Someone5 wrote:Wait a minute, how is that supposed to work? How do you regulate how much you dump into the river if you can only know what's an acceptable safe limit after the fact, once someone with standing has brought you to court?
That, in effect, is how the system works today. Some people die because of pollution. Government regulators are urged to act. They set up some studies, come up with safety standards, and impose them nationally.
The sequence wouldn't be very different. Once one court determined that a certain level of pollution is actionable, you don't need to wait and sue the company. Knowing that they might be liable would cause the owners, executives and even employees of the company (remember - no government = no limited liability!) to be very careful.
Let me explain in a little more detail, since this is obviously not something most people thought about. We will start at the end, and then work our way backwards.
1. A line worker, following an order from his manager, following policy issued by the CEO, nominated and working for shareholders, has opened a valve causing the release of a chemical that is subsequently determined to have cause the death of a child.
2. All the people in the chain, from the line worker to shareholders, are held, at least in part, responsible for the action. They are assessed millions of dollars in restitution. The judgement is, of course, multiplied many-fold if several people are impacted.
3. Everybody needs to spend the rest of their lives as virtual slaves paying off that payment.
Now work backwards - no worker, no manager, no CEO would accept a job, and no investor will invest under circumstances in which their savings, and, potentially, freedom are at risk from causing, even if by accident, the lives of innocent people. The risk is just too high. What do you do?
The answer is
insurance. To get people to work for it, the company offers an insurance policy that covers the liability of all its workers, managers, executives and shareholders provided they follow company rules and procedures on handling dangerous materials. The insurance company must be credible and independent for reasonable people to be willing to take the risk.
Now work backwards again. The insurance company, knowing it would be "on the hook" for any such damages, conditions coverage on the company following strict safety procedures, relying on relevant past court cases as well as its own experts in determining how much pollution to "allow". Further, the insurance company would also send inspectors to insure that the procedures are actually being followed. Overall, since its own money is on the line, the insurance company would be more effective and efficient than government regulators.
From the other side, pollution need not reach the level of fatal concentrations. Even if the adverse effects are relatively minor (but still notable), the pollution can be legally and practically actionable if it effects many people. The libertarian equivalent for class action suit would be for a specialise legal firm to purchase tort rights from hundreds of people. When it does, economies of scale start applying with respect to the cost of litigation.
Even if the ultimate judgement is that each recipient is owed $20 for a 1/100,000 increased chance of serious injury, that amount, multiplied by hundreds of thousands of affected people can warrant litigation.
Through insurance, prevention of pollution becomes prospective rather than retrospective, answering your concern.
I believe the combined solution of insurance (sensibly required by all the individuals with potential liability) and "class action" (or tort aggregators) would answer all of your concerns.
And anyone who wanted to make some money would just hire nonspecialist arbitrators.
Arbitrators are always agreed-upon by both sides to the dispute.
You've still never explained to me how arbitration would even work without a common third party default. Party A proposes to use Crazy Joe's Arbitration Depot (bargain basement arbitration rates!), while Party B will only use Madame Sarah's Exquisite Arbitrations (whom they've used exclusively for the last 30 years). In real life, when both parties cannot agree on a mutual arbitrator, they can go to the government's court system for dispute resolution. In Happy Unicorn Capitalist Land, there would be no government providing that lowest common dispute resolution, so what happens when neither side can agree to a single arbitration service?
The alternative is simply too expensive. Ultimately, what determines which actions are tolerated within society is the sensibilities of its members, not any formal, written rules. As explained above, most conflicts will quickly be "escalated" to the level of professional companies regularly interacting with each other. At least one of the sides to the dispute (normally both) will be insured or represented by a credible major firm. You don't get to become, or remain, credible by insisting that all your disputes are arbitrated by an obscure, untrusted arbitration firm.
The norm within society is that the sides to the dispute have to make a good-faith effort to reach a peaceful solution, preferably by agreeing on an arbitrator. If one side refuses to cooperate, the other is almost assured legal victory.
Btw, I noticed how common it is for left-wing critics of libertarianism to use expressions such as "Happy Unicorn Capitalist Land" to express their lack of understanding of what we are proposing. By contrast, I have not noticed either myself or my fellow libertarians use similarly disrespectful language when discussion your equally incomprehensible leftist utopias. Why is that, do you think?
Yeah, I'm sure they would use only the most unbiased and fair research, lawyers and judges being the noble, uncorruptable bastions of good that they are. Right.
It would be, because an arbitration firm that loses its reputation for being unbiased and fair will, very rapidly, lose all its customers. Remember - an arbitration firm is selected by
both sides. You cannot hope to stay in the business without being known as fair and objective.
By debating how much they like whatever is being produced by the group emitting the pollution and how much they'd like clean water and negotiating a proposal to provide a balance between the two... then letting the members of the community vote on it. If they can't reach an agreement, then obviously the clean water folks would win (having numbers on their side).
So in one sense, your solution is not that dissimilar from mine. It is local in nature (i.e. an agreement between the sides, not a national uniform policy) and based on agreement. Same here. Even the priority for the property owners (water users) is the same in both system.
The only problem with your solution is that it doesn't seem to have any mechanism to encourage the water users to make a small sacrifice for what may be a large gain for society. Unless you assume people will be selfless, why should I agree to even a slight risk of a rush on my little finger so that your factory can produce highly valuable fertilizers when the gain from the fertilizers is spread amongst millions of people, while the risk of a rush is very localised?
I know you don't believe in money, but just for the purpose of illustration, suppose the risk of a rush is relatively minor, and I would happily accept it in exchange for, say $100/year. Me and 10,000 other similarly-situated people. On the other hand, the gain to society from running the factory is the equivalent of $10,000,000/year, but it is spread over 10,000,000 people. So the gain to me is only $1, while the cost is $100. Why should I vote for it?
Right, instead relying on true valuation--what people are willing to do or suffer in exchange for something.
How would the people downstream possibly be able to evaluate the value of that fertilizer? Life isn't black-and-white. Alternative fertilizer can also me manufactured in a more remote location, but that would require 100 people to relocate and work under more difficult conditions. It would also require running a road that would require 10 men-years to create. And the road's demand for asphalt would mean that alternative road projects would have to be delayed. And the delay in another road project would mean that the opening of a salt mine would have to be delayed by two weeks, and on and on. The full ramifications are far to complex to even collect, let alone evaluate by expert, not to mention hundreds or thousands of individuals who, frankly, have many other things they'd rather think about.
Communities and states do most of that policing themselves. "You're dumping more than we can tolerate," as opposed to "You're dumping more than the folks in DC allow." This is, in fact, in line with her discussion about division of responsibility for environmental protection.
How does that contradict what I said? Communities come up with their own standards, and those standards are then enforced, either within the community by its own members or, as necessary, with the help of specialised organisations. No government need be involved.
I'm pretty sure that the two groups of interests would never be able to agree on a common arbitrator. Why do you think environmental law doesn't often get decided by private arbitration?
The answer is that government pre-empts private action, and we lack the cultural standards for peacefully resolving disputes without appealing to government. People are just used to appealing to government to solve every little problem, and government gladly obliges, since its power grows at each turn.
And leaves no option for what to do when neither side can agree on who to use--and, moreover, gives the arbitrators a profit motive to decide in favor of whomever can provide the greatest under the table payments. Note; developing a reputation for underhanded dealings would be an amazing selling point in a society where both sides have to agree on an arbitrator, since your regular clients could simply refuse to use anyone else.
Any company that refuses to deal with anybody but an arbitrator with known reputation for underhanded dealings will quickly be ostracised. Specifically, anybody with dispute with it will credibly approach a well known and respected firm, demonstrate how said company is declining to cooperate, and obtain one-sided judgement.
I can understand how statists, completely obsessed with government as the only solution to every problem, can fail to see how this would work. I find it much harder to understand how somebody can believe that a socialist anarchy is possible can fail to understand how societal norms can effectively force people to act in particular ways.
No written law can stop the British parliament from passing legislation giving themselves life-time appointments at $10,000,000/year salaries. The British parliament is the highest political authority in the nation. Yet such action isn't just rare - it is unthinkable. Because it goes against the (lower case) constitution of British society.
I am proposing a society within which a different constitution is established - one ultimately based on the NAP, but in which dispute resolution through good-faith appeal to common, objective, respectable and credible arbitrators is the only acceptable behaviour.
This is a stable solution because once established, occasional violators of the norm can easily be dealt with. The norm, in other words, is self-sustaining.
Rich wrote:Yes particularly on issues like abortion, age of consent and religious criticism.
Issues of dispute are resolved today without resort to guns. The easiest solution is territorial.
Abortion is probably the most challenging, so I'll address it here. Britain doesn't threaten Ireland with nuclear weapons because the latter doesn't allow abortions. Nor is Ireland sending agents to sabotage British abortion clinics because abortion is murder.
Before 1973, some states allowed abortion, while others prohibited it. Yet cross-border fire fights were very rare indeed. Even today, while a very large minority of Americans considers abortion murder, only a tiny, negligible minority of those takes arms against it.
Why is that?
The reason, I believe, is that while there may be deep disputes within society over any number of issues, some highly emotional and of consequence, there is near-universal consensus over one thing, namely
what constitutes legitimate means of dispute resolution.
In today's America, ultimately, that is the decision of the US Supreme Court. Virtually all pro-lifers accept that as long as the court's decision is as it is, using force against abortion clinics is illegitimate. The reason they don't take up arms, btw, isn't because they are afraid of being punished. First, even deeply-convinced anti-abortion Presidents like Bush obeyed the US Supreme Court decision, despite holding all the fire power. Second, look at Egypt for what happens when people do not consider a decision to be legitimate. They routinely risk their lives fighting for their beliefs. Anti-abortionists in America do not.
I don't know what the solution to the abortion question would be in a libertarian anarchy. My guess is that it would be allowed in many places, prohibited in some, allowed but highly frowned-upon socially in some other communities, etc.
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.
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