The ‘libertarian movement’ was always kind of a contradiction. Don’t you need to actually move to have a movement? Or at least move in the same direction.
That said, polluting the air or waterways definitely counts as ‘initiation of force’, the benchmark for ‘bad’ in Lib-land, and Libs think it should be dealt with in the courts. To an extent this is better than having an agency like the EPA be a fig leaf for the government to protect polluters, but obviously an EPA with teeth would help more than anything.
Trading schemes are a pale substitute for people just inventing less-polluting ways to do things and getting them out onto the market. There certainly is a place for the free market in the battle against climate change, and I suspect it will move the needle more than a bunch of climate-conference circle jerks; it’s just not the only solution.
It’s more than that, they aren’t counting all the people who were born after them and died.
Still, Malthusianism isn’t the answer to climate crisis, as the poorest people who have more children are less of a burden on the planet than the richest 10% who have fewer.
This seems to be yet another example of idealistic college Libertarians being disillusioned when they discover that the real world Libertarians are mostly tax dodging fatcats.
There is generally an implied “in good conscience” or “in good faith” that goes with any “you can’t” statement. Similarly there is [often|sometimes|occasionally] an implied “the logical underpinnings” or “the logical facade” that goes with any “demolishes|d” headline.
Of course, that only matters when “people” care about logic, facts, or have the ability to feel shame.
Ironically, they weren’t wrong; the last remnants of the old style R party did finally die at about that time.
In the scale of this (ongoing, expanding) crisis, libertarianism is pretty low hanging fruit.
When we get to the point of rewritting the rules for nonvoting stock shares, it’ll start to get interesting.
Eventually the Picketty economists will pick apart this notion of “economies of scale”.
By the time all the insurance carriers deny payout for anything they deem climate related, we’ll all have a different understanding of this concept of “debt”.
I expect whatever humanity survives this, will -by the time its truly over- have completely revised notions of property.
Libertarian : It has been said that a libertarian is just a Republican who does drugs. Most libertarians are in favor of free enterprise and a minimal (but nonzero) amount of government. There are some libertarians who are anarchists, and just to confuse things, anarchists used to call themselves libertarians. To confuse things further, there are the civil libertarians, who worry more about rights than about profits. Anyhow, the libertarian movement in America seems to have peaked, so you might not have to worry about this kettle of fish for much longer.
Decades and decades ago, libertarians were faced with how to deal with the growing hole in the ozone layer, caused by CFCs and other pollutants. It was a BAD situation. It could become CATASTROPHICALLY bad.
The libertarian response? Paraphrasing: “We shouldn’t’ burden the public and industry by forcing them to replace all that refrigerant. It would be less expensive to just hand out sun block. Problem solved!”
Of course, this doesn’t address at all the environmental problems.
Fast forward a few years. Los Angeles was having a really bad pollution problem one summer. There were calls for reducing traffic; people would be asked to keep their cars off the road via an odd and even license plate system.
One of the evening news shows – might have been McNeil / Lehrer – had a segment on the crisis. They had on a flak from the Cato Institute. A typical swaggering glib contrarian. More or less exact paraphrase: “This would be counterproductive. We NEED that ozone to fill the hole in the ozone layer!”
I really had lost most of my respect for right-wing corporate-brown-nosing you-can’t-prove-tobacco-causes-cancer libertarians by then, but that was when I went from “I guess it’s important to have intellectuals on that side providing balance” to “fuck that shit, they’re shills and sellouts.”
Right, which is sort of my point. Right or wrong, you can always declare yourself the winner of an argument, which is what those kinds of statements amount to: as far as I am concerned, my side is still right about this! But that’s kind of a tautology, to say that you think your current beliefs are correct/logically sound/etc. If you didn’t, they’d be your former beliefs.
So my pet peeve derives from the fact that people are satisfied with the “demolishing” of their opponents, while their opponents are out there winning Senate seats in spite of having been demolished.
I used to think Libertarianism was cool, back when I first heard of Penn and Teller, and didn’t want to do what my parents told me. Then I grew up, realized that the fundamental tenet of Libertarianism as it is currently practised is, “Screw you, I got mine,” and turned away from it. Hearing Penn and the other Libertarians gush over that idiot Gary Johnson back in 2016 only validated my choice.
I hope they become disillusioned with libertarianism, but I’m afraid that many of those young men just grow into Tea Party schmucks voting for anyone who’ll cut their taxes. They either become the fatcats or they live as “temporarily embarrassed” would-be fatcats—if only the government would stop stealing their money!
Angewandte Chemie just published a nice article on mercurial photodissociation, which is either major points for anarchism, or all about making space for heavy weather made out of -Mercury(0)- where you live, as a rational person who wants to profit the most or at least sell RECs for cleaning the air…and ranching remineralization of fulminates or otherwise counting a head of accountancy for it. --Part excised in reply below–
A libertarian or forsaken-ish agency for being an Architectural Digest full of stone counterbalances full of gains of untouchables, below level 40 of the dungeon. [Still doesn’t know what Goblin Candy is in DF. Whatever.] Here and there, isotope refinement is well situated. [Safety hat property tag: ‘SubORN L 734091 See water? Report it!’]
And like, it’s a parade of that rain. Thanks Cory!
