Libertarians, less anarchist than you might think
There's a great article in the latest reason magazine that has Ronald Bailey looking for a solution to global warming. As a reason magazine science correspondent he's about as libertarian as you can get.
It was neat to see the author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Environmental Apocalypse to then say this in 2005.
You can read the full text at reason online.
Obviously they believe the private market should solve the issue, but there's no real reason for them to do so. Their proposals, spoken through clenched teeth it seems, are either a cap and trade system or carbon taxes.
The only true effect of all this is to make a competitive market and begin to quanitify the negative externality of climate change as related to greenhouse gas emissions by energy producers. I suggest reading the article.
It was neat to see the author of Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Environmental Apocalypse to then say this in 2005.
Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up. All data sets—satellite, surface, and balloon—have been pointing to rising global temperatures. In fact, they all have had upward-pointing arrows for nearly a decade.
You can read the full text at reason online.
Obviously they believe the private market should solve the issue, but there's no real reason for them to do so. Their proposals, spoken through clenched teeth it seems, are either a cap and trade system or carbon taxes.
The only true effect of all this is to make a competitive market and begin to quanitify the negative externality of climate change as related to greenhouse gas emissions by energy producers. I suggest reading the article.
This article seems to demonstrate the power of ideology. The answer to global warming is more libertarianism? I had a little trouble going from point 1 to point 2. I am all for reducing government power and for protecting our freedom, in theory even our right to pollute, but sometimes we all have to admit that we don't have the solution to every problem. I can think of few things scarier than the privatization of water and air suggested by the article. Privatization seems to reinforce wealth inequality. "Oh, I'm sorry you are too poor to breathe my air, you'll have to roll over and die so my air can be clean."
ReplyDeleteI am not looking forward to what ever harebrained scheme comes out of DC in the next couple of years, which will inevitably be too complicated and will fail for some of the reasons addressed in the article, but I think we have not yet found the answer, not even among the libertarians.
The issue that they address rather directly though is that any market that could exist and help correct global warming does not exist. Specifically Bailey's comments lead credence to your assertion that the free market by itself could not solve global warming. Carbon taxes, or a cap-and -trade system are both argued as legitimate means to create that market in the article.
ReplyDeleteThe answer to global warming is a market that takes into consideration the negative externailty that is climate change. This requires cap-and-trade or carbon taxes. The reason for my title to the article was more to point out the necessity of government in a libertarian system to actually create markets so private industry can work towards solutions. The idea that government in and of itself could do anything to correct it is silly, as evidenced by the current subsidies and idiocy being thrown about. (farm lobby)
It's sort of hard to privatize air. The other issue is that energy costs would go through the roof using either a cap-and-trade or carbon taxation system. It would create the market necessary for innovation into non-greenhouse gas emitting energy sources but ultimately consumers would bear the brunt of the window we've had into cheap energy for the last 200 years. If taxation is used to force the hand of the market the problem then becomes the allocation of the taxation or revenue generated by an auctioned cap-and-trade system.
Libertarianism requires government to support contracts, property, and fraud protection. There's another philosophy of forced free-market anarchy that's mediated by an active labor force that dissallows property rights to be held by corporations and instead corporate control in the hands of the laborers. It's called Anarcho-Syndicalism and is most notably supported and pushed by Noam Chomsky. I personally find it idiotic since it epitomizes the philosophy that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. It would easily fall to being a tyranny of the majority.
I posted the article because in our recent conversations I had been led to believe that you believed libertarianism as a market philosphy to be the absence of government, this article shows that libertarianism requires government to create markets in some cases. There is a large difference between the creation of a market and the regulation of a market.
In this case we can thank subsidy and market guidance for corn based ethanol. Taxes have been able to steer consumers towards other energy sources in the past, as it did with diesel over petrol in Europe due to taxation. They leaned the market towards diesel by taxing petrol. In this case taxing all carbon emitting energy producers would have the same effect. It would make companies like green mountain energy more appealing, push consumers to buy more economical vehicles, and ultimately drastically shift the direction of the our high carbon lifestyles.
Just note before you complain that libertarians would privatize air, both Obama and McCain are looking to implement a cap-and-trade system. The huge problem with such a system over carbon taxes is the abiilty of government to give money to energy companies by flooding the market with carbon credits, they'd be able to further regulate the market and begin to destory it as they have with the US dollar in the past decade.