Comments Elsewhere

nobody.really:

And about that air pollution thingy…?

What about it? Some forms of air pollution (e.g. pollution from small, decentralized sources such as automobiles) would be harder to limit under anarchy. Others (e.g. air pollution by large, centralized polluters such as oil, gas, and coal operations) would be easier to limit because the companies wouldn’t be subsidized and immunized from liability by the State. It’s currently very hard for people suffering from the local effects of polluters (in, for example, Port Arthur and other refinery towns in Texas) to demand compensation from the people who are poisoning them, because as long as the companies can convince bureaucrats that they’re dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s under the ex ante pollution regulations, they bear very little risk of being held liable for the actual effects that they are having on people.

The best thing to do about air pollution is use demands for compensation (under principles of nuisance and documented harms) to internalize the costs of air pollution and require the polluters to bear those costs. That won’t always be easy (some major sources of pollution are decentralized and thus hard or impossible to deal with through direct means. In that case you’ll have to lean on cultural criticism, moral persuasion, economic boycotts, technological development, etc. Oh well; nobody promised that anarchism would solve all the problems in the world; any political theory that promises to is guaranteed to be bunkum. All I suggested is that it will solve or ameliorate some of them; and in particular that putting questions to legislators who don’t personally bear any of the costs of their decisions is typically going to make free-rider problems worse, not better. (Again, check out the riders on any large federal spending bill if you don’t believe me. I can think of several big, politically-connected polluters, for example, who wouldn’t be receiving a cent of my money if I had a say in how my money got spent.)