Topic: Negative Externalities (Read 12344 times)

I understand your point very well in that matter. Let's say my answer is the typical response you would get from a "fundamental" anarchist, in that the responsabilities that I am willing to bear and the actions that I am willing to take are certainly not enough to properly and effectively half wrong doings, in this case pollution, but that such actions will put a term to obvious, tangible problems that the actual system perpetuates.

I am aware that ecological consequences are of an unfathomable complexity, yet there are a few obvious, potent ill effect that could be put to an end right now and that would have disappeared long ago if it wasn't for government support. Let's say extensive corn farming as an example. But my knowledge of the environement is too limited to present you with well documented arguments, so i'll provide you with an economic analogy, since i think we can agree money is managed as a common nowadays.

I am thinking about fractional reserve banking. See, there will be people who will argue that fiat currency is necessary to support today's economy, or that debt supports the kind of growth that a savings based economy could never dream to achieve, and i don't pretend that walking out of the fiat system will fix all the ills of the world, simply that I choose to not be part of it (one of the reasons I like Bitcoin). But whatever your stand might be on that matter, the fractional banking act is an abomination and needs to go.

My point, if you may percieve it so, is that to chose between an unknown future rathered than a well identified evil, I will pick the unknown, and that I will always be best served by myself. And also that political power attracts the corrupt, so I wish for as little of it to be available as possible.

Of course, a society where people are directly liable for their actions is doomed if their members aren't acting is a responsible fashion, but then again, such is the case in any other type of society.

The contradiction with communism or socialism globally, is that it purports people should be ruled, implying they are evil, and yet that to rule them is for their own good, which they don't deserve, since they are evil by definition.

I aknowledge that socialism has birthed some social progress, but it all appears to me as a band aid to fix ills that have been born from socialist reforms to begin with.

Ants eat food sources that are several times larger than they are.  It makes sense to cooperate when resources are effectively unlimited.
Piranha eat food sources that are smaller than they are.  It makes sense to compete when resources are scarce.

Earth's resources are becoming fewer every day.  At the same time, human knowledge is growing exponentially.  You do the math.

This has obvious advantages and disadvantages.  I agree in spirit with the majority of your post, but don't understand how this could work.
The biosphere is absurdly complex, and often irreparable on human time-scales.  A rational actor across the world can toxify a lake which destroys a local insect population which reduces the throughput of migratory birds which were themselves fertilising speciaised plants halfway around the globe with a continuing chain of effects.
These events happen naturally at a variable frequency, but the rate at which they are now occurring is effectively an emergency.

In the history of humanity, we generally destroy enormous wealths of biological diversity for individual economic gain.  Now that individuals have the potential to damage large amounts of the Earth through market forces, many people believe that they should be preemptively prevented.
An extreme example is of Joe Bloggs deciding to set up a fission power plant to sell power to his neighbours.  Even if they all agree, the potential damage could be felt worldwide.



Yes and no.  I went a little off-topic there.


I don't necessarily support full social or economic freedom, along with a great many people.
I'm also not sure that communism is essentially contradictory.  I believe that it makes sense to a certain portion of the population who conceive of humanity as a mass entity striving to betterment.  The socialist impulse has been useful in bettering the conditions of the poor, just as it has been useful in suppressing large numbers of people.
The libertarian principle has been responsible for much of the rise of science, culture, and technology, but I have yet to see it applied stably over large numbers of people.

Remember, in an Ant colony, the libertarian fails.  Amongst Piranha, the communist is lunch!

Airlines would be using the least dangerous tech regardless of what consumer protection laws might say.  It tends to be bad press when airlines kill their customers.

It's a less than ideal example, but I wasn't the one who brought up CFC's in refrigerators.

No, they aren't.  HCFCs are not CFCs.  The naming is similar, but they're completely different chemically.  CFCs are gone as of last year except in a few small applications where there is no suitable replacement, mostly specialized fire suppression systems.

Most HCFCs do not deplete ozone to a relevant degree, though they are potent greenhouse gasses and and have been being phased out for 15 years now and will be gone by 2020 (2030 for developing nations).

Then it sounds like the opposite of what you are arguing is true.  Air cycle refrigerators exist in aircraft because of the risk of liability for freon leaks at 30000 feet, and because of laws which account for this externality.

Of course it's usually pretty cold at 30000 feet also, so air cycle cooling probably saves a lot of energy.  And small scale turbines are impossibly difficult to manufacture and not very efficient, so having one in your refrigerator is not practical.  And closed-cycle air and CO2 cycle refrigerators are somewhat high pressure, so having one explode in your home would not be fun.

Overall I don't think this is a very good example of unjust government intervention, even if we assume the law is at all enforceable.  Considering the fact that I am not being arrested for breathing, I think your interpretation is somewhat broad.

Well, I did oversimplify the situation, but the basic premise is true.  Air cycle refrigerators do not exist because prior regulations into the industry makes research into alternatives unattractive for manufactures.  How much does the risk of getting sideways with some nitwit government oversight board cost?  That seems worthwhile with aircraft, mostly because the risk of a freon leak in a pressurized cabin at 3000 feet could kill your customers.  I doubt that it's worth the risk with consumer devices that usually depend upon profit margins measured in a few dollars each.

I think you're really underestimating the proclivity of industry and commerce to simply ignore stupid laws.

Aircraft are a special case.  Weight is an issue.  They require pressurized cabins.  Etc..

It's funny that you should mention this because...

(wait for it)


...they still do!  And it's largely because of government regulations that they do!  Did you know that common air is a refrigerant?  It is....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_cycle_machine

So why isn't air cycle refrigeration used for household refrigerators?  Two reasons...

1) Air cycle machines were inefficient as compared to the ozone destroying refrigerents banned in the US in 1992, but modern advancements have improved their efficency so that they are competitive with the green(er) (still CFC based, just less destructive) refrigerents used in consumer devices today.

And the big reason...

2) Air cycle refrigeration is, by definition, and open cycle.  And the same law referred to above also banned the intentional release of any refrigerant into the atmostphere related to the production, use, repair or destruction of a consumer device.


So it is against the law to manufacture a refrigerator that uses any open refrigeration cycle, including one of the few modern refrigeration cycles that does not use CFC's!  There's your govenment at work!

The airlines get to use open cycle refrigeration because they are not consumer devices!

Thank you for pointing this out.  And, yes, for the purposes of this thread I think it's important to make the connection between pecuniary and non-pecuniary externalities.

Pecuniary externalities are not obviously harmful.  But they eventually translate into material externalities which are very easily recognized as such.  So I think it is important for promoters of Bitcoin to make the logical connection between the two and to point out how pecuniary externalities are in fact harmful.

The problem with commons is that they belong to the "public", thus effectively to the state, and as such are administered by the state. As some people mentioned it results in several problems: Not only is the government the biggest polluter, they setup arbitrary pollution limits that are not respected by big corporations, and the same governmental restrictions allows these groups to pollute in complete impunity. Some of the governmental regulations are also completely misguided, like limiting levels of carbon dioxide, which is not only pointless but pretty much gives license to people to emit any other highly polluting gases as long as they keep their CO² level down, while being marked as "green".

The problem comes down to a few simple fundamentals. Under the rule of commons, essential commodities such as land, air, water cannot be made your private property, they are managed by a corruptible and corrupted entity, and you are forbidden by that same entity to defend these resources against the polluters. In a free market scenario, that responsibility would be yours. In this case, consumers would need to stop buying bad products such as leaded fuel and CFC based refrigerators, but you can certainly expect that I, in an attempt to keep my land, air and water clean, will sue those who don't. Keep in mind that the great majority of polluting substances that have been banned by the government have been so thanks to consumer pressure, not governmental impulse.



That's corporatism, the opposite of a free market.


You can't achieve social freedom without economical freedom. Communists don't have the luxury of being naive, since their concept is contradictory by nature.

I'm interested in hearing more about this.
There exists a significant proportion of the population who, despite the wishes of the rest, will fill the air with smog and the waters with run-off for a cent on the dollar.
If unrestrained, some people will burn the Earth to a husk to get the golden egg before others do.

State-sponsored force has been the only agency so far by which any modicum of forward-thinking can be imposed on the market.  Without it, fridges would still be pumping out CFCs, car fuel would contain lead, agricultural run-off would destroy a large proportion of marine ecosystems and the powerful would restructure the economy to impoverish and undereducate the powerless in order the reinstate feudalism.

I'm fond of social libertarianism, but I can't imagine how fiscal libertarians see the world; they honestly seem as naive to human nature as communists.

What you are describing here is communism, or any form of authoritarian government in general. What about free market? Do you pretend employers will disappear under such conditions? Your idea is that if person A needs my expensive gizmo to build his widgets and that in return of letting him use my gizmo, i get to buy widgets off of him for less than i resell them for, that this difference in price should eventually bestow him ownership of my gizmo. This is in contradiction with the principle of private property for I never chose to sell him the widget for that cumulated price difference; and note that no state was involved in this relationship. Now, are you implying private property is wrong, or that the state, keeping the man down from his "fair" reward is wrong is supporting private property?

The "market" as you call it is an indicator of the potential price a given item can fetch GIVEN a few conditions:

1. That you have access to that market place. If a 5870 sells for $180 in the US and you live in Europe where they are $250, no amount of bitching about evil middlemen at your local store will bring the price down to American standards.

2. That there is a demand for that particular good in said market place. A PS3 is worth $200 in the US. Now try and sell it for that much in Somalia.

Even then there's no guaranty you'll trade for the market's quote. You might sell cheaper, or buy higher, since yeah, it is only a quote, no one is there making sure your goods will fetch the price displayed on some random sign. Unless you are supporting the existence of a regulatory institution that will ensure you fetch the 'fair' price. Technically, government.

Baring the existence of government to fix prices across the charts, the value of any given item is subjective. Now I'll let you ponder whether you want to stick with the evil government keeping the man down from selling his own labor which also happens to be the righteous government making sure you can trade your goods for the "fair" price.


Just pointing that this particular argument is several centuries old, is part of most constitutions of nations all around the world, and that since you are so attached to what is "fair", that it might be "fair" of you to research what mankind think is "fair" in that situation before you go around talking about some imaginary end user license agreement.

Don't have enough time to read whole thread, but here's my .02 BTC:

1) Make sure we're talking about non-pecuniary externalities, and make sure to define that. Because basically every market system operates on constant pecuniary externalities, its just that it often takes some work (and transparency!) to figure out why something costs what it does.

2) For the purposes of this thread all should read Coase's paper on externalities. Externalities are solved by markets when transaction costs are low. Thus, it would be more productive to talk about what externalities have high transaction costs, and then figure out how to lower those costs, or design some alternate system that is manages the problem ethically and equitably.

So what?

What's the real risk? Interest on loans, non-refundable permit fees? These are capitalist and governmental creations. Without them, in the event of failure you could recuperate most of your start-up costs by selling what you've purchased. If some individuals still find that too risky, they could join workers' cooperatives that already exist.

See my previous response. Workers may find security, as long as they're profitable enough, under the tutelage of an employer, but they'll find security and liberty in worker solidarity.

If workers desire managers to help with this task, they can democratically elect recall-able ones.

If the workers can take ownership of the means of production, they could create cooperatives and manage themselves. Some anarchists would prefer communes, collectives, syndicates, or solitary craftsmanship and that's fine, too. Unfortunately, the state prevents workers from taking ownership of that which they've already paid for in the difference between their wages and the sales prices of their products. So, it's not that the workers need employers to work. They don't. It's that employers need the state to employ.

I happen to think that the market is good for determining value as long as everyone can participate in it without patronizing middlemen.

Nope. Value is subjective, but the market is useful, useful enough anyway, for determining it.

Only if you boss them around and try to resell the product of their services for a profit.
Only when its members are employees, or find themselves subordinated in some other way, instead of partners, but then it's not much of a co-op.

That's just another form of employer/employee relationship.

And so is this.

You can divide labor when being self employed.  You hire out services to someone else outside of your skillset.  Or you form a co-op, which is just a really big form of self-employment.

Since all value is subjective, what you are saying is that as long as both parties agree, the trade fair. Did you just defeat you're own argument there?

Based on who's determination of value?  Yours?