Tom Cuddy:

What is the libertarian position on environmental protection?

I don’t think that there is just one answer to this question, because I don’t think that there is just one environmental problem to solve, but rather a lot of problems that are in some ways related and in some ways quite distinct. (E.g., the best approach to pollution problems may not have much to do with the best approach to conservation problems; something that copes fairly well with problems from concentrated point-source pollution or water pollution may not deal as well with air pollution or with diffuse, multisource pollution over a wide or global expanse, etc.) But, to give you the start of an answer, I can say that what I take to be the most promising libertarian approaches to environmental problems — specifically, the approaches offered in some of the market anarchist literature — is to treat it with a combination of (1) abolishing the Land Monopoly and the subsidies that facilitate ecological destruction (subsidized logging-roads; clear-cuts, strip-mines and mountaintop removal of government lands; etc.), that protect polluters, that dispossess individual, small-scale owners, and that amass ownership in a relatively few, privileged hands; (2) enabling individual property-owners to go after polluters for compensation for damages; and (3) practicing conscious, grassroots activism to address community problems directly through nonviolent social action, to boycott destructive practices and to reward sustainable alternatives in the marketplace.

For a broad discussion of some of the things that might mean in practice, see my post, “The Clean Water Act Vs. Clean Water,” Kevin Carson on “Fred Foldvary on Green Taxes,” etc.

Hope this helps!

Hi Fernando,

Thanks; I'm definitely interested to check out the chapter. As for the terminological issue of "Left," "Right," and Other -- well, that's definitely quite a can of worms to open! But briefly, I think that anarcho-libertarians are indeed the real Leftists, on at least one common understanding of what being "on the Left" means. Of course, it has nothing to do with state-driven social engineering or centralized expert control of society (the typical goals of the "Progressive" movement, the corporate liberalism of the mid-20th century, or today's "center-Left" political parties). But "Left-wing" means a lot of things to a lot of people. In its original context, it referred to liberal and radical anti-statists, who opposed mercantile privilege, supported free trade and free association, defended the right of revolution against tyranny, and opposed the principle that political authority was instituted by God Himself, and political dissent barely distinguishable from blasphemy. Bastiat sat on the Left in the  Assembly; and so did Proudhon. Of course, the meaning of "Left" has shifted over time, but I think that there are a lot of current conceptions of Leftism which I think are genuinely anti-authoritarian, and either explicitly anti-state (on the Anarchistic Left), or based on principles which are ultimately anti-statist in their tendency, even if their proponents don't explicitly draw the inferences that they ought to.

To slip into autobiography for a moment, unlike many market anarchists, I actually originally came to market anarchism not from small-government conservatism, or from classical liberalism, or mini-governmental libertarianism, but rather from the radical Left (in particular, from radical feminism and the post-Seattle social anarchist movement). Not because I had some Road to Damascus moment where I suddenly turned my back on Leftism as I had understood it, but because I got more radical, and what I found in the work of the individualists and mutualists offered what I thought were some really important insights into the nature and origins of economic inequality and social domination; into  the ways in which political and bureaucratic regimentation really
served to disempower the poor and socially marginalized, and to corral
and domesticate once-radical social movements; and into ways in which genuinely grassroots alternatives to the State might function (without simply turning the whole of social life into one endless god-awful meeting of the Coalition Steering Committee).

So as I see it I am a Leftist who became a libertarian for Leftist reasons, as my commitments to what I took to be Left-wing values (challening arbitrary authority, promoting grassroots solidarity and mutual aid, dismantling the warfare State, returning the land to those who till it, all power to the people,  etc. etc. etc.). On which, see this comment and this dialogue, and, more programmatically, the discussions of "Left" and its various meanings in In a freed market..., ALL I need to know about the Revolution is what I heard in Vegas..., I am shocked! shocked! to discover that politics is going on in here, etc.

Hyena,

If you're thinking of Kevin Carson, that's not an accident. Besides a lot of similarities in general economic outlook, we're both members of the IWW, and we've been corresponding about state-free wildcat unionism and bouncing ideas off each other for some years now. I discuss some of the application of these ideas to free-market unionism in Free the Unions (and all political prisoners), Re: Individualism Clashes with Cooperation? It Just Ain't So!, El pueblo unido jamás será vencido!, Anarquistas por La Causa, In reply to a reply by J.H. Huebert and Walter Block, King Ludd's Throne, etc.

One issue, however, is that grassroots solidarity tends to be
overwhelmingly anti-trade; Caplan points out that anti-market and
anti-foreign bias probably do the work here, so it's not clear that this
is a "governments only" problem.

Well, I think that economists like Caplan tend to get a lot of mileage by conflating opposition to particular fetishized and subsidized forms of commercial activity, or the nasty products of government-juiced commerce, with an opposition to "commerce" or "trade" as such. (I think Caplan's usual metrics for "anti-foreign bias," for example, are really egregious.) Insofar as they do, I think that this is not really a problem for grassroots solidarity, but rather a problem for our metrics.

However, to be sure there are also a lot of genuine problems with people's sense of what solidarity would mean (hostility to market relationships, etc.).

Now, sometimes this is because people wrongly think that markets per se lead to some genuinely nasty consequences (structural poverty, exploitative and reckless business practices, persistent large-scale inequalities of wealth, dehumanizing or alienating forms of commercialism, workplace hierarchy, etc.). In those cases I think the thing to do is for defenders of markets to get clearer about what they include and how they might facilitate outcomes different from the stereotyped features of actually-existing corporate capitalism; and to make the case more clearly to people who criticize markets for allegedly having those features. (The question here is whether they oppose market relationships just as such; or whether they oppose them because of false beliefs about their likely consequences. If the latter, then better thinking and teaching about the likely consequences will tend to make people more open to the value of market relationships.) In this case the problem isn't with the commitment to solidarity but with the (false) belief that it conflicts with markets; so best to be clearer about markets.

On the other hand, sometimes the opposition results from beliefs that markets relationships produce things which the speaker fears or loathes, but which are not really nasty consequences. Market relationships do bring people into closer contact with foreigners, encourage all kinds of weird cultural cross-pollination, etc., and there are some people who don't like foreigners, have idiotic ideas about monolithic and impregnable Kultur, etc. etc. And I agree that this doesn't just come from government, or from the ripple-effects of government. But in those cases, the thing to do is just to dig in and defend a better, more humane, and more radical conception of class and solidarity than the stupid, belligerent, and largely politically-fabricated notions that are common in nationalistic and other phobic circles. Here, the problem is not false beliefs about what markets produce so much as irrational or malicious reactions to what they do. But then the problem is not, as I see it, the ideal of grassroots solidarity per se; it's rather the stupid, limited, and limiting political identities that people have been handed as bases for it. And the solution is doing cultural and organizing work to challenge the stupidity and offer better bases for cooperation.

Well, in this age, I maintain that there are more people in the "royal"
class than ever before in human history. That is, people that can afford
to support musicians.

Moreover, in the age of Kickstarter, there are a lot of ways that a lot of people, of much less than a "royal" class, can now come together and pool enough resources to support artists or projects that they like, in ways that were difficult or impossible in the 17th and 18th centuries (both for technological reasons and for politico-economic reasons). There's a lot of artists who deserve support, and you might have trouble finding 1 person to toss out $50,000 a year on each of them. But when it's hard to find 1 person with $50,000 to spend, it's now a lot easier to find 2,000 people with $25 they're willing to spend.

Surely libertarianism itself does not condemn intellectual property,
since many seemingly clear-headed libertarians believe in the existence
of intellectual property and support institutions for protecting
intellectual property.

Well, of course the conclusion there doesn't actually follow at all from the premise. "Libertarianism itself" may have implications of which "many seemingly clear-headed libertarians" are unaware. Frege was not aware that his Grundgesaetze system contradicted itself, and if you asked him (without showing him the demonstration) whether it did, he would have said that it did not. But it did. Similarly, if libertarianism has any core commitments with extensive implications, which cannot always all be encompassed by a given libertarian, then there may be clear-headed libertarians who endorse a principle (like the nonaggression principle, or the libertarian case against protectionism) without realizing that it entails a  particular conclusion on IP restrictions.

I'm afraid I see a lot of younger libertarians as simply avaricious egoists, defending a selfish philosophy of Me-ism.

Well, whatever; but you may be interested to know that libertarian opposition to IP goes back well into the 19th century (see for example Benjamin Tucker's writing on it -- he called it "the patent monopoly," but he explicitly intended the criticism to apply to patents, copyrights, and any other form of "property in ideas"). Meanwhile, one of the most vigorous defenders of IP restrictions within the libertarian movement (and the proximate source of most explicit defenses of IP in contemporary libertarian debates) was Ayn Rand, author of The Virtue of Selfishness. In any case, the "selfish" ground here is a contested issue -- I myself make my living in writing and technology (I am a freelancer and a web developer, depending on the occasion), so you might think that my own material interests would be served by trying to lock down my products under conventional copyright law. Certainly, most of my colleagues believe that their material interests are best served that way. But then why doesn't the interest of IP advocates who insist that they have a right to a near-perpetual wage, insulated from market competition, for work that they finished years or decades ago, deserve remark? Why are peaceful consumers to be singled out for criticism of their "selfishness," but belligerent copyright holders, trying to protect their financial interests at the expense of other people's life savings, not? Certainly I don't think that Disney's role in lobbying for upholding strong copyright laws, say, or Roche's role in demanding extensive and well-protected and globalized patents, is an example of disinterested concern for the public good.

But if the thing they want is something that current law or custom deems
to lie in the possession of someone else - say on someone's computer
hard drive ...

Good lord, what are you talking about? Nobody is talking about seizing "someone else's hard drive" in order to get pirated movies (say). We're talking about consensual copying and sharing  of information, in which  Jones freely offers Smith a copy off of her hard drive, and Smith picks it up. Neither action harms anyone's hard drive, or deprives anyone -- not even the original producer of the music or the movie or whatever -- of anything that was in her possession before. (She still has quite as many copies of the movie as she had before; the difference is that now she has one, and Jones has one, and Smith has one too.)

When people run about stealing hard drives, I'm happy to condemn that -- as the theft of a hard drive.

Mark,

I agree with at least most of what you said, but I am a little unclear about how it responds to my argument.

It wasn't primarily intended as a response to your argument on IP; it was intended as a tangential remark on an issue raised by your comment. Sorry; I should have been clearer about that.

So, I am still looking for the logic of granting ownership rights to homesteaders, but denying them to inventors.

Well, the issue is what "ownership rights" would mean in each context, and I do fear that you're right that the common talk of "scarcity" typically obscures the issue more than it reveals it. The difference-in-kind here is better  expressed in terms of two features: (1) the non-rivalrous character of intellectual objects, and (2) the inalienability of (mental) self-ownership.

In the case of a homesteading claim, if I homestead 40 acres for farming, and someone comes along five months later, fences off 20 acres, cuts down my fig trees, tears up my tomatoes, and starts using half of the land to build their own house and a paddock for their horses, then I can clearly specify what their use of the land has deprived me of: the use of the 20 acres, the fig trees, and the tomatoes.

But now say that I write a story about Mideast politics which I intend to publish on my blog; and after I've done so, someone comes along, finds my blog, and, without first asking me for permission, grabs the story to publish it in the Journal of Historical Review, a rag I never would have wanted it published in. (*) This would be ... unpleasant. But  of what have I been deprived? I haven't been deprived of the story -- that's an abstract object, which is hardly the sort of thing that can be seized from me or destroyed; and I haven't been deprived of my copy of the story either -- that's still safe at home on my blog.  Reason being that the physical copies are simply distinct objects (I have mine and JHR has theirs); and the intellectual objects expressed by the physical copies are non-rivalrous -- one person's enjoyment of them doesn't diminish another person's access to them.

You might say that I've been deprived of control over my words; but if I let loose my ideas so that they end up in someone else's brain, I don't think I could possibly claim to control all instances of my words without claiming that I own other people's minds; and I don't. Or you might say that I've been deprived somehow of the sale value of my work, seeing as how the copyist didn't pay me. But again, a sale price is what someone else is willing to pay in a market transaction; it's a part of someone else's mental dispositions, not a possession that I can own. I may be deprived of some ancillary goods -- for example, if JHR prints my name on their list of contributors, that may hurt my reputation. But my reputation, again, is simply what other people think of me, and I don't own other people's opinions. Etc.

Of course, JHR could have voluntarily bound themselves to terms that would limit their freedom of action -- for example, by agreeing to a contract with me that forbade them from republishing my stuff without my permission. But they haven't.

(* This actually happened to a friend of mine. It was, indeed, unpleasant. In the extreme. But I would argue not a violation of his individual rights.)

**ttk2,** I understand that feeling the ground shift under you, semantically speaking, can be frustrating in the extreme. But my suggestion here is that trying to avoid the problem by trying to stop language from changing is a lot like commanding the tide not to come in. My suggestion is that we generally get a lot more done, and have much better conversations, when we try to listen for possible shifts in meaning, and take a step back every so often to see if everyone is clear on, and agreed on, the meaning of the terms we're using, rather than trying to settle on One Terminology To Rule Them All. A bit of charitable listening, a bit of clarificatory questioning, and a willingness to say "O.K., I see that *you* mean X; but *I* mean Y; so now let's see if we still disagree when we qualify our terms accordingly..." all goes a long way -- and averts a lot of fruitless bickering. As for "lost terms," well, personally I came to market Anarchism through the radical Left, and I never had any great interest in defending much of anything that actually existing businesses do, so I never felt that I "had" the term "capitalism" -- although I'm quite happy to say what I like about free association, free markets, and individual ownership of property. But your mileage may vary.

furball,

Thanks for the thoughtful comments about anarchism. I do need to mention, though, for the record, that that while there are gradualist anarchists of the sort you describe, there are also anarchists of the immediatist or abolitionist variety -- those who believe that, were it possible to bring it off, the state ought to be abolished immediately, completely, and forever. And I am in fact one of them. I certainly believe that there are social, cultural, and economic developments which would make anarchy much more pleasant, prosperous, efficient and stable than it would be under current social, cultural and economic conditions. (That's one of the ways in which I have a "thick" conception of libertarianism.) And of course I'd like to do what I can to bring those developments about. But even without them, if I had a button that I could press that would make government simply vanish -- I would break my finger pressing it. As William Lloyd Garrison said of the abolition of slavery, "Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend."

The reason that I take the abolitionist stance rather than the gradualist stance is because my understanding of anarchism is, first and foremost, as an ethical, not just a political commitment. It's not just a theory about how society ought to be organized, but primarily a theory about people ought to treat each other -- and, really, first and foremost, how I ought to be treating my friends and neighbors, and what I have a right to expect of them. The stuff about polycentric legal systems and spontaneous social order and all that is really only a downstream consequence of my commitment to the principle that I've got no business shoving anyone else around, and, as long as I conduct myself peacefully and respect the person and property of others, nobody else has any business shoving me around, either. While there are all kinds of things I'd like to see happen, I think that the act of governing people against their will (which, inevitably, means robbing, tyrannizing, beating, jailing, torturing, killing, etc.) is always and everywhere wrong. And I think that I have no business ever doing that to anyone else, for even a second, no matter what results I might be able to get from it; nor could I, in good conscience, condone it when someone else does it to other people, even if by doing so I think they might protect something that I think is important.

I should note that that's my own take on Anarchism. It's not at all something that all Anarchists (serious or otherwise) agree with me on.

pjg9g:

The thing I would like to see bloggers here start to address is the utopian problem: this brand of libertarianism (and maybe all brands) appears to require almost moral perfection from its government, the same problem which socialism has. Socialism requires the government to be perfect managers of the economy, but libertarianism requires the
government to be perfectly restrained and perfectly consistent in its treatment of individuals....

I agree that if I believed in having a limited government, I'd have a pretty big problem trying to figure out how to keep it limited within the (very narrow) bounds that minimal-statist libertarianism demands, given the ways in which an established government presents an attractive prize for the wealthy and well-connected to try to capture to their ends. Indeed, I think that once you start having governments, the problem of limiting government is more or less impossible to solve. But I don't believe in having limited governments, or indeed any government at all. So I don't worry about that problem.

And not to sound dismissive of anarchism, which may be popular here, but
abolishing government is no solution at all. If government were abolished, what would keep people from forming an even more coercive system?

Well, we will. Government is not the only means by which people can act in defense against coercion, aggression or tyranny; "anarchy" means only "without rulers," not "without security." People can defend themselves individually; or they can do it cooperatively through non-state (consensual, grassroots, non-territorial and/or non-exclusive) organizations. Maybe you think that those forms of self-defense are sure to be less effective than government. If so, that's not actually an argument for the legitimacy of government (even if government always triumphs, that's no guarantee that it actually has the right to do the things that it does to establish and maintain its power). But in any case, you'd have to give some reason to believe that it's always going to be ineffective. Otherwise, I know only that you do dismiss anarchism; not that you have a response to it.

Mark.

Thanks for asking. How much they differ and in what depends on what part of Rothbard's career you're looking at, and it also depends on how much you focus on first principles, and how much you focus on consequences. (Because I think that there are many cases where Rothbard was right about a basic principle, but failed to draw the consequences of that principle out to the full logical conclusion.)

To oversimplify pretty dramatically, I agree with most of what Rothbard has to say about natural rights theory, about inalienability, about property ownership, about contracts, and about some economic issues (e.g. I'm indebted to his discussion of the calculation argument). I am in general much more likely to agree with Rothbard's economic and social commentary from his "New Left" phase (from ca. 1960-1975, say) than the stuff from his LP days or, worse, his "paleolibertarian" material. Where I disagree with him has to do with a few specific, but I think important, issues. Rothbard for example believes in the legitimacy of copyright restrictions and I do not -- I am against all forms of "IP," including copyright. Which might seem like a small thing around the edges, but it's actually a pretty big part of some very large corporations' business models, and increasingly important as control over digital information more and more becomes control over the most important sectors of the economy. In his writing on banking and money, Rothbard has many things to say against government monopoly money and in favor of commodity money that I think are absolutely right-on; but his dismissal of the 19th century mutualists as nothing more than "money cranks" (in, e.g., "The Spooner-Tucker Doctrine") and the writing on mutual banking as some sort of crackpot hyperinflationary scheme, is just wrong. As a result of his failure to consider other views on credit and commodity money I think a lot of his stuff on money is prone to a great deal of oversimplification and exaggeration. Unlike Rothbard and unlike most anarcho-capitalists, I believe in the legitimacy and importance of non-governmental public property (that is, property owned in common by the actual public -- you and me and our neighbors -- not property owned by the state; for more on that, see Roderick Long's "A Plea for Public Property").

Moreover, for reasons that are probably best discussed at length elsewhere in the comment thread, I think that Rothbard -- especially in his later writing, after he had given up on the New Left -- and especially the post-Rothbardian anarcho-capitalists tend to dramatically overestimate the extent to which the kinds of corporate organization, formal business relationships, and commerce are products of free-market processes, and so they tend to dramatically underestimate how much the abolition of pro-business privileges (capitalism-2 in my fourfold distinction above) would change the face of the economy, and reduce the prevalence of extremely large firms, top-down control within firms, large inequalities of wealth, and the commercialization of functions (such as personal security/defense and  insurance/mutual aid, to take a couple of very important example) that might otherwise be provided through face-to-face relationships and "civil society" or other grassroots means. That is -- and I know that what I'm about to say is dramatically oversimplified, but a full discussion is way beyond the scope of this comments thread -- Rothbard and other anarcho-capitalists like Hans Hoppe or Walter Block tend to write as if there are overwhelming reasons to believe that free markets -- capitalism-1, if you like -- will naturally tend very strongly towards workplace hierarchies, narrow concentrations of capital ownership, and large-scale commercialization of more or less the kind with which we are familiar -- capitalism-3 and capitalism-4 in the above scheme. The view of earlier market Anarchists -- the individualists and mutualists like Tucker, de Cleyre, Spooner, et al., was more or less exactly the opposite -- that the prevalence of capitalism-3 and capitalism-4 is not due to market dynamics, but to government restrictions on the poor, and to government privileges extended to business interests -- that is, capitalism-2. Remove those constraints and you would see all kinds of flourishing economic activity -- but economic activity running through quite different channels, usually directed by ordinary workers rather than a professional business elite, through firms or other forms of organization that are smaller but far more numerous, with lower fixed costs, less overhead, far less extreme disparities of wealth and income, etc. etc. On that particular debate I happen to agree with the mutualists, not with the anarcho-capitalists -- so what I expect to happen in a free society is to see something very different from actually-existing corporate capitalism, and different because it is much less "capitalistic" (in the sense of much less predominance by wage-labor arrangements, landlords, in-your-face commercialism, etc. than what we see now). My detailed reasons for taking that view are probably better hashed out elsewhere, but suffice it to say for now that I think that existing government policies constitute a very large and powerful subsidy to commercialism, concentration of wealth, financial complexity, and corporate forms of organization; and if that subsidy were removed, ceteris paribus, you'd tend to see relatively less of the subsidized good, and more of the substitute goods that were being crowded out by the subsidy.