Many forms of pollution can be addressed by property right systems and the law. Meaning, just like everything else.

There is a long history of rivers being divided up and pollution was handled just like if you throw waste into your neighbors yard. This is just one simple example but there is a huge amount of resources around this. There is a hole field called Economics&Law or Property rights economics.

Pollution of things like Oceans and and the Atmosphere can not be handled like that. Problem is, our current state system fails as well. The current system fails for the exact same reason, there is no system of property rights.

Of course we have states and they do both enforce and sometimes create rules. That is why people like Hayek and many others were not anarchists. The hole philosophy of classical liberalism is based around the idea of a small state to enforce these rights.

The problem is that the solution 'the state' is not a complete one.

We of course also know that property rights do exist and persist outside of state systems. Many different types of system can and do provide rights and have mechanism for enforcement.

It is a major field of study in both economics, for legal scholars and many others. There has been a lot of work on this question and it is a hard one to answer. One possible that one economist/legal scholar provides is that it is all about the Schelling point, you pick some point and commit to overreaction. Once you have this idea even two people on a empty island can establish property rights. So its about commitment and signaling.

We can easily find situations like this in real live. There are tons of example both now and historically. Common Law for example was not created by the state, but was in essence eventually enforced by the state. The first Stock market in Amsterdam was neither created, nor enforced by the state.

There is a hole lot to be talked about. To tie it back together with the original discussion. If we are talking about pollution protection in the current world, it would of course have to be either rules created by the state, or rules that evolve as they did in common law (in fact many rules already exist in British common law).

The state could set the limits for a pollutant but then let it be enforced by normal law enforcement, more like civil rather then criminal law.

P.S: Many classical liberals believe in Natural Law, but many also do not. This debate is still active and has not gone away.

The idea is that some rights belong to the person, and they end at the point where one person can do harm to another person.

Who enforce the natural law, then, if not the state?

That's a great question. It could be the State. It could be others. The Bar Association enforces standards and behaviors on lawyers, and thereby your right to practice law. Cisco enforces standards on it's engineers (I'm thinking CCIE, etc), and the rights that go with that.

Here's the rub, though. The State should be a mediator between two parties. If I say that you destroyed my yard, I should get recourse in front of an unbiased and uninterested 3rd party. It doesn't have to be the State. It could be anyone that we both agree is impartial.

Obviously, the State can take away those rights. That's different from giving you rights.

Same is true for anyone with a gun (equating death with losing all rights).

(I am strongly on the natural law side)

I would also make the argument that most of the time its the most efficient, but certainly not the only one.

First, people use the hammer of centralized control just as they sell after the market has taken a big fall - because of fear. In both cases, it's the wrong action. Fear and greed are the two major reactions that humans have, at it'e hardwired into our brains. Discussion is a much higher brain function that is easily overruled by those functions. Hence crazy regulations upon crazy regulations.

Secondly, the Epipen issue exists because of the FDA. There is no such thing as a free market for drugs - it is COMPLETELY controlled by the government.

Personally, I think the CEOs can set whatever price they want. Our response should be demanding that the FDA promotes competition instead of killing it. This would allow for more rational pricing. To me, in a free(er) market, drug prices would look like Intel chip prices - high at the beginning to offset heavy capital costs, and then lowering over time. Obviously patent protection comes into play, making it less free, but this could be addressed as well.

One other example that we're going to see play out in the coming months is the Dodd-Frank regulation. There are an amazing amount of constraints on banks, when many of them could be eliminated by two rules: 1 - a bank has to eat the first 20% of losses on a loan, even if it sells it; 2 - if your bank goes under, the top two layers of management cannot work in or for the industry for the next five years. That would largely get rid of the bad actor problem, since the punishment would be significant.

He is talking about government control of the economy.

Also this hole point about DARPA creating the internet is just as dishonest. First of all because nobody ever claimed government can never do anything useful, second of all the internet is what it is because of millions and billions of dollers invested in it by both governments and private companies, because of millions and billions of people putting their creativity in it.

The idea that nobody would ever had the idea of networking without the government is just insanity. We can clearly push forward the development of the internet, develop, adopt and implement new protocols today without the government. Even without government there would be some sort of system where we can discuss stuff online.

Right. In fact, is there any human group that don't have some kind of central planning?

Ironically, the only kind I can think of is the anarchist meetings where, somebody told me, nothing is never decided.

I would however also say that Hayek has more to say on the topic and that the parent comment mischaracterized Hayek's arguments.

Little triva, Coase was a student at LSE when Hayek was there in the 30s. They are two of the best and most important economists of this century, both should be studied in depth.

It's a bit of a different situation. Giant companies can still look to prices on the market to make decisions about how to use their resources. Central economic planning, as I understand Hayek to have meant it, means getting rid of market generated prices.

Having shortages of medication is a serious risk.

The need for price controls is usually caused by other problems... lack of competition/monopolies, a weak economy, lack of a proper social safety net for poor people to afford basic necessities, etc.

But my comment was hardly just about price controls. It is a critique of the default instinct people have to look to centralized control (typically regulations) to solve problems in a marketplace.

Wow. The most obvious counterexamples involve resource allocation during wartime.

But regardless that is an extreme rare example. Not what I'm talking about at all...

You are correct, it is a usecase for them.

Hayeks arguments from "Road to Serfdom" and later books has actually been absorbed in many arguments by political economists and political scientists as well. They are highly sophisticated works of political economy. Of course he often was not the first person to make many of the arguments. People reading the "Road to Serfdom" will quickly find that there are lots and lots of footnotes pointing to obscure Italian political economists and of course people like Hume, Smith and such.

Its kind of funny, in economics we talk about how oligopolies will move prices up. So if all our 'real world markets' are 'monopolistic oligopolies' why are they not moving up? In the majority of markets and globally speaking this simply is not the case.

Medical market in the US right now is a 80 year shit-show of epic proportion on all levels of government. In the markets that are related but far less controlled like different kind of eye surgery or all kind of plastic surgery we simply don't see the same pattern, in fact, there prices are falling.

P.S:

Also the term 'Late Capitalist' sound like you not only believe that history moves in stages, but also that you know when one stage will end.

Marx ideas were based on his limited knowledge of history that was available at his time and was in no way generalist. Marxist historians have since tried to rewrite much history to comply with these ideas, but happy they have mostly failed and historians have moved on.

>Its kind of funny, in economics we talk about how oligopolies will move prices up. So if all our 'real world markets' are 'monopolistic oligopolies' why are they not moving up? In the majority of markets and globally speaking this simply is not the case

Because the models themselves are fictional games, with little relation to the realities of global history or politics.

>Also the term 'Late Capitalist' sound like you not only believe that history moves in stages, but also that you know when one stage will end.

Marxists did a better job predicting the trajectory of Capitalism than any one else, so this doesn't bother me.

You can call things what you like as long as you admit that most prices don't go up most of the time.

> Marxists did a better job predicting the trajectory of Capitalism than any one else, so this doesn't bother me.

Sure. Like when Marx said that workers will become poorer and poorer? How about the time when he predicted socialist revolutions in capitalist countries and the only place the happened were poor farm based countries? When Marx predicted that the amount of firms would decrees but turn into monopoly, and now 200 years later we have more firms then ever before.

Marx economic works has been completely rejected by all modern economics. This was not because of some sort of hate for Marxism. He was actually quite a economics star at his time. Only once people started to pointed out the flaws in his system and he had no answer did the economics profession turn against him.

The tech industry is actually a quite good example of the collapse towards monopolies. Venture Capitalists siphon up innovation created by underpaid labor using the guise of entrepreneurship, funneling ever greater wealth and control into a dwindling number of corporate giants. Small firms that do survive sell services to them. And I don't even really have to make this argument, as it is the express ideology of people like Thiel.

The failure of socialism to develop in more advanced economies is the result of a violent, rightist empire that toppled any governments that moved democratically too far in this direction. Take Chile, for example...

Marxist economics have been intentionally discredited by US institutions to serve their political ends. That much is true. But there are plenty of modern Marxists economists in European and Asian institutions. The bought and paid for US economists in their cozy corporate think tanks are not the totality of economic thought.

What? That is absurd. Maybe it could be claimed that other people who were partially inspired by Marx made modern states, but that's about all.

> Hilariously, Hayek predicted that they would devolve into serfdom, which is what is actually happening in the country that hemmed closer to his ideology.

Clearly you have not actually read or understood Hayek. This often gets repeated but everybody that knows anything about Hayek understands that this is false.

> The tech industry

I'm not gone address this because its so clearly false. There is a huge industry with 100000s of firms all over the world. Also I work in a small tech company who sells to other firms of very different sizes.

> The failure of socialism to develop in more advanced economies is the result of a violent, rightist empire that toppled any governments that moved democratically too far in this direction. Take Chile, for example...

True to some extent, but also a convenient excuse. Chile for example was never Socialist, they had a Socialist president for a while, but that's all. All the places that went for into that direction destroyed themselves as well, the hole Soviet Block, Venezuela and more.

Marx btw never really defined how these systems should work. Other people did that based on what they thought Marx was saying.

> Marxist economics have been intentionally discredited by US institutions to serve their political ends.

False again. Marxist economics was already discredit wildly in Europe before US had many economists or institutions interested in economics.

> But there are plenty of modern Marxists economists in European and Asian institutions.

Again simply false. You can look at any indicators of economist opinions and you will see a huge majority of opposition everywhere in the world.

> The bought and paid for economists in their cozy corporate think tanks are not the totality of economic thought.

Again, Marx was already discredited before there really were think tanks. Eugen Böhm von Bawerk was not payed by JPMorgen, and neither were most other economist at the time.

I'm still waiting for Lenin to hang me with the rope I sold him.

Fun story, not sure if they made a profit.