Q Politician and a couple of crackpot scientists doesnt classify CO 2 emissions as pollution doesnt mean theres a disagreement from the scientific sectors that actually matter,

Wikipedia has a whole list of so-called crackpots by your logic. Link breaks, but just alter then reenter.

Tiny URL!

edited 12th Oct '11 9:28:15 AM by secretist

And that's the point. If I personally think it's pollution..hell, what if I don't want to hear the noise?...then to me it's an act of aggression. Now, again, I think this is way overblown and totally unworkable. But I'm not the one that's running off of complete non-aggression as an ideological absolute. Generally speaking I don't run off of ideological absolutes and distrust anybody who claims to.

Hint: some of those dont even have degrees in the appropriate sciences to be listened to. Not to mention, whether carbon dioxide is the only factor isnt the question, and you're essentially twisting sources to say something they arent.

Most of those scientists argue climate change is Mostly natural, or that projections are flawed, or that they dont know. None of them argue "carbon emissions isnt pollution"

edited 12th Oct '11 9:33:57 AM by Midgetsnowman