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EPA To Buy Small Town In Kansas
Ponca City, We love you writes "The Wichita Eagle reports that Congress has approved funds to relocate the population of the southeast Kansas town of Treece, which is plagued with lead, zinc and other chemical contamination left by a century of mining. Estimates say it will cost about $3 million to $3.5 million to buy out the town, which is surrounded by huge piles of mining waste called 'chat' and dotted with uncapped shafts and cave-ins filled with brackish, polluted water. 'It's been a long, dusty, chat-covered road, but for the citizens of Treece, finally, help will be on the way,' said Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas who has been pushing for a buyout of Treece for two years. The population of Treece has dwindled to about 100 people, almost all of whom want to move but say they can't because the pollution and an ongoing EPA cleanup project makes it impossible to sell a house. The EPA has already bought out the neighboring town of Picher, Oklahoma, stripping Treece of quick access to jobs, shopping, recreation and services, including fire protection and cable TV. Both cities were once prosperous mining communities but the ore ran out and the mines were abandoned by the early 1970s. Of 16 children tested for lead levels in Treece, two had levels between 5 and 10 micrograms per deciliter of blood and one had a level of more than 10 times the threshold for lead poisoning."
Where it will become a nature reserve.
FHA is doing the financing.
AT least the kids are protected from cosmic rays http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/44139/184/
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
There could be lots more (hundreds) towns standing in line by this criteria.
Maybe the townspeople should've just built a big high school football stadium (Friday Night Lights) and sucked it up.
Times Beach, Missouri.
...didn't put a DOME around it, barring everyone in the town from the rest of the world!
If they are, I think I have some old thermometers around here somewhere....ooops! Dropped 'em!
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
In the end it's the tax payers and not the rich owners that end up paying for the clean ups. It's my main opposition to nuclear power not the reactors it's the clean up from both the mines and processing sites. It's true of most mineral based resources that they cut corners on extracting and processing and the people living around the places and tax payers generally suffer. It's long overdue that we end the corporate veil for this kind of abuse and bleed the ones that profited dry to pay for the mess. There's a whole town full of houses we can let them have cheap to live in.
Corporations turn town into a toxic sludge dump.
Taxpayers pay for people to relocate.
=> Free Money solves the pollution problem!
By converting the planet's natural resources into limitless virtual symbols for value, we are approaching a point when we'll have to eat, breathe, and drink money.
I think it may be time to reform money: http://www.realitysandwich.com/money_a_new_beginning
The goods manufactured there are cheaper for us because they export the true cost onto the Chinese population and the environment. Those costs will catch up to them, just as they've caught up to us.
They could use if as a location for a live FPS game. Americas army with live ammo!
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Once the mining companies go belly-up, it's hard to say where the money's gone and who is responsible, because many people were involved. One thing is for certian, we all benefitted from the lower priced minerals, and now we all have to pay to clean up the mess.
It was not a free market system. A faulty accounting system allowed the mines to extract profits without being responsible for the damages.
Now the tax paying public is cleaning up. So the "free market" now has tax payers paying while the company exits with its profits.
A proper market accounting system would have made the mining corporations pay for the cleanup.
So what happened here was a broken market system where the costs of the mines was not properly applied.
So the next step is to put a big dome over the town, trapping everyone inside, and... Oh wait, that was Springfield.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Well, in all seriousness, it is worth noting that Pat Roberts is a Republican pushing for government intervention in an environmental problem. It's not so controversial when it's something an tangible as lead-poisoned children.
Because the perfectly legal free market system crashes the markets, destroys lives, and also destroys the world in the name of increased profits.
Note that this accounting failure is the descendant of a deliberate choice made by various courts shortly after the Industrial Revolution, when they chose to rule for polluting manufacturers and against impacted property owners in a blatant display of "progressive" social engineering triumphing over property rights.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
With lithium batteries cars will be cleaner, heck copper mining for wire which is used in all cars is just about the worst. If we would just require a certain level environmental protection for all goods sold we could prevent most of this mess. No hybrid car nor solar panel required the use of these methods, someone decided to use them so he could pocket the profit.
The comment about lead levels is exaggeration. Lead levels between 5 and 10 mcg/dl are more likely caused by chipping lead paint or lead dust from home renovation. Those lead levels more likely indicate that the mining is NOT causing elevated lead levels.
Lead levels above 10 mcg/dl are considered "elevated." Lead poisoning refers to lead levels above 24 mcg/dl.
Corporations are people, too: http://www.ratical.org/corporations/SCvSPR1886.html
So I guess they merit "social engineering", eh?
/SarcasmOff
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Abe Simpson was right. EEEPAAA!!!!!! Are they going to cover it in a glass dome too?
Indeed, and because we still haven't really learned that lesson (that property rights should *really* be treated as rights, and not subject to modification whenever government finds it more convenient), we're going to see this repeated.
It's certainly one of the ongoing battles with Monsanto corp. over some of the toxic waste sites they've left behind over the years. They've been playing all sorts of legal games to dodge paying for some of it though, including filing bankruptcy and spinning things off to a new company, Solutia.
If individual homeowners could file suits any time a corporation generates pollution that falls on their personal property, I bet they'd treat much more carefully. As it stands though, something like that would be a "David vs. Goliath" battle most homeowners can't afford to fight.
The government's fundamental purpose is to at least restrain individuals from harming other individuals. Anything less than that is not a free market by its very definition. A free market is not anarchic in nature but is instead the minimum intervention required to protect individual rights against various forms of violence. Environmental damage like this is a perfect example of a case where the government must intervene on behalf of those whose rights were abused. You are arguing against corporatism which is a perfectly reasonable position to have on the matter.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
1) Mine out everything you can, and pile waste all around
2) Sell land to EPA
3) ???
4) Profit!
Doesn't $3 Million seem a bit cheap. Essentially, they could clean it up for billions, but instead they are just gonna move the population away for a measly $3M and hope that everyone just forgets about the place.
I don't think that this "solution" will work in all cases, but in this case I am glad they decided to spend $3M rather than cleaning up the mess. If left alone for a couple of centuries, I'd wager that nature will take care of much of the mess.
Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
Times Beach, Love Canal, etc.
Best Slashdot Co
Some photos from around Treese:
Chat
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579757
Cave Ins
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/3579725
Ah yes, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas. The same senator who voted to protect KBR from rape charges. He's such a class act.
Note that this accounting failure is the descendant of a deliberate choice made by various courts shortly after the Industrial Revolution, when they chose to rule for polluting manufacturers and against impacted property owners in a blatant display of "progressive" social engineering triumphing over property rights.
My observations have been that when you talk about pollution with rabidly pro-free-market libertarians, it proceeds something like this:
Q: Won't that new plant they're building cause a lot of pollution?
A: Well they should have to pay for externalities like cleaning up after themselves.
Q: Ok, they built the plant, can't we stop it from pouring all that pollution into the environment?
A: That's not really pollution. It's shoddy science to say it is. There's no proof that it causes cancer. Who cares if the rates of cancer have tripled, correlation does not equal causation. Making it cleaner will cost too much.
Q: Well the plant's been shut down, now the area around it is a dead zone, the economy's shot, and people are dying, isn't this a failure of the economy?
A: Well they should have been made to pay for externatlities like cleaning up after themselves.
Silver is usually a useful byproduct of lead and zinc mining, It was an important side-product of the Cornish tin industry. The tailings of lead mines can contain significant silver.
Nevertheless. there are regions which do no have the traces of the silver you might expect. The price of silver is not that great: it can dip below three times that of copper. If no-one is offering to rake through their tailings then either (a) they are waiting for a better price or (b) there is nothing there to be had. A simple chemical test - flame spectroscopy would probably be best - would settle the issue one way of the other.
Does anyone have the figures?
Corporations turn town into a toxic sludge dump.
Corporations go out of business.
People become more aware of the general problem of industrial pollution.
Laws are passed to limit such behavior.
People in the town get sick.
After realizing that the horse has left the barn, taxpayers pay for people to relocate.
"As was raping, selling or killing your own children."
What the fack are you talking about?
In an economics course, when they teach you about the free market, they start with something like, "When transaction costs are low, there are no barriers to entry, and property rights exist and are enforced, then the free market is efficient". Otherwise.... it's generally not. One of the things that lets negative externalities like pollution come to pass is that the "property rights" for "living in a town that's not crazy polluted" didn't exist / weren't enforced.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Just apply the free-market solution to this bunch of pathetic pinko trash: fuck 'em. You want mommy government to buy out the town? No, let it fetch the free market price of $0.01 an acre (if you find a sucker willing to pay that much). This crying about lead poisoning is communist bullshit anyway. If it weren't for the commie EPA they wouldn't know it was bad at all and the town would be rolling in the riches of the free market. They'd also pull themselves up by the bootstraps and not complain about the commie fire department from the socialist town next door not being there anymore. If you can't afford a fire department in your town, tough shit, you fucking commie pinko. They're all probably dependent on pinko commie socialist Welfare, socialist pinko commie Farm Subsidies, socialist commie pinko Social Security, pinko socialist commie Medicaid, and commie socialist pinko Medicare. Probably send their kids to commie pinko socialist public schools. Don't even get me started on the socialist commie leftist fascist public police force, the goddamn unamerican pinko jackbooted islamic thugs. If it weren't for the fact that the mines are depleted, we should declare war on them.
This post brought to you by the Cato Institute.
Yeah but it's government take over of a town. Do we honestly want government take over of a town. Just say no to your town being taken over by the government :)
Corporations aren't people until they're susceptible to rubber hose cryptanalysis.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Do nothing? Okay.
Let's move to a totally free market economy. Let's forget about public roads. Someone will build a road to where I want to go. Except the road only goes one place. Did you catch the cost of switching from the road you are on to another road system? I can't get some places because the road owners can't agree to trade terms. That's okay though because it's unfettered capitalism.
The great thing about totally free markets is, kidnapping you and selling you into slavery is legal. But you won't fetch nearly the price I get for selling your children into slavery. There are no exceptions to your magical thinking. No pesky government prosecuting me for the world's oldest, most abhorent crime. And I'm just getting started. I'm going to put on man-to-beast fights to the death shows and charge $5 to get in. You will be my first contestant. I'm going to make a killing!
I could go on from there, but the basic point is you are pursuing a mythical notion with consequences that you can't possibly justify and purposely choose to ignore. The sooner you come back to reality, the better off we all will be.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
[Native American #2 sees a small piece of trash and begins to cry.]
Native American-Indian #1: Do yourself a favour. Don't turn around.
[camera pans across to show the old Spingfield as a huge land of rubbish and waste]
Native American-Indian #2: [off-screen] AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
Native American-Indian #1: [off-screen] I told you not to turn around.
The entire town gets relocated five miles away.
Prior to starting the mining, the company should have to commit
to paying, say, 25% of top-line revenue into a fund to be held in escrow
by the government.
If the company cleans up adequately, and operates cleanly all along,
then at termination of mining operations, they get the funds back with interest.
If the government has to clean up, it uses the fund. There should be a penalty
catch, something like: If the government has to spend more than 25% of the
fund cleaning up, then the government fines the company the rest, and
such money is made available to an R&D pool that companies and universities
can access only for purposes of R&D into more environmentally responsible
methods and technologies for extracting resources.
This is probably an appropriate place to state that my signature line is ironic,
being a listing of two oxymorons.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Parent is 100% correct.
Who modded this flamebait?
It was not a free market system.
Of course it was a free market. Unless you're trying to claim that government regulations *forced* them to pollute?
A faulty accounting system allowed the mines to extract profits without being responsible for the damages.
If they were allowed to do something, then it is (by definition) a free market. If they weren't, then it wasn't a free market.
To be precise, what you are describing is called an externality, and they exist just fine within the free market system.
I think the rubber hose has been phased out in favor of the oh-so-versatile wet towel.
You fold the wet towel up tight across its width, drop its temperature to the verge of freezing, and Voila!
A cryptanalysis tool that automatically self-destructs while you stall the International Red Cross.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Companies extracted the minerals without actually paying the true cost of their actions (and thereby generated higher profits), and now the taxpayer needs to pick up the bill. Of course, the relocation is only the tip of the iceberg: medical costs and environmental costs are likely to be many times over the cost of the relocation.
That's kind of a twisted way of looking at it - had the town been owned by a few landlords who gave the ok, it would not have been any better. Property rights only go so far in protecting the public good.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
You mean I can buy an entire town for $3,000,000? That's not a lot of money for a bunch of buildings and some land.
So what do you do with a polluted site?
I can't think of any business model, but there has to be something...
Wind farm? Solar? Landfill?
So, I think this sounds like a remarkably civilized end to a nasty story, and hope they can get the people out. I've worked with people who had chronic lead and mercury poisoning from old mine contamination and some of them are really seriously screwed up.
(*) There was an old mine called the Yak Tunnel, dug not for minerals but to drain all the other mines, at a much lower level than they were, so it served as the sewage drain for dozens of huge mines. Whenever one of the old abandoned mines would have a collapse, a huge surge of contaminated water would dump out the Yak and right into the upper Arkansas, killing everything downstream for dozens of miles.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Allowing a government to buy a town is clearly unfair competition and socialism. Only private businesses should be allowed to buy towns.
A proper market accounting system would have made the mining corporations pay for the cleanup.
The problem is that when people suggest that corporations should pay tax on the externalities that their operations create they get called "tree hugging socialists" or something. There's a huge section of society that doesn't know what an externality is, doesn't care, and has been convinced that taxing companies based on the pollution they generate is some form of anti-freedom anti-American communism.
So the mines closed in the 70's. That's nearly 40 years ago.
There's 100 people left, complaining that they can't sell their house?
Um... I call bullshit.
In 40 years, they should have been able to -pay-off-their-mortgage- cut their losses, and get the fuck out.
Even if they don't, they're putting a (very realistic) price on their health, and they're f-ing -dumb- for doing that.
If I found out that my town was -that- polluted, I'd move, default on the mortgage, and live (longer!) with the consequences. Anything beyond that would be short-sighted, ignorant, and just plain fucking dumb.
But no. Instead, they want someone else to fix their problem for them. Whiny ass bitches aren't willing to do what's necessary to protect themselves, I say let them all die.
That is why I hate early 1970s!
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Something tells me there's a nice investment opportunity in the Cardin, KS housing market...
I wish I could buy my own town. The EPA gets all the cool stuff.
Movie site? Museum of baby boomer mentality?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
I hear there's Lead there, maybe you could open a mine?
Tragedy of the commons.
I agree! The fault is in giving a value to environmental, social and other intangible values. As it is, these values are given a value of zero. Laws against pollution are an attempt to rectify these problems but then corporations just move operations to some other country where they are allowed to pollute. Either that, or companies that want to pollute play fast and loose to get around the law. We really need to rethink a way to give value to intangible tings such as a clean environment.
It was not a free market system.
You are right, they did require accounting even back then. Truly free markets do not impose such a stringent government imposed requirements.
I'm so sorry my sarcasm was not lost on you :-)
P.S. I have still, even after Bush and Obama, huge difficulties differentiating between republicans and democrats.
Don't worry, it is the same problem in Finland, though we can "choose" from three (major) parties.
Eh ... perhaps you should worry.
You mean I can buy an entire town for $3,000,000? That's not a lot of money for a bunch of buildings and some land.
No kidding. It's about $30K per person to go find somewhere else to live. It's condemnation money.
So what do you do with a polluted site?
One this big? Generally nothing. You put up a fence and don't let people live there. It's not worth the money to fix compared to the cost of just developing unspoiled lands.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Considering how ridiculously broke our federal government is, I'm not sure in what sense it can continue to be said that it is "buying" or "paying" for things.
So, if they leave the whole town abandoned, what is going to keep all of the abandoned properties from becoming meth labs, crack houses or interesting places for a rave?
Of course that would have been better. Only the property owner has any right to object to how others' actions might affect it. If the property owners don't mind the pollution then there is no complaint in the first place.
Naturally, if this property is being rented or leased others then their contracts should include terms governing the level of pollution they're willing to tolerate, just as similar terms govern access to utilities, noise levels, cleanliness, etc. In that case the tenants would have a valid claim against any landlord which permitted pollution in excess of the agreed-upon limits, but not against the polluter directly.
On a related note...
There can be no concept of "public good" without some way of observing, summing and comparing values quantitatively across many unique individuals. This is impossible. A partial, per-individual ordering of past values can be observed in the choices which people make, if their choices are completely uncoerced, but even within the context of a single individual such values are only ordinal; you cannot say that one good is worth twice as much as another, only that it is worth more (or less). If goods A and B would both be chosen in preference to C, that doesn't imply that goods A and B together would be preferred to two of C. Precisely predicting even one individual's future preferences based on past behavior is an insoluble problem, and when it comes to current preferences, expressions of value (e.g. statements, polls, voting) without action are unreliable indicators at best, and people's value scales change over time in unpredictable ways. The only preferences others can know with certainty are the ones expressed through action, which are useless for determining future policies intended to maximize the good of the individual in question.
When moving from one individual to a group the difficulty becomes even greater, as each individuals' ordinal scale of values is only meaningful in the context of their own preferences. You can't say "the good person A wants has more value than the good person B wants," and thus satisfy person B at the expense of person A for an increase in "the public good," without imposing yet another subjective value scale, generally your own. There is just one limited exception: any completely voluntary choice with no involuntary externalities imposed on others can only be an objective ex ante net increase in overall "public good". (Lest you reply that ex ante is not necessarily ex post: true, but public policy is also limited to the information available beforehand. When making any decision, private or public, the ex ante expectation of the outcome is all anyone has to work with. Adaptation and self-interest ensure that ex ante approaches ex post over time.)
In short, "the public good" in its idealized form is a meaningless concept, impossible to measure, or even to show a clear improvement outside the context of an aggression-free society with no externalities. However, arguments involving "public good" inevitable use it to justify imposing such externalities, claiming that doing so will result in a net increase, when in fact any such increase cannot be objectively demonstrated. In actual use it's nothing more than a more palatable stand-in for "the way I think goods and services should be allocated, regardless of the owners' wishes," which is little more than the position of any common criminal.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
It's more that a Kansas senator is pushing for federal pork for Kansas. Roberts wouldn't normally support an environmentalist bill, but in this case, his pro-pork tendencies overrode his anti-environmentalist tendencies.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Times Beach was contaminated by dioxin laced waste oil, which was common to spread on dirt and gravel roads to cut down dust. When it flooded the area, the oil was washed all over everything. At the time, nothing was known of dioxin. The entire four corners area (Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas) has hundreds of zinc & lead mines. For over 200 years, those mines were the backbone of the area. We call that area of Missouri the "armpit" because of all the contamination.
FWIW, thats basically the situation with Nuclear Power Companies and nuclear waste:
http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2005/06/dollars-and-nuclear-waste-fund.html
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/42/usc_sec_42_00010222----000-.html
However, we haven't come up with a politically acceptable solution to storing nuclear waste, so the fund actually has about $16 Billion saved up in already.
Anyone who would oppose holding polluters responsible for damages evidenced by clear cases of cancer rationally attributed to their emission of carcinogens is no "pro-free-market libertarian," whatever they may call themselves. Yes, I know about the "No True Scotsman" fallacy, but the only possible point of your comment would have to be an accusation that I would make such an argument based on my similarity to "libertarians" you've encountered in the past. I have made no such argument, and I have no plans to do so, so feel free to check your stereotypes at the door.
Of course, I'm not the one you have to convince. It would be up to a suitably impartial court to decide whether causation exists—and up to you to convince them that it does. Naturally (if there is no out-of-court settlement) the polluter is going to argue exactly the opposite, just as in any other court case.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
That's not completely correct in terms of your 2nd answer.
The free-market solution would be to not regulate any pollution, but to put the onus on the property owner to file a suit for any pollution placed on his property or in his airspace. Have fun proving the pollution in your air was created by a particular corporation.
This is why we have communal ownership of airspace rights and the government regulates pollution. The deal is that Monsanto et al. can emit a particular amount of pollution with impunity. In theory the regulators would look out for what the public safety, but as is with almost all regulatory bodies in this country, they are captured by the industries they attempt to regulate. Therefore the regulatory body is an arm of the industry, essentially charged with making sure the industry's costs are increasingly externalized.
While I don't know the details of what happened shortly after the industrial revolution, you can't seriously consider empowered property rights as the best defense against corporate pollution.
Whats to stop a group of home owners from being bought off in exchange for letting the company pollute around them?
Pollution must be regulated at a state and federal level, not by individual property holders.
Nature will indeed sort it out, rain will wash the pollutants into your water courses, wind will blow dust off the waste piles and spread them across the wider area. Eventually the polluting agents will even out across the whole of your country.
It'll all work out. Might be a bit of a mess for the neighbours for a couple of hundred years though.
"When transaction costs are low, there are no barriers to entry, and property rights exist and are enforced, then the free market is efficient".
So not in the real world, then.
Perfectly true, but no system will be demonstrably efficient with high transaction costs, barriers to entry, or non-existent or unenforced property rights, so on the whole the free-market system wins out anyway. Particularly since having a free market implies that you at least have reasonably enforced property rights; otherwise it would be called something else. As you pointed out, the system the GP is railing against was not a free market, not even an inefficient one, as property rights were not enforced.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
I'm a rabidly pro-free-market libertarian. There are two options for paying for clean-up of pollution. One is to charge the company, who will turn around and charge the consumers with higher prices. The second option is to make the taxpayers pay for it. In my mind taxpayers = consumers and so there is no real difference.
By the way, liberatarian != hates the environment. Liberatarian == hates the government.
Hooray, now thanks to a new law passed in my area, I'm allowed to assassinate my competitors to increase profits! I'm so glad I live in a free market.
And the game is to spot that the benefits and costs are not proportionately distributed, and then maneuver so that you're more in one group than the other.
"belly-up": code for limited liability, the great way to get something for nothing. This is why I can't help mocking Republicans: they claim to be for free markets, but for fucks sake, the last thing they want are free markets without this government handout. I say, if you want the government handout (the special favor of limited liability, so that you can just walk away if things don't work out -- a favor most private citizens don't get), then STFU about conservativism and the virtues of free markets, because you're touting the advantages of a system that you've chosen to avoid. Don't praise Adam Smith while spitting on his grave at the same time.
And so, to all the polluters: get a job, hippie!! You're just as much living on gummint subsidies, as a Chairman-Mao-sign-holding drum-circle-jerking illegal-alien welfare-mother, who is actually a married gay transvestite, and you can bet he has long hair and never takes a bath. Fucking corporate Republican hippies, panhandling all over Washington DC! I hate 'em!
Someone must enforce the property rights to have a free market. That someone does not have to be a government, however, nor any other kind of monopoly over the use of force. In fact, if you have a monopoly backed by force, even over the (non-aggressive) use of force, then you are violating property rights and do not have a free market. Ergo, any system involving a government, defined as an organization claiming a monopoly on the use of force, is not a free market by its very definition, even ignoring other inevitable property-right violations such as taxes to fund the enforcement.
In a free market the enforcement of property rights is ultimately the right and responsibility of every property owner. There are no rulers required or permitted. Not all forms of anarchy have free markets, but all free markets are anarchic in nature.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
You're assuming that every taxpayer is a consumer, and that every consumer uses the product (and contributes to the pollution) in equal amounts. Neither assumption is well-founded, which means that there is a significant difference between holding the company responsible for its pollution and taxing everyone to clean it up. The tax-based approach creates major externalities, imposing the cost of cleanup disproportionately on users and non-users alike. It's also an after-the-fact approach, and "justice delayed is justice denied." The company should be held responsible when the pollution occurs, and not permitted to let the pollution accumulate.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Wait a minute, what happened to the rabid pro-free-market libertarian when you asked your second question? It looks like his arch-nemesis, a Republican, did a Man in the Middle attack. Next time, do your PK exchange correctly.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
Sarcasm doesn't carry well over the intertubes, I'm afraid.
Damn, who cares about modding posts anyway...
In my mind taxpayers = consumers and so there is no real difference.
Your mind is wrong. If Company A poisons thousands of people while producing their product and has to raise their prices in order to pay for the damage done and Company B manages to produce their product without poisoning anyone, who is going to win the marketplace?
As long as Company A can convince everyone else to pay to clean up their own shit, Company A can continue to pollute and pretend nothing is wrong.
The only problem is that, as others have pointed out, Company A will do everything it can (including, for example, lying about it to a court) to prevent having to pay for cleaning up its pollution. This means that under a real unregulated system things would get worse before they get better.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Argh, replying simply to clear up a mis-click when I tried to moderate. Stupid no-verification mod buttons suck! :)
Well, you certainly make an excellent case.
An excellent case for the elimination of private property ownership and collectivization of ownership of everything.
One is to charge the company, who will turn around and charge the consumers with higher prices.
That assumes that they are not already charging what the market will bear, or that their margin is approximately zero.
In general, the price a company sells their product at is not a direct function of the cost to produce it. Instead, it's a function of the demand curve at different price points. They price the item to maximize their expected revenue. The difference between that and their costs is their profit margin. As long as their margin remains positive, then they won't increase the price due to an increase in costs because that increase would actually reduce their revenue. Only in situations where the product is commoditized and the margin is very small will changes in cost directly translate to changes in price.
And in commodity markets, the drop-off for raising prices relative to competitors is even higher. The cost of, e.g., copper is fixed by the supply, not by what any particular provider wants to charge for it. If they can't make money selling copper at that price, tough for them because raising the price won't help. What this means for environmental costs is that if there is an environment-damaging technique that provides a marginal increase in supply (e.g. using arsenic pools to siphon extra gold from ore mentioned in another post), but they have to pay for the cleanup, then the cost of acquiring that supply will be higher than what they can sell it for (especially since introducing extra supply tends to drive the price down), and it becomes unprofitable to use the environmentally dangerous technique.
Think of another commodity, oil, only this time without the "environment" factor. Why aren't oil companies drilling for the oil that's in the Gulf shale? Because it's uneconomical to do so. Why can't they just raise the price of oil? Because it's a global market, and nobody cares how expensive their oil was to acquire. Only when the global supply shrinks and the price of oil rises will it become economical to get that oil.
Sure there may be some cases where a company is able to simply raise prices and continue damaging the environment, but in many cases that's simply not an option, and ergo the cost will not be born by the customer. By making an externality an internality, we've changed the economics of damaging the environment so that the more you damage the environment, the less economical it becomes. So either they stop doing it, or they make less money.
The second option is to make the taxpayers pay for it. In my mind taxpayers = consumers and so there is no real difference.
I can think of three significant differences.
1: Taxes are an even more indirect way of relaying costs to citizens. It's highly unlikely that the tax burden of an individual would increase in proportion to the cost of environmental cleanup. Much more likely is that their tax burden stays the same, and NASA (or whatever) gets less funding.
2: By hiding the cost, you're removed the incentive for companies to not pollute, and individuals to not buy from polluting companies, and that's even if (1) didn't hold true. "Oh don't buy from company X because my taxes will go up by Y" is not something most people will think about.
3: Corporations and the rich pay a lower percentage of their incomes in taxes than the middle class, because much more of their income comes from capital gains. Also individuals are taxed on income, while corporations are taxed on income minus costs. Also this burden would be placed on people who did not purchase products from the offending company. Allowing society at large to pay the cost for a corporation's environmental negligence is the whole problem in the first place.
By the way, liberatarian != hates the environment. Liberatarian == hates the government.
Well that's good. The question is, how exactly are you going to internalize this significant cost without the government? Of the two optio
The enemies of Democracy are
Hooray, now thanks to a new law passed in my area, I'm allowed to assassinate my competitors to increase profits!
Actually, that would require a repeal of the murder law, not necessarily an additional law.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Is it constitutional for the EPA, a government-funded agency, to buy a civilian town?
I really don't know, does anyone else see this as crossing some sort of line?
This comment was laboriously planned and extremely well thought out by Mike Donaghy @ http://mikedonaghy.org
Mines come in when it's profitable, screw up the environment because nobody can stop them (that would be government regulation, which would be socialistical), and leave having raped the land of the only thing that was worth anything. The people left behind have no money to clean up the mess the mines made, and the mine companies are under no obligation to do so themselves. Yet another example of why libertarianism is a pipe-dream utopia second only to Communism in its impracticality.
I piss off bigots.
You seem to have a very well developed notion of what the public good must mean, and your refutation of it depends on that well-developed notion. That style of refutation, if it holds water (I would need to wrap my head more deeply around the particular notion you're arguing against - more effort than I'm willing to put in right now - in order to decide if, given that definition, the idea falls apart under your attack), does not cover other potential notions of the public good. If I were still a Libertarian today, my arguments would be a lot better than what they were.
It's not much of an indication that you're thinking very philosophically, despite the flavour of your thought, when you end your argument by saying that those who don't share your conception have the mindset of a common criminal.
At the risk of being accused of meeting ad hominem with ad hominem:
When I was in university, I often came across people who made the big leap of beginning to think philosophically, and grabbed onto objectivism because it's a very simple philosophy that makes reasonably determinate claims about the world, with few grey areas. Unfortunately, their philosophical exploration stopped there - their notion of markets, liberty, and the like never were exposed to the varying other strong philosophies that exist now, and they ahistorically back-projected their philosophies to various historical figures they admired. To them, everything that was not Objectivist was Fascist. At the time I wasn't much unlike them - I wonder how much of this describes you. I'm not going to claim that because I see things differently now that there's a natural progression from such things, but rather that there are more careful and philosophically appropriate ways to hold the positions you do (just as any political/philosophical position has both philosophically immature and mature forms)
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Obviously a GPL supporter. When you add restrictions, its no longer free.
'Free Market' sucks for everyone but the guy on top. Always has, always will. No one any lower down on the ladder than the very top WANTS a free market, they just don't realize it. You are a shining example of that.
You don't want free market, you want a controlled open market. Its a different beast entirely.
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Your notion of free markets is just one among many, and a particularly unpopular and unworkable one at that. Capitalism has existed in a number of forms - there are philosophical differences (e.g. is Perfect Competition or Lassiez-Faire a better general goal) as well as regulatory differences (is the legal structure providing common currencies appropriate? Corporations?) and general vision (are the laws, other regulation, and other framework aimed towards allowing big businesses to exist, or is the traditional conservative small-town market the ideal?). It's tricky and unlikely to be broadly accepted to paint any particular flavour of these markets as being "true capitalism" or "true free markets" - liberty-fundamentalism may be one econopolitical philosophy, but in forms as strong as you suggest, you're describing a value system that's alien to anything that ever has existed and would only garner acceptance of a small portion of the population (this is not a philosophical criticism of your position so much as it is your portrayal of it as "the one true thing").
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Coming up on your left...Nothing.
Make America grate again!
Just curious here, i have no idea how the US legislation on mineral resources works.
Don't these companies pay royalties or some kind of compensation to the federal gov. to explore those resources?
Centralia, Pennsylvania- town on fire - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centralia,_Pennsylvania
http://www.offroaders.com/album/centralia/centralia.htm
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2196
When you add restrictions, its no longer free.
An unrestricted "capitalist" economy is anarchocapitalist not a free market. Some restrictions on "freedom" are necessary; for example, most societies restrict one's freedom to kill or defraud others. That doesn't mean that that society isn't free, in fact those restrictions mean the difference between a shattered country like Somalia and pretty much anywhere else with the vaguest sense of individual rights protection. btw I am a supporter of competition; the GPL, BSD, MPL and other open-source licenses just happen to be very effective tools in stimulating innovation through robust competition. If there was a license that was comparitively free and more efficient at stimulating innovation in the software market then I'd support that as well.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Once again an inept bureaucracy of the federal government tries to solve problems with bigger, more expensive problems. We don't need an EPA, the constitution gives us property rights. If pollution encroaches on your private property you don't need to appeal to Big Environmentalism, just take the polluter to court!
It's not much of an indication that you're thinking very philosophically, despite the flavour of your thought, when you end your argument by saying that those who don't share your conception have the mindset of a common criminal. ... At the risk of being accused of meeting ad hominem with ad hominem:
What I said was not an ad hominem. I did not say "you're wrong because you are, or you think like, a common criminal"; I said "those who violate property rights are criminals (thieves, murderers, extortionists, etc., by definition), and the concept of 'public good' is only used in practice to justify such violations." That is simply a statement of fact. (Or definition, if you prefer.) I am challenging you to show that your appear to non-defensive force is somehow meaningfully different from those criminal acts. That is the standard which I set for others' behavior; you don't have to use it yourself, but if you are trying to justify the concept of "public good" to me then this is a barrier you would have to clear first.
I am not an Objectivist. However, I do believe that matters involving the interpersonal use of force do require an objective (as opposed to subjective) and rational basis differentiating them from aggression in order to remain both consistent and bounded, the alternative being ad hoc (chaotic) and escalatory. If one's use of defensive force cannot be defended rationally from everyone's point of view (objectively) then it is not significantly different from aggression.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Rights are the constructs of governments and philosophers - anyone might formulate a set of their interests into a phrasing of rights, and likewise another person might either say "you don't have that right" or "you don't understand that right correctly". Anyone could say either to you regarding property, depending on their position.
The common criminal (more specifically, those who loot in one form or another) secretly takes things out of the public sphere or from another person in order to enrich themselves. Taxation, appropriation, and other forms of state action are (or at least should be) to benefit society, to redress wrongs, or to serve some other social interest. This is not so much a taking away of things theoretically merited by their former owner as society withdrawing some privilege it allocated to people for a time.
Your body and a reasonable amount of personal property (clothes, heirlooms, etc) are reasonably inviolate - barring immediate need or your own debts, society should not take it from you. A reasonable residence is largely the same. Means of production or excessive amounts of the above are things that society might reasonably take to meet its needs - but likewise society rewards those who act for the societal good in their labour or otherwise - some amount of privilege for a limited time and in a limited scope can be healthy. None of this is absolute. Society can reallocate its resources as it needs, bearing in mind how that might motivate or demotivate people. If its ordinary customs allow one person to effectively create slavery or gross imbalances of power, particularly if some people have great excess and the basic and reasonable needs of others are not met, it should redress that situation.
Regarding your second statement, there is no objective reason people might choose to use your definitions and framework. I know that I don't think in your framework anymore, and your attempt to mark it as a privileged (perhaps objective) position is something people should reject.
Likewise with mine - I simply present mine here, as I wish to always confront people with my former philosophy of Libertarianism with other ideas - it is too often that they persuade people simply by being the only people to show up and make a case. By presenting both my own ideas and those of the vast number of philosophies that came into being before (and after) libertarianism, I believe property absolutism and other bad philosophy as dogma can be at least be slowed.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.