It's a lot like cryptocurrency and DAO schemes: it turns out to be really really hard to get people to accept that a bug in the law means a bad outcome for them, and nobody writes non-trivial bug-free code.
That's disingenuous. There is plenty of libertarian literature on negative externalities. Milton Friedman, notably, was happy to use taxes and regulations to protect the environment.
The reasoning is simple: by polluting my land / poisoning me with PFAS, you have violated the NAP. This kind of pollution is illegal in "Libertopia".
The same can be said about your arbitrary argument. Why are the fine schedules set to $X today instead of $X+1? Why do we get drivers licenses at 16 instead of 17? Do you oppose Obamacare because it has such an arbitrary income limit?
Everything about the specific implementation of laws is arbitrary. The important thing is that it is reasonable, and on solid moral ground. A libertarian government would scale the fines / punishment / taxes in accordance with how grevious the crime was.
I am exactly not expecting unanimous consensus, which is why statements like "this kind of pollution is illegal in Libertopia [because of NAP]" seem dubious to me.
The generally(this might be too strong a word to use with Libertarians) accepted interpretation of the NAP is that as long as I do not initiate violence against someone, my behavior is acceptable, and that violence is only acceptable against someone if they break the NAP first.
This breaks down in Libertarian communities as they cannot agree on common deductions of things like what counts as “someone”, what counts as “violence”, whether you have rights to the land if you’re not using it(Georgists/homesteaders), or if indirect damages like pollution are a violation of the NAP.
The idea that a libertarian community would let someone dump toxins into their neighborhood and leave without cleaning it up or compensating the hurt is completely plausible. Half of the community would not believe he directly caused the cancer unless he injected it into you, and you should have been more careful about what water you drink, and the other half’s only recourse would be to fight the first half.
You might be interested in this review of an another book on a related topic:
>The Town That Went Feral
>When a group of libertarians set about scrapping their local government, chaos descended. And then the bears moved in.
>... This is the so-called Free Town Project, a venture wherein a group of libertarian activists attempted to take over a tiny New Hampshire town, Grafton, and transform it into a haven for libertarian ideals—part social experiment, part beacon to the faithful, Galt’s Gulch meets the New Jerusalem. These people had found one another largely over the internet, posting manifestos and engaging in utopian daydreaming on online message boards.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159662/libertarian-walks-int...
After a while the regular libertarians look to confront the plant owner about the waste and dumping asking for a cleanup and compensation for the damage to people and property.
Well hearing that people are upset, the plant owner has a town hall with the folk, they get rowdy and emotional. The plant owner get's defensive and thinks about the possibility of a down quarter for his victimized chemical plant. Everyone leaves a bit upset. Some more than others.
Later that night the plant owner sits in his home and reads about a new libertarian utopia that's started. They go to bed that night with a plan to pack up leave this ungrateful town.
A month later the plant over leaves with most of the towns job, the PFAS stays and everyone else is too sick or poor paying for someones sickness to be able to be a libertarian anymore.
Ta-da, the aristocrats.