[clue-talk] Wow, Card's a little political...

[Jed S. Baer]

On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 01:44:58 -0400
Angelo Bertolli wrote:

> We share the atmosphere, if for no other reason that we have to.  Any 
> pollution you put into the air, affects me.  If you make money and this 
> is a byproduct, I am paying a price for your profit.  (I bet you're 
> going to say that pollution isn't a problem, and that the air we
> breathe is every bit as good as it was 5000 years ago, but this is
> really just an example.)  So this, for me, a great example of a "shared
> resource" and how it may imply that we need something more than pure
> capitalism.

Well, I anticipated your response. Yeah, air. Consider a Lockean approach
towards ownership. People own things because they have put in some effort
in order to acquire them. Even if you're a trust-fund kid, living on what
is essentially a gift from your ancestors, those ancestors worked to
acquire the wealth they're giving you. At some point, somewhere, somebody
worked to acquire the money.

Nobody owns the atmosphere. But, if somebody invests the time, effort,
money, resources, etc., to compress it and bottle it, then they can sell
compressed air. There's a huge market in the world for bottled gasses.
Sure some of them aren't obtained by processing atmosphere, but there's
some segment of that market which is -- SCUBA tanks come to mind, as long
as the diver isn't using a special mixture. It's reasonable to argue that
I own the air in my bike tires, since I expended the effort to capture it
from atmosphere and compress it. It's very cheap, so I don't mind that I
have to "repurchase" it regularly. It's an expendable resource, like
gasoline. I "buy" it with the labor I expend to operate my bicycle pump.

Similarly, nobody owns the oil that's in the ground. It's owned only
after somebody expends the resources to extract it. How is it that it's
shared by anyone when it's just sitting there miles below the surface,
unused? Unused isn't the same thing as shared. And I reiterate my
previous question. What effort has some "we" engaged in to establish
shared ownership? Mere presence? If that's your argument, then I bet I
can find some Indians, or perhaps even Spaniards) who'd be willing to
argue that they collectively own various oil fields, because they were
here first. (That's a philosophical point; might be true or not, but
doesn't matter to the argument.) But the U.S. has control of access to
those fields, and issues "mineral rights" (yeah, scare quotes again,
because if something can be created by the government, it isn't really a
right, but a privilege). Yeah, in this particular example, the government
serves as a gatekeeper. But there's no denying that the oil companies,
once they've done the work of extracting the crude from underground, own
it by dint of the time and effort they've spent to acquire it.

So, to use your terminology, people convert "shared" resources into
privately held resources all the time, and have been doing it for
centuries. We do it by expending effort to obtain ownership. The
hunter-gatherer societies did the work of seeking food to eat.

Now, on to your pollution argument. Breathing polluted air, and drinking
polluted water, are harmful. Therefore, it's completely legitimate to
hold polluters responsible for the harmful effects of their effluent.
BTW, this includes everyone who drives a car, especially if you're going
to start in on some argument about pristine antideluvian air, but I'll
get to that. Anyways, in a purely capitalistic society, where the
government exists mainly to enforce property rights, then those people
whose health is harmed by pollution would file a class-action lawsuit
against the polluters, and they'd win. In practice, this is impractical.
So govenments operate on behalf of the people to prosecute those who
pollute. Again, I defer to Thomas Sowell, who addresses this point in his
book on basic economics. In the world of economics, things such as
pollution are called negative externalities. Do a web search on that
term. (Yes, there are those who are even more rabid than I on the
anarcho-capitalist front, who do in fact directly advocate for the
litigation approach to things such as pollutants. One of the arguments is
that after a few companies have been put out of business due to
class-action lawsuits by the harmed parties, businesses won't risk their
capital on enterprises which put out lots of pollution. It's an argument
that does have merit, but I acknowledge its shortcomings.) So, if you're
thinking that I've made a concession, you're correct. I can, however, at
least tie it back to an actual infringement of property rights (you own
your own body and life, and the value of that "property" is dimished by
polluted air -- though the degree is, I suppose debatable for various
levels of various substances). But I will still continue to argue against
the evils of collectivist, communist, socialist thinking. Because there
are far too many people who want to take that concession and just keep
going and going and going with it, and we wind up with arguments that we
need socialized health care because the labor of the people is a shared
resource from which we all benefit, which is a big stinking pile. It's
due to the "give 'em and inch, they'll take a mile" nature of allowing
the government a tiny measure of power that people such as myself,
Collins, and many others continue to argue against the expansion of the
state. Socialist states have killed more people than air pollution. Look
up the toll for Stalin, for just one example.

BTW, if you'd like to read a small tract which is informative on what
sort of power government should have, I recommend "The Law", by Frederic
Bastiat (especially if you're a fan of Rousseau). "The Law" is freely
available online, at bastiat.org, and probably other places such as the
Foundation for Economic Education (who will sell you a bound copy) or the
Ludwig von Mises institute.

Oh, and we can argue all over the place about pristine air. Who the hell
knows how clean the air was 5000 years ago? Nobody was taking
measurements. But hey, whatever. Lets go back to the age of volcanism. If
we go back far enough, earth didn't even have an atmosphere to be
polluted. Can't get much cleaner than vacuum! ;-)

jed