That's something I have been wondering about for a long time. Wouldn't pure libertarianism require a huge justice system and give a lot of power to courts? In absence of regulation every dispute would have to go to court.
We only support legislation that is rights-respecting (e.g. no forcing people to do business with customers they don't want), reality-based (e.g. no environmental legislation without provable harm), and consistently administered (e.g. no free passes for particularly rich criminals).
Secondly, even in an hypothetical absence of regulation, mediation would be preferable to court action in a lot of cases. That's true even now; private mediation is frequently used to resolve disputes before they ever see a courtroom.
Edited to add: Also, in a rights-respecting State, the list of criminal acts would be a lot, lot smaller than it is now. No censorship (obscenity, blasphemy, etc.), no war on drugs, etc. etc. It's likely that justice system workloads would drop significantly.
I really would like to see a set of laws and government regulations that libertarians would support. Has anybody ever created such a thing?
Would there be regulations on cigarettes, selling alcohol to 10 year olds or lead paint? Who would prove the harm if there is no EPA? Who has the money to go against big corporations and their paid experts? It took forever to get a shared understanding that smoking is really harmful.
I don't want to be dismissive but most libertarians I talk to seem to live in a dream world and avoid real-world scenarios.
I really would like to see a set of laws and government regulations that libertarians would support. Has anybody ever created such a thing?
Not to my knowledge :) But that has more to do with a combination of factionalism, incorrect philosophy (e.g. religious 'Libertarians' who'd like to ban gay marriage), and utopianism.
Would there be regulations on cigarettes
Other than prohibitions on fraud ("cigarettes are healthy!") or selling to minors, no.
selling alcohol to 10 year olds
Yes.
lead paint
Depends. Perhaps there would be cases where lead paint would be okay; I don't know that much about it.
Who would prove the harm if there is no EPA? Who has the money to go against big corporations and their paid experts?
Lawyers working on behalf of those bringing class-action suits against the manufacturers.
And why do you presume there would be no EPA (or an equivalent)? (Some) environmental laws are valid. I'm not American, but I'm pretty sure the Constitution doesn't grant the Federal Government the power to create something like the EPA. But the States surely do have that power.
It took forever to get a shared understanding that smoking is really harmful.
Not at all. It took forever for the justice system to overcome the massive lobbying and corruption that was protecting the tobacco industry from lawsuits over their fraudulent advertising.
> Not at all. It took forever for the justice system to overcome the massive lobbying and corruption that was protecting the tobacco industry from lawsuits over their fraudulent advertising.
Isn't that the point? Tobacco companies had vast sums of money to spend buying scientists and spreading FUD. Individuals had no hope of picking out the truth of this and we only saw real change in rates of smoking when government intervened to stop the manipulation.
And the FUD wasn't all simple plain fraud. It's a consistant drip-feed of messages like "we all die, you might get hit by a bus" or "smoking isn't that addictive" (because physically, it isn' that addictive).
1) It's none of the Government's business what smoking rates are. All that should matter to the Government is whether smokers are being lied to about cigarettes, i.e., whether their rights are being violated.
2) Some of the FUD was fraud, and thus should be the subject of a) lawsuits, and b) criminal charges.
3) The rest of it wasn't fraud, as you correctly point out, and therefore ought to be legal.
4) Individuals had no hope of picking out the truth of this is patently untrue. Many individuals did.
You mean have a group of people who decide what is true?
Yes. That's the way society works; in a civilised country, that decision is made through the courts, based on laws created by a democratic Government[1].
Isn't that better known as Not-Libertarianism?
No, it's better known as Not-Anarchism. Please stop conflating anarchism with Libertarianism.
[1] Not necessarily an elected one. There's more than one way to achieve democracy; selecting the Government by random ballot from the citizenry, a.k.a. sortition, is one alternative to voting. It also happens to be my preferred one.
"Lawyers working on behalf of those bringing class-action suits against the manufacturers."
Who can afford that? You will always be outmatched be by big corporations.
"Not at all. It took forever for the justice system to overcome the massive lobbying and corruption that was protecting the tobacco industry from lawsuits over their fraudulent advertising. "
In what way would the situation improve if there was no regulation? There would be even more corruption. Just look at the ratings agencies during the 2008 crisis. They were supposed to be a market based information source but in reality they were paid off.
There is a lot that's wrong with agencies like the EPA but abolishing them and dreaming up market based solutions that are corruption free doesn't seem to be realistic to me.
Who can afford that? You will always be outmatched be by big corporations.
That's clearly untrue; class-action lawsuits are regularly successful against big corporations without Government intervention (other than the provision of the justice system itself).
Just look at the ratings agencies during the 2008 crisis. They were supposed to be a market based information source but in reality they were paid off.
Sure. And many people who relied on them got burned. The moral hazard arose when the Government decided to bail out people and organisations who'd depended upon them, with money extracted from taxpayers by threat of force. I'd also point out that a lot of the corruption you mention is Governmental; many of those subprime loans only existed because of market intervention in the first place.
There is a lot that's wrong with agencies like the EPA but abolishing them and dreaming up market based solutions that are corruption free doesn't seem to be realistic to me.
Me neither. As I've said before, I think it's entirely reasonable for a Libertarian Government to regulate polluting activities. The caveat is that such legislation must be rights-protecting, rational, and uniformly enforced. Also, in the case of the USA, there's no Constitutional mandate for a Federal EPA so it ought to be dissolved and its responsibilities taken up by the States.
> Who would prove the harm if there is no EPA? Who has the money to go against big corporations and their paid experts? It took forever to get a shared understanding that smoking is really harmful.
The EPA is a horrible example to use against libertarianism. As you note it took much longer for the EPA to figure this out that virtually any other expert in the area. This is because governmental organizations have poorly aligned incentives which almost necessarily result in regulatory capture.
To answer your questions:
Who would prove the harm if there is no EPA? The same experts who the EPA uses, or hopefully better ones. I would happily subscribe to a consumer reports for heath information, for example. This would create a market where accurate and timely information was actually incentivized.
Would there be regulations on cigarettes, selling alcohol to 10 year olds or lead paint? Sure. These regulations would happen on a city-by-city basis or better yet on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis.
As for references, check out the work of Rothbard (a full anarcho-capitalist), and/or Hayek (a minarchist). Economics in One Lesson is also a great introductory book to get your footing thinking through these things.
"Who would prove the harm if there is no EPA? The same experts who the EPA uses, or hopefully better ones. I would happily subscribe to a consumer reports for heath information, for example. This would create a market where accurate and timely information was actually incentivized."
How do you make sure that your consumer reports aren't corrupt? And how do they get financed? Research into things that cause long-term effects (like lead or mercury or tobacco) is very expensive and not really viable for a company that needs to produce a profit short-term.
In my mind, if you want a functioning libertarian state you need to strengthen public research and make sure it's not corrupted. So strengthen the EPA instead of abolishing it.
That way courts and citizens have accurate information to determine if harm has been done or not.
> How do you make sure that your consumer reports aren't corrupt? And how do they get financed? Research into things that cause long-term effects (like lead or mercury or tobacco) is very expensive and not really viable for a company that needs to produce a profit short-term.
1. The methods used to figure out that mercury/cigarettes are harmful is some combination of animal testing and running reports over medical records. These are expensive largely because of regulation.
2. Short term profit goals don't actually destroy the incentive to do research, even expensive research. Consumer reports does tests on cars, requiring facilities and specialists. The major banks spend insane amounts of money doing analysis of companies. Intel, google, etc all invest heavily in R&D.
3. Re: corruption, there's a very strong financial incentive for corporations to not be corrupt. Most of them offer satisfaction guarantees for example, and corporate scandals result in resignation and share price depression. Most of the examples of corruption I'm aware of involve politicians and government agencies. If the EPA were private, it would probably have gone bankrupt / been overtaken by competitors due to its cigarette ineptitude and other failings.
> In my mind, if you want a functioning libertarian state you need to strengthen public research and make sure it's not corrupted. So strengthen the EPA instead of abolishing it.
I think the libertarians completely agree with the strengthening sentiment of your comment. Where we differ with you is that we think the most powerful thing you can do to strengthen public research is to privatize it.
To expand on that: as I said above, I believe the EPA by design ends up in a state of regulatory capture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture), a problem for which I'm aware of no workable solutions for. You yourself probably don't trust the EPA's health advice nearly as much as a smart friend or two of yours who is actually looking at the literature on a given topic. Contrast this with consumer reports, who (personally) I trust at the same level. I think this problem is structural / inherent to public research originations... and needs to be directly fixed by aligning the interest of the researcher with the consumers of their research.
To put that another way: the best researchers I know aren't working for public research institutions. The best ML researchers I'm aware of have actually quit tenured professorships to join Google, Facebook, and Baidu. The best finance/economics researchers I'm aware of work at hedge funds. The best agricultural researchers I'm aware of work at food conglomerates. The best biologists I'm aware of work at drug companies... The majority of the public researchers I'm familiar with (growing up as the son of a math professor) are basically curiosity junkies. This is sort of good, and I'm happy that they're happy, but I think isn't really the foundation that life-changing research comes from -- you want the researcher to be personally invested in a workable solution, not academically curious about something in the area.
To put that a third way: your comment is an example of the nirvana fallacy. What method can we use to "strengthen public research" that won't result in the same misaligned incentives we're currently seeing? What method of preventing corruption are you suggesting beyond those which are already known to not work?
I guess the bulk of it it would be much the same as what we have now: courts, police, Government departments tasked with protecting the rights of the population.
There would be laws against murder, assault, rape, fraudulent advertising, running two-stroke cars[1], etc. etc.
The main change would be that whole classes of crimes (drug crimes, obscenity, blasphemy, private discrimination[2], etc.) would simply disappear. And - if this were the USA - a lot of powers currently improperly usurped by the Federal Government would be instead claimed by the States, assuming their constitutions allowed.
[1] In other words, collective problems justify collective legislation. If smoky two-stroke cars cause human harm by polluting the air, it may be reasonable to ban them by legislation.
[2] By law, the State would be prohibited from discriminating on the grounds of race, religion, sex, marital status, etc. But individuals would be free to discriminate in whatever rational or irrational manner they chose.
Ditto. I think this is a valuable conversation, esp. for bystanders who haven't been exposed to Libertarianism before (or have been misled into equating it with Anarchism).
Yeah, this is a really good point. Short of altering the gene pool (haha), what can we actually do about it "as a society"? I refuse to accept that we just have to tolerate this, but any solution I come up with to prevent it feels like it isn't much better than the problem ..
This is the nirvana fallacy. That people enter into contracts they later regret does not disprove the obvious benefits of allowing legally binding agreements.
If you have an alternate solution, by all means propose it.
(And while we're on the topic of libertarianism, I'd like to note that lawyers being too expensive for poor people is largely a product certification costs, something libertarians want to get rid of)
Not at all. Valid contracts must pass a minimum bar of consent. There was no consent granted, the victim in this case is blatantly incapable of giving it.
Sorry I was unclear. I mean "own" as in how the rich own the politicians in the current system. In a libertarian society I have a hard time seeing this being anything but even less protective of people like those described in the article.
