"You Have To Pay For Everything, But Some Things Are For Free..."

As a foreigner in Taiwan, I might be expected to be in the tank for the Democratic Progressive Party - certainly, a cursory sweep of the English blogosphere in Taiwan might instill that prejudice - and indeed it is certainly true that I have no affection for the currently governing Nationalist Party either. As it is, I regard both parties with an equally equanimous antipathy.

The reason I dislike the Democratic Progressive Party is simply this: they reflect, in their attitudes toward domestic policy, almost every strain of populist prejudice carried by the Left in the now decaying Western countries: the two most virulent of which are "social justice" and "environmental sustainability". Both of these now stained babble-flags represent more than mere intellectual errors...

In a short yet drawn-out post by one "Matt Bruenig", which has no doubt been doing the rounds among Leftists after Monbiot mentioned it in the Guardian recently, there is a crude attempt to torture a slithered figure of "libertarianism" into confessing its hostility toward climate change claims. Here is Monbiot hissing from his rhetorical zenith:

"A transparently self-serving vision, it seeks to justify the greedy and selfish behaviour of those with wealth and power."

Since Monbiot is reliably arse over elbow (scroll down for comments) on philosophical distinctions, let's leave him to his blades and look at Bruenig's argument itself...

"No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others."

Although Bruenig stretches the argument out over several paragraphs, it is essentially this: responsibility for the negative externalities of air pollution cannot be accounted for under property rights alone without State involvement, and therefore libertarians "deny climate change".

The argument is fallacious on several counts, the most obvious of which is the conclusion: "denial of climate change", which, to rescue the reality from that smothering rhetorical pillow, is actually... skepticism of the AGW hypothesis, skepticism of the pending ecological collapse with which the Left try to intimidate ordinary working people, and dogged opposition to the Left's shakedown for greater Leviathan powers on the tenuity of this hypothesis.

On the substance of the argument itself however, Bruenig's initial premise may be granted: since air pollution observes no geographical property boundaries, responsibility for any adverse effects cannot be accounted for on the basis of geographically delimited property rights alone. Yet Bruenig's conclusion that therefore polluters must be forcibly restrained by the State entails two presumptions which do not directly follow from the premise itself... first, the presumption that any and all infractions of liberty are to be answered with a legal response, and second, that this can only be achieved via a coercive, monopolized regulatory system.

(1) People act to pursue values chosen in a context which typically requires prioritization and the sacrifice of lesser for greater values. Although air pollution may indeed be an infraction of property rights, it is not necessarily worth doing anything about given (a) the comparatively limited resources of the individual, (b) the considerable importance of fossil fuels to the global economy and (c) the negative externalities of permitting yet more political power to accrue to the State and its' agencies. To quote from the admirably eloquent commenter "twostix" on this blog thread (comment #38):

"Seriously, I mean man, SERIOUSLY Asia doesn’t give a fuck about your white, western, self flagellating, puritanical eco religion."

Quite. If AGW is true, then regardless of the severity of its consequences it quite literally cannot be stopped now given the massive industrialization of China, India and Brazil, which only begs the question of what the environmental sustainability movement in the West is for - but that may now be a question for historians and anthropologists.

(2) Since the first point given above renders the entire discussion academic, I am entirely at liberty to make this second, more theoretical point: the contention that only Hobbes' Leviathan can actually render polluters accountable to those who suffer from said pollution is unwarranted; the Statists simply prevent the emergence of alternative regulatory structures from the freely cooperative workings of the market. On this subject more generally, it may be possible to deal with negative externalities better, not through the coercion of government, but by the voluntary production of licensing agreements kept in check by consumer demand; monopolist regulatory agencies do not operate under the economic incentives of competition and are thus more especially vulnerable to corruption.

In the specific case of bringing the fossil fuels industry to account, we must remember that States are indirectly dependent upon the economic importance of fossil fuels, and so there is a conflict of interest. If we are to believe the exaggerated claims that entire coastal cities will no longer be viable places to live following catastrophic rises in sea level, then we must also accept that the State will have to intervene on behalf of the fossil fuels industry to ensure that their accountability, although it may require them to "redistribute" some of their cash, does not quite put them out of business.

A less hyperbolic scenario would be that, if and when there is a very modest rise in sea levels over the next century, it will likely only be a relatively small number of residents and property owners in the world's coastal cities who will need to relocate. Since relocation will cost money and that money will have to come from somewhere, any attempt to demand the fossil fuels industry pay for this will likely be fought over in the courts (especially given point (1) above). Since the problem is essentially one of economic costs, the obvious solution is, as always, allowing more people the freedom necessary to accrue greater wealth from producing innovative solutions to social problems and bringing these to market, rather than attempting to hammer at them through the force of government. Two places to start are the repeal of land-use legislation and the careful privatization of utilities.

***

To draw this brief post to a close, let us return to Bruenig's argument by repeating the earlier quotation:

"No story about freedom and property rights can ever justify the pollution of the air or the burning of fuels because those things affect the freedom and property rights of others."

The argument is not that property rights justify pollution, but that Statist attempts to bring polluters to account will not only be ineffective but will themselves result in other kinds of negative externality that will make real solutions far more difficult to produce.

What Bruenig doesn't appear to understand is that, although property rights are of course an important aspect of libertarian thought, they are not the be all and end all. Property rights, along with the rights to free speech, free association and - dare we say it? - free exchange, are a political manifestation of the deeper claim of self-ownership; that people are not slaves and each of us is individually sovereign, as John Locke and Thomas Jefferson understood.

Of course I do not expect the Statists on the Left to quite grasp this, since after all, they regard such authors as Locke as little more than philosophical antiques long since surpassed by the advance of Pragmatism, the under-heralded school of epistemology which has made possible the resurgent Marxian puritanism evinced in the wild by such creatures as Monbiot.

As I have stated elsewhere, there is only a subtle difference between the belief that all aspects of the market and civil society ought to be controlled by the State, and the belief that there is no aspect of either one which ought not to be controlled by the State. In other words, the old Liberal paradigm of limited government is now an alien idea outside of "terrorist groups" like the U.S. Tea Party movement.

Negative externalities must be paid for, but the critical point is that this is best achieved through business, not government. Some things, however, are for free - and my criticism is one of those.