Issues with Anarcho-Capitalism, Part 3: Externalities

[EGreg]

Many of the actual problems with Anarcho-Capitalism as a system for organizing human activity can be traced to the concept of Negative Externalities. The incentive structure created by Capitalism in general leads to exploitation of free resources, and often times individuals acting in their own best (short-term) interest results in the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons.

Factory Farms

They say when you're not the customer, you're the product. That's certainly true of farm animals. They are slaughtered to be sold to people for food. The milk and eggs they produce are sold as well. So what happens? Well, very simply, Capitalism on its own will cause exploitation of animals on a massive scale. Billions of animals are raised in ever more cramped conditions, forcibly inseminated and fed antibiotics. Little birds have their beaks cut off so they don't peck each other as they wallow in their own shit and filth. Now, they spend their whole life in these conditions. This is the epitome of coersion. And why has it become like this? Because those farms which take these measures can sell meat and dairy for a lower price than the ones which don't. In the market, many people want the cheaper sausage, however it was made. So there is a growing demand for factory farm output.

Not only that, but the farmers form organizations to boost demand for their products such as the National Dairy Checkoff. They do this without government. Remember those "Got Milk" commercials? How about "Got Milk from a cow that barely moves and is fed hormones"?

OK, maybe you can make some ethical contortions by simply excluding animals from ethical considerations, saying only humans matter. Certainly then you can claim that it's immoral to use any type of force to prevent factory farms from operating. When Capitalism takes its course, people will often choose the cheaper milk / meat, e.g. at McDonalds or KFC. Capitalism doesn't care about morality. And by excluding animals from considerations, you don't have to, either. In Europe, factory farms are banned, but that is an act of government, i.e. force. There is no way to do it within Capitalism. If you buy up all the factory farms and liberate all the animals (like they did with slaves, let's say) someone else can just start another farm and sell meat cheaper than you. So you don't get rid of this through Capitalism, because it results in cheaper goods. The only way is to band together as a society and use force to ban it.

Antiobiotic Resistance

But of course, externalities aren't just limited to animals. The factory farms figured out that antibiotics can make animals fatter and bigger, therefore bring more money. Once again, Capitalism selects for those farms which do such a thing. And now, as a result, this has accelerated the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. So here's a Negative Externality that can affect MILLIONS OF PEOPLE on a scale not seen since antibiotics were invented. Thanks Factory Farms. Now are we going to somehow take them to court and extract some sort of reparations? By now it's a bit too late. Perhaps it was better to have banned this from the start, and use inspectors and force to make sure it's not done in the first place.

And that wonderful State Capitalist system of government-granted Patents of the Pharma community has failed to produce antibiotics at a quick enough pace. Meanwhile, other branches of Science and Open Source Software where people freely contribute to a snowball of knowledge has eclipsed for-profit companies like Microsoft and Brittannica. Wikipedia has way more than Britannica. Linux runs even on toasters while Windows runs only on a particular architecture, because they owned the closed code and didn't need to make it for any other. Imagine if drugs were developed on an open source ecosystem instead of a for-profit patent-fueled Pharma one.

Prisoners

A similar dynamic appears with private prisons. The prison that spends the least on each inmate, and works them to the bone, would make more money. And instead of the National Dairy Checkoff, they simply pay local courts to send them more kids, or lobby for minimum sentencing laws. Again, these situations would only be worse if we had MORE private prisons, because more people will care about saving a buck than about the welfare of prisoners. 

In Everyday Commerce

One can say that Anarcho-Capitalism are a Wolf and a Fox (or a Wolf and a Lamb) deciding that another Lamb is for dinner. When A and B make an agreement (e.g. that A will employ B), you can focus on their voluntary choice to make that agreement. But what you don't see is all the other people C who face the consequences (e.g. B is a manufacturer of a robot, and C was a local worker who used to be employed). So when C makes an agreement with D, they are coming from the situation that was created by all the transactions where C had to face the externality. Therefore, even on a grand scale, Anarcho-Capitalism can be quite coercive to many people. (And is one reason why societies have instituted Welfare schemes or Unconditional Basic Income).

Working Class Families

Capitalism works well to distribute money to people when employers value their employees. Your grandfather's generation worked at a Corporation for decades, and one breadwinner was able to support a whole suburban household, complete with cars, kids etc. Loyalty went both ways, and your grandfather even got a pension after retirement. Today, we are over 5x more productive per capita (inflation-adjusted GDP divided by number of people) and yet the Working Class hardly has the same earning power. Today, both parents have to work long hours just to pay the rent or mortgage for the exact same suburban house and car and kids. For a majority of the population, Jobs have become 2 year stints and are moving further to a gig economy where each worker is totally replaceable. Most manufacturing has been automated, so the demand for human labor in those sectors has gone down. That's why rent has become so much higher.

Now look at the incentive structure for the family. The resource is time and attention to your spouse. The dad gets a nice offer to earn 90% of what the grandfather used to earn (in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars). He goes and trades his time for that money, leaving less of it for his kids and wife. Now the mom wants nicer things for her kids – or perhaps a career of her own in the new shiny office workplace (not your grandfather's workplace) – and goes to work as well. So, even less attention for the kids. The kids are sent to public school, and the grandparents are put into nursing homes. Who wins from this? The kids don't, the grandparents don't, unless you count "professionals" taking care of them to be a step up from their own family. But the economy is booming and growing! The GDP is higher than it was before. Yet the time people spend with their kids and elderly is a negative externality. It's given up entirely organically through voluntary exchanges. And that affects how our society functions.

Induced Demand

Induced Demand is the phenomenon when more of a good being produced leads to greater consumption of that good. For example, constructing more lanes on a highway can actually make traffic worse, and vice versa. Malthus argued that as food becomes more available, people have more children, and pretty soon each person is right back to the same amount of food and material wealth as before. Since the 1950s it appears that we've been able to escape this "Malthusian Trap", but we may just have staved it off and are now living on a credit card. See below.

In Capitalism, of course, the producer and the consumer both have incentives to keep increasing production until all the supply is exhausted. This can lead to really scary planet-wide effects for both us today and our children and grandchildren.

Desertification

As farmers use land to its maximum capacity, prices fall, and farmers acting in their own short-term self interest push harder, extracting as much as they can from the land, in order to keep making what they're making. The result is a total collapse of the land's ability to sustain food. Now crops barely grow and soil starts blowing away like dust. You could have seen this in the Dust Bowl preceding the Great Depression, and the Government paid farmers to NOT PLANT for a while, something that would not have happened if everyone just did what's in their own self interest. We know this because now the situation has been replicated all around the world. Now, far from reducing desertification, we have increased it at a rate beyond anything before. In China, for example, the Gobi desert is growing every year. In Africa, farmland that was once arable is now desert. In fact, the UN estimated back in 2006 that this will lead to a migration of 20 million people from Africa – and this was way before Angela Merkel's policies 

Collapse of Ecosystems

Colony collapse disorder threatens wild bees. There are far less insects than before. Sure, it's nice that commercial beekeepers were able to keep the bees alive – this is one argument for private ownership of animals to prevent extinction. But, the extinction could very well have been a Negative Externality from unsustainable human activities. Certainly this can be said about overfishing or the extinction of species at an unprecedented rate. Is it a coincidence that this is the age of the most widespread Capitalism? It has certainly led to prosperity, but at the expense of consuming everything around it. Including finely tuned ecosystems.

Fossil Fuels

In the last 70 years, we are living in a time of the highest concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans, in MILLIONS OF YEARS. The cause is obvious: humans have released a lot of the CO2 trapped far underground in oil, gas etc. through burning them in our machines. As with the animals, proponents of fossil fuels need to engage in constant public contortion to deny simple data observations as a conspiracy by government scientists. They point to all the good that has been achieved with fossil fuels. They say Earth has been warm in the past. That's true, Earth has had both Greenhouse and Icehouse periods where palm trees grew near the poles, although evidence seems to show that during the Greenhouse periods, the areas below, say, Chicago, were uninhabitable by warm-blooded animals, certainly by humans. Going outside would be like going into a 170 degree fahrenheit sauna, the same sauna that has a warning not to be there for more than a couple hours. So are all those people living at those latitudes (including many developing prices) just "collateral damage" and are we gonna pay for our Negative Externality by dumping a few air conditioners their way? Or if their cities get flooded, are there gonna be private court cases to finally trace the causation to the people who contributed to this 20 years ago ... is that really the best way to deal with these problems?

But of course, the greenhouse effect isn't the only problem with pollution. The constant smog from 19th century London, or 20th century New York, looked like this. Human cognition starts to suffer in a stuffy room with poor ventilation because of a buildup of CO2 to 1000 ppm or more. Right now the global ambient concentrations are already around 400 ppm, nearly one half of that. In some areas, it's worse.

Summary

Let's sum up. Has Capitalism brought us unprecedented prosperity? Well, technological innovation did (one can argue it could have proceeded even faster with open source software, science, collaboration instead of competition etc.) But let's say it was pure Capitalism. At what cost? The competition has led to negative externalities which are really hard to remedy using Capitalism alone. More of the same will simply make MORE negative externalities. Capitalism is resilient and resistant to messing with making products cheaper and more available, by any purely Capitalism-based means. But don't be fooled, there are externalities everywhere:

Billions of animals at Factory farms suffering so meat and milk can be cheaper and more plentiful

Desertification of farmland

Pollution of the air and oceans

Overfishing, collapse of ecosystems like the rainforest or lake Baikal

Working class works harder and longer for less money

Capitalism is a good system for certain things, but it is not a panacea. Negative Externalities exist. Induced Demand exists. These need to be recognized and addressed on a societal level, and not praying to the invisible hand to somehow make sure we survive the consequences of our ever-increasing unsustainable consumption.

[smarterthanone]

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

Factory Farms

They say when you're not the customer, you're the product. That's certainly true of farm animals. They are slaughtered to be sold to people for food. The milk and eggs they produce are sold as well. So what happens? Well, very simply, Capitalism on its own will cause exploitation of animals on a massive scale. Billions of animals are raised in ever more cramped conditions, forcibly inseminated and fed antibiotics. Little birds have their beaks cut off so they don't peck each other as they wallow in their own shit and filth. Now, they spend their whole life in these conditions. This is the epitome of coersion. And why has it become like this? Because those farms which take these measures can sell meat and dairy for a lower price than the ones which don't. In the market, many people want the cheaper sausage, however it was made. So there is a growing demand for factory farm output.

Not only that, but the farmers form organizations to boost demand for their products such as the National Dairy Checkoff. They do this without government. Remember those "Got Milk" commercials? How about "Got Milk from a cow that barely moves and is fed hormones"?

OK, maybe you can make some ethical contortions by simply excluding animals from ethical considerations, saying only humans matter. Certainly then you can claim that it's immoral to use any type of force to prevent factory farms from operating. When Capitalism takes its course, people will often choose the cheaper milk / meat, e.g. at McDonalds or KFC. Capitalism doesn't care about morality. And by excluding animals from considerations, you don't have to, either. In Europe, factory farms are banned, but that is an act of government, i.e. force. There is no way to do it within Capitalism. If you buy up all the factory farms and liberate all the animals (like they did with slaves, let's say) someone else can just start another farm and sell meat cheaper than you. So you don't get rid of this through Capitalism, because it results in cheaper goods. The only way is to band together as a society and use force to ban it.

Do you buy cheap food from factory farms or do you buy more expensive ethically raised free range organic chicken type meats? Why do some people buy one and some people buy the other? Well some people think its WORTH the extra price to buy the ethical (and often higher quality) meat. Some people do not think its WORTH it to pay the extra price. Is one group of consumers wrong? Why are you qualified to make that decision for them? Should a starving man with a family of 4 to feed be forced to pay extra for the meat and go with less? If you were to ban factory farms, you know all that would happen is the poorer people who are buying the cheapest food will have a skyrocketing grocery bill. Banning factory farms has great human costs, its not as simple as just be good to animals.

 

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

Antiobiotic Resistance

But of course, externalities aren't just limited to animals. The factory farms figured out that antibiotics can make animals fatter and bigger, therefore bring more money. Once again, Capitalism selects for those farms which do such a thing. And now, as a result, this has accelerated the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. So here's a Negative Externality that can affect MILLIONS OF PEOPLE on a scale not seen since antibiotics were invented. Thanks Factory Farms. Now are we going to somehow take them to court and extract some sort of reparations? By now it's a bit too late. Perhaps it was better to have banned this from the start, and use inspectors and force to make sure it's not done in the first place.

And that wonderful State Capitalist system of government-granted Patents of the Pharma community has failed to produce antibiotics at a quick enough pace. Meanwhile, other branches of Science and Open Source Software where people freely contribute to a snowball of knowledge has eclipsed for-profit companies like Microsoft and Brittannica. Wikipedia has way more than Britannica. Linux runs even on toasters while Windows runs only on a particular architecture, because they owned the closed code and didn't need to make it for any other. Imagine if drugs were developed on an open source ecosystem instead of a for-profit patent-fueled Pharma one.

There is one reason why there is no open source drugs. It's illegal. See government. Pharma as we know it would not exist in the absence of government. Pharma invests a lot of money into producing drugs. A large amount of it is complying with federal regulations. A lot of the drugs are also "waste" and I mean for example marijuana is proven to help people with anxiety. However since it has been illegal, Pharma has a reason to create anti anxiety medications. If marijuana was legal from the get go, Pharma would have much less incentives to create anti anxiety medications and would instead have to move on to the next thing... maybe cancer cure or something else.

 

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

Prisoners

A similar dynamic appears with private prisons. The prison that spends the least on each inmate, and works them to the bone, would make more money. And instead of the National Dairy Checkoff, they simply pay local courts to send them more kids, or lobby for minimum sentencing laws. Again, these situations would only be worse if we had MORE private prisons, because more people will care about saving a buck than about the welfare of prisoners. 

Private prisons in a government are bad. You are right. I completely agree with what you said. HOWEVER, the US has by far more prison population than any other country. Why? Because the US government has made many things illegal and many of the crimes with sentencing requirements. If the government did not exist, we would probably still have issues with prison systems HOWEVER there would be far less people in prison. So the overall harm would be greatly reduced.

 

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

In Everyday Commerce

One can say that Anarcho-Capitalism are a Wolf and a Fox (or a Wolf and a Lamb) deciding that another Lamb is for dinner. When A and B make an agreement (e.g. that A will employ B), you can focus on their voluntary choice to make that agreement. But what you don't see is all the other people C who face the consequences (e.g. B is a manufacturer of a robot, and C was a local worker who used to be employed). So when C makes an agreement with D, they are coming from the situation that was created by all the transactions where C had to face the externality. Therefore, even on a grand scale, Anarcho-Capitalism can be quite coercive to many people. (And is one reason why societies have instituted Welfare schemes or Unconditional Basic Income).

There is a difference between me saying Hey Joe you can't stay on my couch any more... and Joe now faces homelessness. VS me aiming a gun at Joe and saying You are not allowed to have a home, be homeless or die. You are considering both as coercion. That's fine. But lets agree we are talking about both scenarios.

Coercion, when used in the manner you are using it, is the natural state of man and introduced by non human elements. One human, alone on the entire planet would be coerced into working like a slave because of natural scarcity and the elements. This same problem is passed on from human to human to human. It is impossible to have no coercion, as you are defining it.

Regarding robots. I don't see why you have a right to not have a robot do your job. Why don't we get rid of computers because so many people lost jobs doing math and keeping records by hand? Well sure we lost a bunch of people doing those jobs but guess what? Look at the value of the computer industry? It far surpasses the jobs and value produced by paper makers and professional page filers.

UBI will not do anything except make the super rich richer and the poor and middle class poorer. Its basically just additional inflation.

 

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

Working Class Families

Capitalism works well to distribute money to people when employers value their employees. Your grandfather's generation worked at a Corporation for decades, and one breadwinner was able to support a whole suburban household, complete with cars, kids etc. Loyalty went both ways, and your grandfather even got a pension after retirement. Today, we are over 5x more productive per capita (inflation-adjusted GDP divided by number of people) and yet the Working Class hardly has the same earning power. Today, both parents have to work long hours just to pay the rent or mortgage for the exact same suburban house and car and kids. For a majority of the population, Jobs have become 2 year stints and are moving further to a gig economy where each worker is totally replaceable. Most manufacturing has been automated, so the demand for human labor in those sectors has gone down. That's why rent has become so much higher.

Now look at the incentive structure for the family. The resource is time and attention to your spouse. The dad gets a nice offer to earn 90% of what the grandfather used to earn (in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars). He goes and trades his time for that money, leaving less of it for his kids and wife. Now the mom wants nicer things for her kids – or perhaps a career of her own in the new shiny office workplace (not your grandfather's workplace) – and goes to work as well. So, even less attention for the kids. The kids are sent to public school, and the grandparents are put into nursing homes. Who wins from this? The kids don't, the grandparents don't, unless you count "professionals" taking care of them to be a step up from their own family. But the economy is booming and growing! The GDP is higher than it was before. Yet the time people spend with their kids and elderly is a negative externality. It's given up entirely organically through voluntary exchanges. And that affects how our society functions.

Part is they are getting squished by taxes and part is a segment that is not evolving career wise. I will talk taxes first. As an example, I make say $200,000 pre tax as a single man. This is generated by 33 rental units each paying $505 a month each. I pay a high tax rate, lets just say 40%. So after taxes I make $120,000. This is a good life for me. I feel I deserve to maintain this lifestyle and my business as is. So next year taxes go up to pay for Obamacare or free college or some other new program whatever, doesn't matter. Now I pay 50% taxes. So the same $200,000 now only nets me $100,000. I have my own mortgage, car payments, life and I work just as hard as I did last year, I deserve to make at least what I made last year. So what do I do? I now need to make $240,000 pretax to net the same $120,000. So I raise rents, they now go up $101 PER MONTH! I still make my $120,000 per year after tax buying power BUT all the renters now are paying an extra ~$1200 per year for housing.

The other part is if you stacked bricks in 1850 you made a living. You stack bricks today, its minimum wage work. When we live in the future Star Trek like land, how valuable will stacking bricks be? It will be useless. We will just have the bricks created in the place they need to be or something like that. So if you think you can just do one thing forever, and your kids can do the same thing, and their kids kids etc... wrong. Even higher paying jobs become obsolete. That is just how it works. Always has, always will be... UNLESS we halt all further technological development. Thats dumb.

 

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

Induced Demand

Induced Demand is the phenomenon when more of a good being produced leads to greater consumption of that good. For example, constructing more lanes on a highway can actually make traffic worse, and vice versa. Malthus argued that as food becomes more available, people have more children, and pretty soon each person is right back to the same amount of food and material wealth as before. Since the 1950s it appears that we've been able to escape this "Malthusian Trap", but we may just have staved it off and are now living on a credit card. See below.

In Capitalism, of course, the producer and the consumer both have incentives to keep increasing production until all the supply is exhausted. This can lead to really scary planet-wide effects for both us today and our children and grandchildren.

You aren't looking at the big picture. Yes it can make traffic worse on that road. But its taking from other roads. Traffic isnt unlimited, everything has a natural stop. I can't think of a single example where this is a bad thing. The more people who sign up for Facebook the more valuable the platform is to people and thus even the skeptics are like well now its useful enough for me to join. So what? The more people use it that just means they want to use it. Whys it matter to you? Same with kids. If there are so many people food is scarce, food prices will go up and people will have less kids.... then when the population is lower food will be super abundant and people will have more kids. Capitalism is self correcting like that.

 

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

Desertification

As farmers use land to its maximum capacity, prices fall, and farmers acting in their own short-term self interest push harder, extracting as much as they can from the land, in order to keep making what they're making. The result is a total collapse of the land's ability to sustain food. Now crops barely grow and soil starts blowing away like dust. You could have seen this in the Dust Bowl preceding the Great Depression, and the Government paid farmers to NOT PLANT for a while, something that would not have happened if everyone just did what's in their own self interest. We know this because now the situation has been replicated all around the world. Now, far from reducing desertification, we have increased it at a rate beyond anything before. In China, for example, the Gobi desert is growing every year. In Africa, farmland that was once arable is now desert. In fact, the UN estimated back in 2006 that this will lead to a migration of 20 million people from Africa – and this was way before Angela Merkel's policies 

Same as previous with the kids. As farm land decreases, profit from farming will increase and the incentive to save or bring back bad land will go up and up and up until its corrected. Whole point of capitalism.

 

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

Collapse of Ecosystems

Colony collapse disorder threatens wild bees. There are far less insects than before. Sure, it's nice that commercial beekeepers were able to keep the bees alive – this is one argument for private ownership of animals to prevent extinction. But, the extinction could very well have been a Negative Externality from unsustainable human activities. Certainly this can be said about overfishing or the extinction of species at an unprecedented rate. Is it a coincidence that this is the age of the most widespread Capitalism? It has certainly led to prosperity, but at the expense of consuming everything around it. Including finely tuned ecosystems.

Ecosystems and the earth are the "best" if humans were extinct? Right? Everything here is a "so what", species have gone extinct since before humans existed, and new ones are forming constantly. So what. Regarding bees specifically. In the past nobody cared about bees. Now since there is a shortage, professional bee keepers will bring bees on a truck to where they are needed and they charge for the service. An example of capitalism incentives at work.

 

On 10/8/2017 at 4:36 PM, EGreg said:

Fossil Fuels

In the last 70 years, we are living in a time of the highest concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere and oceans, in MILLIONS OF YEARS. The cause is obvious: humans have released a lot of the CO2 trapped far underground in oil, gas etc. through burning them in our machines. As with the animals, proponents of fossil fuels need to engage in constant public contortion to deny simple data observations as a conspiracy by government scientists. They point to all the good that has been achieved with fossil fuels. They say Earth has been warm in the past. That's true, Earth has had both Greenhouse and Icehouse periods where palm trees grew near the poles, although evidence seems to show that during the Greenhouse periods, the areas below, say, Chicago, were uninhabitable by warm-blooded animals, certainly by humans. Going outside would be like going into a 170 degree fahrenheit sauna, the same sauna that has a warning not to be there for more than a couple hours. So are all those people living at those latitudes (including many developing prices) just "collateral damage" and are we gonna pay for our Negative Externality by dumping a few air conditioners their way? Or if their cities get flooded, are there gonna be private court cases to finally trace the causation to the people who contributed to this 20 years ago ... is that really the best way to deal with these problems?

But of course, the greenhouse effect isn't the only problem with pollution. The constant smog from 19th century London, or 20th century New York, looked like this. Human cognition starts to suffer in a stuffy room with poor ventilation because of a buildup of CO2 to 1000 ppm or more. Right now the global ambient concentrations are already around 400 ppm, nearly one half of that. In some areas, it's worse.

I agree this is an issue. But when its not valuable nothing happens, when its valuable, everything happens right? So right now, nobody is actually in the ocean. Right? I mean I am standing on land, you? But say NYC is about to be swallowed whole, well then capitalism says that the people of NYC would be willing to pay lots of money to save their property, so the incentive to solve the problem increases. If the whole world was about to burn up because it was so hot, I would imagine half the worlds wealth would be the reward for solving it at that point. So as it gets worse, people want a solution more, the reward/incentive increases. Just because everyone isn't tireless working today on the problem doesn't mean it won't get solved. I would trust people standing to make $10 trillion dollars as a reward to solve the problem in the final hours over a bunch of hippies trying to solve it now who are living on a $30,000 salary. Incentives are powerful.

[Jsbrads]

On the last topic by Smarter

Government is preventing us from using nuclear power.

other than that, agree with Smarter

[smarterthanone]

1 hour ago, Jsbrads said:

On the last topic by Smarter

Government is preventing us from using nuclear power.

other than that, agree with Smarter

True as well. However I am not so sure nuclear would take off as much or as quickly as you think due to nobody is going to tolerate a nuclear facility next door, I think operators would have to own vast lands or cause vast ghettos (ie all housing in a 20 mi radius is low cost housing because of the nuclear facility). Right now people tolerate it because the government sanctions the existing ones. But you think if 10 people on my block get a rare eye cancer that specifically forms from nuclear power generation waste a year after a nuclear facility opens we arent going to shoot those people in voluntaryism you crazy. And that stuff happens all the time with these places.

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

Shouldn't you work out the glaring holes in your last two posts?

[Jsbrads]

No, governments shut down safe nuclear facilities 20 miles away from people.

In a land that doesn't grant government unlimited power, 3% of the people would not be able to shut down safe nuclear reactors that 97% of the people want. 

[EGreg]

On 10/20/2017 at 9:22 AM, Dylan Lawrence Moore said:

Shouldn't you work out the glaring holes in your last two posts?

Well, shouldn't you stop beating your wife after so many weeks?

[Dylan Lawrence Moore]

On 10/25/2017 at 9:27 AM, EGreg said:

Well, shouldn't you stop beating your wife after so many weeks?

Damn. That's so clever I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out the analogy.

[Goldenages]

On 8.10.2017 at 10:36 PM, EGreg said:

Billions of animals at Factory farms suffering so meat and milk can be cheaper and more plentiful

Desertification of farmland

Pollution of the air and oceans

Overfishing, collapse of ecosystems like the rainforest or lake Baikal

Working class works harder and longer for less money

Capitalism is a good system for certain things, but it is not a panacea. Negative Externalities exist. Induced Demand exists. These need to be recognized and addressed on a societal level, and not praying to the invisible hand to

Negative Externalities exist, and they are always a consequence when property rights are violated.

Overfishing, collapse of ecosystems like the rainforest or lake Baikal are the best examples.

The oceans belong to nobody or to states. So who is responsible for overfishing? Capitalism?

The government forces native people to leave their living einvironment, cutting trees and destroying the rainforest, using police and military forces. Who is responsible for this? Capitalism?

Lake Baikal was destroyed by ideas and actions of an authoritarian government. Again - where do you see capitalism, in the complete absence of property rights and free trade in all above examples?

 

Yes, working class works harder and longer for less money. Two main causes: Steady import of low qualified workers into the West, while demand for low skilled work is declining. Second cause is this junk money printed in central banks for the needs of those in power, i.e. government, while claiming they are running a caring welfare state. Capitalism? Where?

Growth in Africa is a million people more in two weeks. Desertification? You bet, if we had that growth of population in Europe, Europe would be hell. The reasons why many countries in Africa are undeveloped are authoritarian, socialistic or religious governments. They do not grant property rights to their citizens, they take money from the West, deal with some big companies and exploit people and country.  You blame capitalism? Are you kidding me?

What you are using are the classic leftist "arguments". Every evil that is done by governments and states - and yes, it is a lot - is blamed to capitalism.

regards

Andi

 

[EGreg]

Andi - we see the same things and you attribute it to government - which is everywhere - and I attribute it to the profit motive - which is everywhere.

The thing is - if there was no government, the same profit motive would still lead to factory farms and desertification. All it takes is everyone acting in their individual best interest.

It's like you're playing this game by hiding "capitalism" and saying it's not around anywhere, but government is around everywhere. And then everything can be blamed on it and nothing on capitalism. A bit like patent trolls or Donald Trump's political record. He can attack politicians all day long but he has no record to attack (except of course his record as a businessman). Well, not everyone is going to go along with such a game.

[Goldenages]

On 2.11.2017 at 1:57 AM, EGreg said:

The thing is - if there was no government, the same profit motive would still lead to factory farms and desertification. All it takes is everyone acting in their individual best interest.

If there was no government, but the land (or the oceans or the rainforest) owned by private citizens, all it takes is everyone acting in their individual best interest.

Someone wants to make big holes into the countryside, looking for oil? Sorry guys, thats my land. There are no fish any more in the seas?  Well, a perfect example for the Tragedy of the Commons. A company wants to cut trees of the rainforest? No way, I am living there.

All exploitation is a violation of property rights. Violation of property rights is the exclusive preserve of an entity called "the State".

 

regards

Andi

[Jsbrads]

If people destroy the value of their land, they lose the ability to support themselves.

if the government does it, it just taxes someone else. Government doesn’t care. Government officials grant land to be destroyed by their highest campaign contributers. Since neither own the land, the destruction of the land value is not borne by either party, both leave to destroy again. 

[smarterthanone]

On 10/24/2017 at 3:28 AM, Jsbrads said:

No, governments shut down safe nuclear facilities 20 miles away from people.

In a land that doesn't grant government unlimited power, 3% of the people would not be able to shut down safe nuclear reactors that 97% of the people want. 

There is a proportional defense. What I mean is an entity like the United States of America has funding and need for a certain level of man power, equipment etc to protect its "employees" from violence. Such as the military and other organizations. Same as a corner store owner has its own amount of equipment proportional to the size and risk of its operations, probably a shot gun and camera system and bullet proof window.

A nuclear power plant is somewhat more than a corner store, but far less than the USA. So no, they can't feasibly go around killing people or all their CEOs and people will get shot as soon as there are 10 of them together.

Secondly. Existing ones would most likely stay. New ones would not be built. What would happen I think is the existing ones property values would decline unknown amount over an unknown time period. Depending on how they are run, if the community tolerates more leaks and stuff as opposed to less then the areas will become ghettoized where only poor people will live and tolerate nuclear sludge.

[Jsbrads]

You just described the opposite of reality. Nuclear facilities are originally placed far from cities. And people continue to fill in the space between the city and the nuclear facility because it is safe. 

[Fashus Maximus]

On 11/17/2017 at 3:57 PM, Goldenages said:

All exploitation is a violation of property rights.

While I agree with most of your posts, I don't think the above statement is totally accurate. There are negative externalities that are not induced by violating property, such as atmospheric pollution. The atmosphere cannot be privatized. Also, degenerate markets such as the trade of voluntary servants, whore-ism, sorcery, predatory lending, and witchcraft do not violate private property and yet also have negative externalities.

This is my problem with those who profess AnCap. It is totally focused on individual property and does not address the issue of collective resources that cannot be privatized. You cannot have a voluntary society that ignores collective problems because collective problems will ultimately result in very private costs for the members of the community. Hence, it will be mathematically impossible to sustain.