Topic: Maximum role of Government? - page 14. (Read 28705 times)

That's irrelevant.  Groups of citizens hire lobbiests all the time.  If citizens can overcome a private security company, why can they not overcome a coal plant company?

Private, independent ratings and standards agencies would be much more effective at preventing wide-scale pollution, because if one gets corrupted or co-opted, its ratings will diverge from the rest, and it will quickly be discredited. Someone pays off an EPA inspector, and there's nobody to double-check.

I already did. And since you seem incapable of responding, I'll assume you concede.

Because the people already pay people to go represent their interests in Washington. these people are called 'Congressmen'

Why not?

You cannot compare hiring multiple private military forces in response to a threat to hiring lobbyists. Please, set up your straw men elsewhere.

Funny, when we had a similar argument about who would fund a security company against a crime syndicate you made it very clear that such a syndicate wouldn't be a match against the massive funding of the private citizens. Yet now the argument is reversed? How come?

Who, do you think, will be better able to pay for lobbyists, the coal-burning power company, or the citizens?

Care to address his points? And Daly's?

I didn't point you toward the paper, I pointed you toward the concept. That you found a paper is immaterial. Care to address my arguments?

But I want you to look up 'tragedy of the commons' to see how difficult it is to allocate resources held in common.

You were the one who pointed me to the paper (which I thank you for). It makes a number of salient points, pretty much exactly in line with those of Herman Daly. There is nothing ridiculous about it.

I don't know why you are now arguing against the paper that you seemed to imply would back your claims.

This is ridiculous. If it's mutual, it's not coercion. If it's coercion, it's not mutual.

we mutually agree to coercion

Excellent.  Can't wait to see how that one is explained away/brushed aside.

To say that we mutually agree to coercion is not to say that we are required to enjoy it, or even to pretend we enjoy it. Who enjoys taxes? We all grumble about them. But we accept compulsory taxes because we recognize that voluntary taxes would favor the conscienceless. We institute and (grumblingly) support taxes and other coercive devices to escape the horror of the commons.

An alternative to the commons need not be perfectly just to be preferable. With real estate and other material goods, the alternative we have chosen is the institution of private property coupled with legal inheritance. Is this system perfectly just? As a genetically trained biologist I deny that it is. It seems to me that, if there are to be differences in individual inheritance, legal possession should be perfectly correlated with biological inheritance-that those who are biologically more fit to be the custodians of property and power should legally inherit more. But genetic recombination continually makes a mockery of the doctrine of "like father, like son" implicit in our laws of legal inheritance. An idiot can inherit millions, and a trust fund can keep his estate intact. We must admit that our legal system of private property plus inheritance is unjust -- but we put up with it because we are not convinced, at the moment, that anyone has invented a better system. The alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate. Injustice is preferable to total ruin.

The tragedy of the commons as a food basket is averted by private property, or something formally like it. But the air and waters surrounding us cannot readily be fenced, and so the tragedy of the commons as a cesspool must be prevented by different means, by coercive laws or taxing devices that make it cheaper for the polluter to treat his pollutants than to discharge them untreated. We have not progressed as far with the solution of this problem as we have with the first. Indeed, our particular concept of private property, which deters us from exhausting the positive resources of the earth, favors pollution. The owner of a factory on the bank of a stream -- whose property extends to the middle of the stream -- often has difficulty seeing why it is not his natural right to muddy the waters flowing past his door. The law, always behind the times, requires elaborate stitching and fitting to adapt it to this newly perceived aspect of the commons.

But I want you to look up 'tragedy of the commons' to see how difficult it is to allocate resources held in common.

Similarly, Hardin's use of "commons" has frequently been misunderstood, leading Hardin to later remark that he should have titled his work "The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons".

Daly argues that these things should actually be subtracted from the GNP, as they do not represent growth at all.

No man, or piece of land, is an island unto itself.

You ruined it by ignoring science.