There are many environmentally damaging actions that offer short-to-medium term gain, and many of the changes necessary for long term gain have costs in the short term so are not attractive to the short/medium term thinkers.
The problem isn't even constrained to issues that will come to a head after our lifespans. There are many issues that are going to start biting hard in our lifetime, but to "the market" even that is long term: companies are thinking about profits/costs over the next five or ten years and individuals are thinking about maximising what they can get out of their current company in the next year or two before they move on.
Heck, many (both companies and individuals) are just thinking about how they will maximise (or in some cases, simply survive) the next quarter and anything else is too far in the future.
I mean, isn't the environment the prime example of a situation where externalities and the tragedy of the commons describe the problems for the free market to solve the problems at hand?
Further, free enterprises exist to maximise their own profit and not to protect the "market".
The only circumstance under which I expect the free market to freely solve any environmental issues is if the consumer demands more (truly) environmentally friendly products and services, moving the demand and hence the profit from polluting products.
> The only circumstance under which I expect the free market to freely solve any environmental issues is if the consumer demands more (truly) environmentally friendly products and services, moving the demand and hence the profit from polluting products.
I believe both you and GP are correct as there is very little incentive to protect externalities affecting current business model over extended periods.
Common land = public land. In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land. You producing pollution on your land that negatively affected mine would result in a lawsuit.
It is really the very existence of the legal-fiction of "public land" (ie. land that everyone owns), which gives rise to many of the real environmental abuses.
*typo
None of this libertarian fantasy is remotely feasible, even after you assume that you can assign property rights to every molecule of the earth and have to sign contracts to take a breath.
Libertarianism and anti-statism are usually quite more nuanced than their typical strawmen, and many libertarians are OK with small state which would be in charge of law enforcement. However, such small state still has no reason to own any land (except for government buildings) or designate any land as "public".
You didn't address ZeroGravitas' first paragraph; how would you solve these issues?
Nah, not even someone hip to the kool-aid they drowned in wouldn't have been able to predict something like
> every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land
> Be then frankly an entire anarchist and not a quarter anarchist, an eighth anarchist, or one-sixteenth anarchist, as one is a one-fourth, one-eighth or one-sixteenth partner in trade. Go beyond the abolition of contract to the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but also of property and of authority in all its forms. Then you will have arrived at the anarchist community; that is to say, the social state where each one is free to produce or consume according to his will or his fancy without controlling, or being controlled by any other person whatever; where the balance of production and consumption is established naturally, no longer by the restrictive laws and arbitrary force of others, but by the free exercise of industry prompted by the needs and desires of each individual. The sea of humanity needs no dikes. Give its tides full sweep and each day they will find their level.
The argument against public ownership came first about a century after libertarianism was first conceived, with the rise of right-wing libertarianism, which took left wing libertarianism and turned it pretty much upside down by adding a focus on property right enforcement which is in direct opposition to the original principles of libertarianism.
A key point of Dejacques original libertarianism was the view that enforcement of property rights pretty much inherently deprives the public of liberty by using the state to add restraints on people that take away far more liberty than they grant.
Having grown up in Norway - one of a few countries with extensive freedom to roam [2] - I will tell you that nobody can convince me that strict enforcement of property rights is anything but theft from the public; once you are used to it, you feel the loss of that freedom deeply when you go elsewhere and are quite literally fenced in in situations where you'd previously be used to be able to roam free.
[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...
No, you have it backwards. The "tragedy" was a fiction invented to justify the Acts of Enclosure in the UK, wherein public land (commons) was fenced off for sole use by the local lords.
Here's a good explanation: http://www.monbiot.com/1994/01/01/the-tragedy-of-enclosure/
In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land.
OK, here are two counterpoints:
First, if land is held in common, everybody has a share of ownership, including people who actually live there and therefore really do care deeply about the environmental quality.
Second, just look at the recent stories about Toys'R'Us. It was purchased in a leveraged buyout in 2005 -- meaning the buyers paid relatively little and the company was saddled with a massive debt. By your argument, wouldn't those new owners care deeply about the long-term health of the company? Instead they extracted as much cash as possible and left behind a bankrupt shell. I think the analogy to private land is pretty clear.
A commons is a piece of land supposedly used commonly and not owned by anyone. So Hardins theory is addressing tthings like the ocean and the air.
This article might as well be rebutting the theory of gravity because it only applies to objects with mass.
No, Hardin himself intended his theory to address land usage; it's this article that argues the theory doesn't actually work properly in that context.
I can prove it to you. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full
This is the original article by Hardin. Ctrl-F oceans. Then Ctrl-F pollution. You will see that Hardin directly references pollution and oceans as commons.
If you read the entire article you will see that he talks about population control more than he talks about land.
There are at least three categories, not just two (as Hardin clearly explains): common ownership, nationalized ownership, and private ownership.
The Monbiot article argues that common ownership doesn't necessarily mean a destructive free-for-all; often the people who actually live in a certain land do a good job of looking after it.
As for private ownership, free market fans tend to assume this is the best approach, but individual owners aren't always incentivized to make the best long-term use of land.
I don't think Monbiot is entirely against Hardin, he's saying more that Hardin is being misread as a justification for private ownership of land only. (I don't think Hardin takes a position on private vs nationalized; he's only concerned with commons vs owned.)
If i'd own the river flowing by a big plant, would I care more about it's preservation than the polution-fee I could take from the company owner?
One last point: you call public land a legal-fiction - that's interesting, because I would call property rights a legal fiction, and "public ownership" the natural state of stuff (one could argue every legal concept is fiction, I'd tend to agree with that).
Nearly every culture that has ever existed has recognized that someone taking something from you by force is crime. Its a normative expectation for nearly 100% of all humans.
People like yourself, who don't see a value in others property (ie. think you are free to take it), are generally seen as very dangerous and inconsiderate people.
Yes, most cultures recognise some notion of property, few would agree with taking the clothes off someone's back. But the exact nature of these property systems is varied, and the idea that all things must necessarily have an owner, and anyone else using them is "taking them by force", is by no means universal.
Many cultures have some notion of public property, and indeed many of these public property rights were violated historically in order to establish the modern notion of private ownership.
Property Rights exist, at best, as part of a human narrative that we have some interest in designating a legal owner for a piece of dirt. Without humans, the dirt is not owned. With humans, we say we own the dirt (but there is no actual, objective ownership).
>People like yourself, who don't see a value in others property
I don't think GP made that point, rather that until Humans come along, no ownership, ie, public ownership, is the default. The land is owned by nobody until someone buys it.
This can be shown with an example; Mars. Who, at this current moment, owns mars? All the dirt on mars must, by your argument, be owned by someone.
Property rights are the first level of abstraction above the physical layer of "might is right". "Public" land is usually a higher level of abstraction, because it almost always still limits who is the public: even indigenous people usually mean "public" land as land of our tribe, not their tribe.
Property rights are still not an inherent part of nature.
If you break down the universe into component parts and sift through it all, you won't find any part that says "Property rights" and rather stuff like "Gravity" or "Particle Weak Interaction" or "Wave-Particle Duality".
Commodore Business Machines for several decades had their plant in Westchester, PA, leak assorted chemical related to their chip manufacturing. When this was identified, they started some improvement work, but didn't fix the problem. The site was eventually sold to a company that bought it knowing it was contaminated, who continued to operate a chip manufacturing business there, until the demanded improvements made it impossible for them to operate.
Despite corporate ownership for years, nobody advocated or cared very deeply about the environmental quality of this land until they were forced to by the EPA, because it did not affect their business. Other people nearby would largely have remained unaffected for many years too, until chemicals started seeping out, at which point Commodore was in decline and eventually went bankrupt.
Here's one of the documents regarding this site: https://semspub.epa.gov/work/03/50245.pdf
I'm sure there are cases where the issue is that nobody has any direct legal interest in a piece of land, but a lot of serious environmental issues have explicitly happened or escalated because the owner did not care or could not afford to remedy the problems.
The bigger fiction is to think that the owner will always "care very deeply" about the environmental quality of their land.
> Common land = public land. In a truly private system, one in which all land was owned, every parcel of land would have some advocate who cared very deeply about the environmental quality of their land.
The state is the entity that owns all land - prior to states land was simply not owned - and state organs like the EPA are the advocates who care deeply about the environmental quality of public land.
You can't address environmental issues on a smaller scale - indeed even individual states are too small a scale be able to address inherently global problems like CO2 emissions. Any "private" owner of the entire planet, or even of a large enough region to address issues like fishery management or water table pollution, would have to function like a state and share the same problems (e.g. lack of competing alternatives).
Who owns the state?
Both of those examples mentioned above are right now being heavily polluted.
The tragedy of the commons is essentially this: The cost of me polluting the air by driving a car is much less then the cost of me not polluting the air and walking 20 miles to work instead. My pollution contribution to the air is minor when compared to walking 20 miles and therefore by choosing to drive i am acting logically. The phenomenon ghe theory addresses is that when everybody does this the aggregate contribution to pollution ends up destroying the commons.
Therein lies the tragedy: groups of people acting logically in picking the lesser evil end up destroying the commons.
Why do people even argue about this theory? It's readily apparent if you drive a car or use any form of non renewable energy.
Or maybe the tract is owned by my shell corporation. I extract millions, polluting the property and that of surrounding neighbors as well. A large swath of land lays in ruin. My neighbors sue the owner of my tract, ie the corporation, which promptly goes bankrupt. I don't care, I've already made my fortune and I'm protected by the corporate veil. If you say in such a case I shouldn't be protected, then you're arguing in favor of special penalties with respect to environmental issues.
More importantly, how do you cope with the person who buys the entire amazon basin and decides that, actually logging it is going to be the best way to realise its immediate value.
I don't understand. How is the legal fiction of 'public land' more fictitious that the concept of 'private land'?
In a world where corporations buy land, pillage all of its natural resources, then sell off a smoking crater, the loser is always the environment, as corporations and people downcycle real estate constantly, extracting their profits, destroying what was there before, dodging externalities, and then often defrauding the next investor. Look what was there before and what is left over after the whole cycle. It's shit.
You should take a look at the forests of New Zealand and the movement to make logging on public lands illegal.
Does it mean that zero and negative numbers are morally bankrupt?
I can give more examples of B.) where corporations visit environmental destruction on lands they own (e.g. gold mines) and then sell off the leftover, ruined real estate, having still profited handsomely in the end.
Quote:”What improves the circumstances of the greater part can never be regarded as an inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.”
And:“[The rich] consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity…they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species.”
There are even situations of negative externality[1] where the value of the externalized costs exceeds the profit gained so that the net productivity to the nation is negative. Since the company never need pay those costs and they're applied to society as a whole, however, the company is still motivated to do it.
I wonder what Adam Smith would have said about the tragedy of the commons.
That's the core mistake. It's often very profitable to damage the market.
Unfortunately there's so much propaganda that effectively argues that corporations should be allowed to do anything they want and it'll all work out for the best that the whole thing has been tainted.
Efficient markets NEED an efficient government to put down ground rules and enforce them.
If there is one thing I've learned about the markets, it's this: Things move much more quickly or much more slowly than anyone ever expects.
Besides that I think that enterprises in some cases "dilute" ethics of individual beings.
This obviously means the company will quickly run out of resources and employees but depending on the severity of the deployed sacrifice, this can take decades, a time span that corporations have shown on several occasions to not care about.
Any agency brought up to protect the environment has per it's mission an incentive to protect the environment and doesn't suffer the problems of a corporation, namely limited funding. A government agency doesn't need to make profit to receive lots of funding if it's important enough.
> What if the bad actor owns half the land in the region and all the guns?
As far as I know the government has the biggest guns.
Not in the mythical libertarian paradise where all property is privately owned.