Chris doesn't think you should start your car next door to him:

> Because pollution affects health, because it directly affects
> private property of individuals unrelated to the creation of the
> pollution, it is a physical threat and falls within the realm of
> government jurisdiction.
>
> The effect to consumers is higher prices for products manufactured
> that require pollution control.

One thing that most libertarian theorists fail to adequately account for is
that take account of is the fact that we all aggress against each other in
subtle but tangible and inescapable ways. Loud music from the car next to
you at the stop light. The smell of bbq pork wafting over the fence into
your Muslim neighbor's kitchen windows. Air pollution isn't much different
from these examples unless it reaches an extreme.

We all have to deal with obnoxious things that might technically be rights
violations. But to try to enforce them would lead to a war of all against
all until the most sensitive, persnickety little bitch in all the world
ruled the rest of us. In fact, you can see that very thing happening on
college campuses and in "progressive" cities where trans-fats are about to
be outlawed and a male student can be expelled for posting something
suggesting that fat girls should stop clogging the elevators and walk up the
stairs.

As much as libertarians grouse about environment regulations, you have to
admit that they have been at least a qualified success. Perhaps the costs
haven't been worth it, but you have to admit that air and water are a lot
cleaner in the US than they were a few decades ago and the economy hasn't
collapsed and we haven't lost our industrial leadership because of the EPA.

But the argument for environmental regulation isn't about your particular
rights being violated, but about the aggregate degradation of the
environment that results in a situation that nobody prefers, but that nobody
would be individually incented or empowered to stop.

Strict libertarians would argue that if you just arrange property rights
correctly that you could get to the same place more efficiently and with
less coercion. I don't think so. "Pollution credits" are an artificial
construct, not really property. Just because you try to harness some of the
dynamics of stewardship inherent to ownership doesn't make them
ideologically pure. (I'm not against pollution credits--I'm just saying
they're not a libertarian solution to the problem.)

Libertarians who foam at the mouth about how zoning restrictions mean they
live in a Nazi police state are silly. Libertarians love the idea that you
can settle all political disputes by reference to a theory of rights. That's
just not the case. There are frequently competing rights or it's hard to
tell what is a right or how permissible it is to defend a right or when a
right must give way to an overriding interest. I don't think it helps when
libertarian-leaning people try to justify state coercions on the basis that
they really are defending rights. To do so, you always end up advocating
redress of a minor rights violation by major government action.

Ayn Rand had a great litmus test for when citizens should consider
themselves entitled to commit revolution against their neighbors or
government: if trying to persuade your neighbors to your point of view will
likely result in you being jailed or executed. I remember being really
annoyed by that test when I first read it. To my doctrinaire
anarcho-libertarian 20-year-old mind, the fact that public libraries were
funded by coerced tax dollars was sufficient moral warrant to blow them up
(not that I ever would have--slaughtering all those innocent books!).

People say that government should protect your rights and that's all it
should do. Not so. Government should only (try to) protect a small subset of
your rights, ones that you can't defend on your own and where it is possible
to very clearly establish that an important right has actually been
violated.


Mike Lee
My right to swing my fist ends when you take a self-defense course or two