Libertarians confused on pollution, sacrificing their core values. At the root: lack of hands-on practical experience.
I found a podcast episode from the Cato Institute, where I spoke last year and met some wonderful people: How Does Libertarianism Deal with the Problem of Pollution?. I’m posting quotes from them mainly for future reference.
Sorry if the post isn’t my most readable, but my main response:
Lack of hands-on practical experience leads them to opposed their own values. They think no pollution means the end of civilization, when Adam Smith didn’t pollute. Were ancient Athens, Sparta, Rome, China, and India not civilization?
They think banning pollution means a band on a modern economy. A ban on modern economy? What value is an economy if it undermines freedom? Do they not believe a free market can solve the problems of keeping people healthy and free without hurting each other, given that humans did so for hundreds of thousands of years?
I read the guest, Matt Zwolinski’s, book The Individualists in January after a friend (a postdoc in philosophy at NYU and fan of Hayek) I met at my podcast guest Peter Singer‘s going away conference at Princeton.
They start by acknowledging that some people interpret libertarian views to say something like, “You can’t stop me from doing what I want with my property” and therefore unable to stop pollution. Zwolinski shares that he’s researched a lot of libertarian (and related) writing on pollution, including from Robert Nozick, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, David Friedman, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Michael Huemer, Ronald Coase, Eric Mack, and John Locke.
He says they haven’t solved how to handle pollution. Below I’ll share the show notes, then some quotes from the podcast and my comments.
[EDIT: after writing the quotes and my comments, I read Zwolinski’s paper so below the comments on the podcast, I include some quotes from the paper and my thoughts on it.]
Show Notes
Here are the show notes from the podcast page:
Matt Zwolinski joins us this week to talk about his recent paper, “Libertarianism and Pollution,” available on the Social Science Research Network. In it, he examines how various libertarian philosophers and economists, including Nozick, Rothbard, Ronald Coase, and Eric Mack have dealt with the problem of pollution.
In a system of strictly enforced rights to private property, how should one account for pollution? Should it be allowed at all? And in either case, how can the term “pollution” be defined?
Matt Zwolinski, “Libertarianism and Pollution” (SSRN paper)
Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (book)
Murray Rothbard, “Law, Property Rights, and Air Pollution” (Cato Journal article)
Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority (book)
Ronald Coase, “The Problem of Social Cost” (Journal of Law and Economics article)
Eric Mack, “Locke on Property” (Liberty Matters essay) [jds edit: fixed link. edit2: That link doesn’t contain the quote below aht Zwolinski ascribes to it and I can’t find where it originates.]
Matt Zwolinski is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego and director of USD’s Center for Ethics, Economics, and Public Policy. He is the editor of Arguing About Political Philosophy (2014, 2nd ed.). He co-edited, with Benjamin Ferguson, The Routledge Companion to Libertarianism (2022) and Exploitation: Perspectives from Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (2024). Zwolinski co-authored The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism (2023) with John Tomasi, an intellectual history of libertarianism from the 1850s to today. He co-authored Universal Basic Income: What Everyone Needs to Know (2023) with Miranda Perry Fleischer.
Trevor Burrus is a research fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies. His research interests include constitutional law, civil and criminal law, legal and political philosophy, and legal history. His work has appeared in the Vermont Law Review, the Syracuse Law Review, and the Jurist, as well as the Washington Times, Huffington Post, and the Daily Caller. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a JD from the University of Denver Sturm College of Law.
Aaron Ross Powell was the director and editor of Libertarianism.org, a project of the Cato Institute.
Here are quotes from the podcast. I’m not perfect connecting voices, but I’m pretty sure the following is from Zwolinski:
If you’re a libertarian, you believe in property rights. That’s your core political claim, is that the state is like any other person or group of persons under an absolute requirement to respect the property rights of others and cannot violate those property rights even if doing so would serve some important social or economic value. So if you take that seriously, you can’t justify allowing some pollution merely because you think it’s going to be good for economic growth if that pollution involves a violation of the property rights of other persons. I think there’s a good case to be made that pollution, at least most of the time and maybe even necessarily as just a pure conceptual matter, pollution does violate the property rights of others.
If you think about what pollution is, it’s sending stuff unbidden and unconsented from your domain into the domain of others. If you’re doing that without their consent, then that looks like a violation of their property rights. That looks like the kind of thing libertarians ought to condemn, regardless of whatever benefits that pollution might confer.
Then you get to the counterintuitive or unexpected part as opposed to the kind of libertarians for human progress, libertarians for a better future of human ingenuity or the respect for libertarian property rights.
It is clear that the real problem with libertarianism isn’t that it’s not sensitive enough to environmental considerations but that it is too sensitive by far in the sense that it would, it could almost grind the world to a halt if we just applied these in the way you’re talking about. If you start off with just the basic intuitive insight, it looks pretty plausible and it looks like something that ought to make libertarianism attractive to environmentalists.
Later he says:
Something that [Eric] Mack is doing in this paper. He says, “… Property rights are getting us in trouble with this pollution issue because it looks like if pollution constitutes a violation of property rights and we have this absolute commitment to property rights then we must be absolutely opposed to pollution and that means basically the end of human civilization. That’s a problem, so why was it that we had property rights to begin with?”
Later he says:
“the problem of blanket bans on effectively a modern economy that would flow out of strict libertarian property rights.”
“How can we solve this problem: Is there a way to make a world where people can pollute enough to live well and drive a modern economy compatible with strict libertarian rights? I wish I had a better answer for you than ‘I don’t know,’ but that’s the state of my own thinking and as far as I can tell, that’s the state of current libertarian thinking. I tried to survey everything I could find on this topic in the libertarian literature and I have yet to see anything that offers a satisfactory solution to the problem. I think Eric Mack’s paper probably comes closest.”
“Pollution is tricky because generally speaking the harms caused by pollution are not harms caused by one individual’s actions that could be directly traced to some particular victim. Think about global warming. If global warming is imposing harms upon some people, it’s a harm that a whole lot of people have produced acting in a kind of concert and the harms are kind of radically dispersed throughout the globe such that it’s very difficult to trace a direct connection between one person’s actions and the effects on any other individual.
How do you deal with a problem like that within the framework of individual rights? I think that is a problem that libertarians have not yet even begun to address adequately.”
My response
Lack of hands-on practical experience leads them to opposed their own values. They think no pollution means the end of civilization, when Adam Smith didn’t pollute. Were ancient Athens, Sparta, Rome, China, and India not civilization?
Ban on modern economy? What value is an economy if it undermines freedom? Do they not believe a free market can solve the problems of keeping people healthy and free without hurting each other, given that humans did so for hundreds of thousands of years?
After Reading Zwolinki’s paper
After writing the above thoughts and reactions to the podcast episode, I read Zwolinski’s paper, Libertarianism and Pollution, or at least a preprint I found without a paywall. It’s more thorough and clear than the podcast, which was more accessible. I also plan to read the papers linked to in the podcast’s show notes (Eric Mack’s paper’s link didn’t work, but I found it here: Eric Mack on “John Locke on Property” (January 2013))
Most of my comments are similar so I’m taking the privilege of it being my blog where I explore thoughts not necessarily post final, peer-edited theses and leaving what I wrote above. Sorry, doing so leaves the post raw, but a quote or two:
David Friedman, himself a libertarian but a critic of the kind of natural rights position espoused by Locke, Nozick, and Rothbard, was the first to point out the problem: “[C]arbon dioxide is a pollutant. It is also an end product of human metabolism. If I have no right to impose a single molecule of pollution on anyone else’s property, then I must get the permission of all my neighbors to breathe. Unless I promise not to exhale.”
This view confuses carbon cycles, as I describe in my posts Know the 2 carbon cycles and don’t confuse them and Carbon offsets increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere. They do not decrease or offset them. They increase them. The problem isn’t emission of carbon but bringing new carbon into the biosphere.
Also:
The demands that libertarianism seems to place on us go far beyond asking us to recycle more of our wasteproducts, bicycle more to work, or pass a few more laws for the protection of wilderness areas. Indeed, not even the complete abolition of the automobile or electrical power would seem to go far enough. The only way to ensure that the actions of one human being do not cross the moral boundaries surrounding any other human being in even the slightest of ways is to abolish human society altogether. Libertarianism’s apparent demand that we eliminate pollution altogether thus appears to be an impossible and grossly implausible goal.
Since when is a free market “to abolish human society altogether”? It’s not. He’s stuck in the belief slaveowners had when they wrote that democracy required slavery. He can’t imagine life without pollution, despite just citing so much basis in Locke, who lived before pollution, though not before depletion, which contributed to plundering property of indigenous Americans in violation of their natural rights and yet further depletion. He didn’t mention Smith or America’s founders, but they also wrote their main works before pollution.
Had the APPLE PIE amendment been part of the Bill of Rights, our world today would contain more liberty, freedom, equality, and democracy, as would all the time between then and now, and it would have created more health, safety, security, and other things we value. Had the Thirteenth Amendment been part of the Bill of Rights, the same would have been true of 1861, and there would have been no need for the Civil War.
If I violate your rights by poisoning you, then I also violate your rights when I, along with 9 of my friends, each add 1/10 of a lethal dose of poison to your drink. Does the rights-violation disappear if the poisoning is performed by a million people, instead of ten? Or if their “cooperation” in poisoning you is the unintended (but foreseeable?) byproduct of their actions, rather than their intended aim?
Finally some sense!
Still:
libertarians have long stressed the vital role of private property in providing individuals with an incentive to care for natural resources. Pollution is a problem mainly when individuals are able to externalize the costs of the harmful byproducts of their activities onto other people’s property or bodies. When the benefits of use are internalized, but the costs are externalized, tragedies of the
commons ensue.
Someone born with a birth defect is not a “cost.” This quote makes a category error. Something that money can remedy can be remedied by a fee, but some results can’t be remedied with money, such as society crumbling to atoms, in Adam Smith terms, or sea level rise causing, among many results, billions of homes to become submerged as well as land where homes could be built, or cancer or birth defects.
Also, pollution and depletion of nonrenewable resources, or that render once-renewable resources into non-renewable, like extinction, aren’t tragedies of the commons. They are different systems.
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