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Nov. 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:08:44

492 Environmental Protection Without the State - Live Speech at a Libertarian Convention

From a speech given in Toronto, 1pm, Nov 4 2006

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	Thanks very much. I really appreciate the chance to come down and speak here.
	And thank you for that very kind introduction.
	It's true, we've been out of touch for a little while.
	I did get sort of swallowed up on the practical side of the economics world by going out and sort of starting a company and so on.
	But I guess over the last year or year and a half, I've really gotten back into writing and to communicating in the sort of freedom movement that we're all sort of very...
	I'm interested in, focused in, and the company that I worked in or co-founded and worked in for seven years was in the environmental field, so that's actually fortunate that they asked me to talk on the environmental issue.
	A little less work for me, hopefully a little more coherence for you.
	So I'd like to just, I'm going to go through sort of two general sections over the next hour.
	Is that I'm going to talk about environmentalism in general, sort of how to understand it, how to approach it.
	Also a little bit about the history of environmentalism, because if you're going to say that the state solves problems, we would like to apply that theory to a situation where the state didn't in fact create the problem.
	So we'll talk a little bit about the history of it, and then I'll lead you through an analysis that I've been working on for about the last...
	12 to 14 months, which is a way of being able to solve these really challenging environmental and resource allocation issues without using the state at all, right?
	So I always like to start from no state and then, you know, if absolutely backed into a corner, you know, if there's like the cage of rats descending on my head in the 1984 scenario, then I will concede that maybe a little bit of government would be good.
	But I'll always start with no state, right?
	And so this is where I've been sort of giving myself the intellectual challenge is to figure out how these resource allocations can occur and how environmental issues can be addressed in the absence of the state completely, right?
	So we're going fairly far afield here from some of the standard minarchist libertarian theory, which is good.
	This is the exact right group to poke holes in the theory if there are any, which I'm sure there are.
	So I'll start with that.
	I don't mind if people want to start to interrupt with questions.
	If you've listened to any of my podcasts, you know that I'm constantly interrupting myself, so don't feel that that's a bad thing to do if you have any questions as I go forward.
	Any questions so far? Okay, good.
	All right, so let's look at environmentalism sort of as a broad-based phenomenon, because it is one of the greatest statist phenomenon of the 20th century, 21st century.
	It's one of the big things prior to the War on Terror and after the Cold War that is giving people the sense that without the government they're doomed, like without additions to state power and more coercion within society, that we're all kind of doomed, right?
	So I'm really focused on that as an issue because you get a lot of those objections.
	I think, personally, I think libertarians have kind of won the war in economics.
	You don't get a lot of people saying that, you know, the government should take over the computer industry so that we get better operating systems.
	Which, believe me, I mean, these would be arguments that you would hear.
	I'm 40 years old, so when I was growing up in the sort of 70s and 80s, when I first got into libertarianism in my mid-teens, I mean, it was a real uphill battle.
	And those who are, you know, maybe as hairless as me will remember some of this.
	From there growing up that you used to have incredible debates starting from the very beginning where people would just say, well, the government should take over everything.
	There were lots of communists floating around, lots of heavy-duty socialists.
	Those have largely gone by the wayside because the disasters of centrally planned economies are so clear now.
	But environmentalism and some other issues, defense and so on, is still where there's a lot of resistance.
	And so that's sort of where I've tried to focus my efforts.
	Environmentalism as a whole is sort of a three-part mental structure the way that I see it.
	And it's not that complicated, which is one of the reasons why it's so effective in getting people to give up their economic and political freedoms.
	The first thing, of course, which is always required for state power is there are really bad people out there.
	Really bad people out there.
	And there's a massive danger that these bad people pose, but we, the politicians, We can save you, right?
	That's the general tripartite analysis of just about every growth in state power.
	And this is going to be the audience interaction part, which is, these are just some of the things I've jotted down in the car on the way over here about environmental disasters that I remember just from my own relatively short life.
	Mass starvation. We were supposed to run out of food by 1980.
	That's sort of some of Paul Ehrlich's predictions.
	Boy, are we ever going to run out of oil.
	That was also, I think, 1980 was considered to be a year where just everything bad was going to happen.
	I remember this in the 70s, right?
	No electricity was going to be possible.
	Global cooling. Does anyone remember global cooling?
	It's a pendulum, right? Oh, we've run out of fear on this side.
	Let's go back over here and, you know, that sort of stuff, right?
	Massive species destruction, the Rachel Carson scenario, the Silent Spring.
	DDT, you know, DDT, end of the world as we know it.
	Only about 60 million people ended up dying because of the ban of DDT, so I think environmentalism considers that a great success.
	Acid rain, you know, acid rain?
	Fell on my forehead, as you can see.
	And killer bees, anyone remember the killer bees?
	And now, of course, the big one, global warming, right?
	Four billion dollar a year industry.
	Anyone else remember any that I sort of couldn't recall?
	The disasters? Nuclear disasters, for sure, absolutely.
	Nuclear power was going to be a bad thing.
	Yeah, that's a good point. I always get that one mixed up with nuclear war, which is the other one, but that wasn't specifically environmental.
	Love Canal. Now, does anyone know?
	I won't go on a big divergence here, but the Love Canal thing is hilarious in that the government forcibly took over the land.
	The company, I think it was Dow Chemical, said, we've got three feet of concrete around this stuff.
	Whatever you do, don't drill it.
	You know, like here's the map of where it is.
	We did all the environmental regulations, and so don't drill here whatever you do.
	It's like saying to the kid, don't go into that jar, it's got really great cookies.
	So they drilled and it all, anyway, so we know that.
	So yeah, Love Canal, absolutely.
	Anything else that I couldn't remember?
	Because, you know, it gets kind of wearying after a while when you think of these constant series of threats and disasters and everything that's going to go on.
	And, of course, it all goes down the memory hole, right?
	So, global cooling, eh, you know, let's move on to global warming.
	We never look back and there's never any validation, right?
	Yeah, yeah. Great Lakes are losing water and the water, and they're not replaced.
	The water isn't even replaced.
	The nice-age water is in the Great Lakes.
	Oh, right. We're drying up.
	That was a year, and a year later there was flooding in Lake Erie.
	All the bodies were being washed away.
	There was so much water, they were drowning in it, and you never heard about that one again.
	Right, right, right.
	Lake Erie, there were eels in Lake Erie and zebra mussels.
	Zebra mussels, right, right.
	They were going to clog up all the intakes and the outputs of the sewage systems, if I remember rightly.
	So, of course, I mean, we all know this.
	There's this constant series of scare scenarios, which is not to say that the next one might not be true.
	It's just that, you know, after a couple of thousand times of hearing wolf, you ask for a little bit more proof for some of this stuff.
	And it does become a kind of religious mania, some of the stuff, especially for the younger people, right?
	I know that for myself...
	I didn't get a huge amount of environmental propaganda in school, but boy, you know, kids these days, oh man, don't I sound young?
	Kids these days, they just don't know.
	But no, they, I mean, it wasn't really a big focus when I was a kid in school.
	Of course, I was in England, so it wasn't, I don't even know if it's still a focus there now, but now environmental stuff is just monstrous, so.
	I'm not sure it's a big focus.
	Yeah, yeah, it could be, it could be, for sure, for sure.
	It's not a big scare, but you have to, just, who knows this past week?
	Child pornography, you don't know.
	That's true, but that's not exactly the kind of environmental stuff.
	But for sure, you'll notice, and I'm not a big conspiracy buff, but you'll notice that as people start to look at regulating the internet, you'll see more and more of these scare stories, right?
	It's just natural, right? You have to whip up the frenzy stuff.
	So, okay, there's a couple of premises that are sort of embedded in environmentalism, and I just sort of want to go through those so that when I talk about solutions, we know what it is that we're addressing.
	So, the first premise, which I don't think anyone's going to dispute with, human activity has an effect on the world around us, right, in terms of industrialization, population, pollution, and so on.
	And, of course, these can be bad for your health.
	I think that's fairly acceptable.
	People in general, and I don't mean to get all economics geeky on you, though I'm sure it's going to be fairly inescapable, a company seek what's called an externality of costs, which is that I want to push off the costs to everyone around me.
	That's a pretty common thing within the economics world.
	So if you, again, since I'm not talking to the youngest crowd in the world, we may remember that when we were kids or...
	When you were teenagers, you had to take the pop bottles back to the grocery stores.
	You'd get your nickel. There's a great Seinfeld about, you know, the way to do that between states where the prices are different.
	But the idea is that the pop bottles, you know, they go out and then you bring them back.
	They get recycled and so on.
	Now, the pop bottle companies weren't very keen on this because it's kind of an overhead, right?
	It's kind of expensive. So, of course, one of the things that they did was they pushed for the government to centralize recycling and so on so that they could push the costs of that kind of stuff to the taxpayers.
	So companies are constantly seeking to externalize their overhead, get the taxpayers to pay for the things that they would, you know, in a rational society, have to pay for themselves.
	I think they really wanted those pop-up when I was a kid.
	Nobody was requiring to recycle the way of things back then.
	Right, right.
	Sure, yeah, yeah.
	Right, I mean, that's...
	Sure, sure, sure.
	That's great, and that's...
	Well, that's partly it, but of course, partly they were able to shift the costs.
	Well, we'll get into that in a second, and that's good, because I actually have some pictures of you and your friends.
	I'm going to use that as an example later, so I'm glad that you brought that up.
	It works perfectly. Now, we all know that in the realm of environmentalism, there are sort of two aspects of the economy that are constantly talked about.
	The one is the problem of the commons, which we're all fairly familiar with, you know, that If you think of a land area that's being cultivated like a big donut or a bagel, that we all have strips that we're growing stuff around the edge.
	And in the middle is this common land where we can send our sheep to graze and all that.
	And nobody owns it, right? So everybody has a huge incentive to just go and pillage that as much as possible, right?
	So there's this problem of the commons that is fairly strong in the whole environmental movement.
	And it's associated with what environmentalists and leftists and to some degree rightists also call market failure.
	The market just doesn't work in certain situations.
	You hear this stuff when you talk in non-libertarian circles about things like the roads and air pollution and water pollution, that there's just market failure.
	The market can't allocate these costs.
	It doesn't work. Of course, the market failure is generally perceived to be derived from the problem of the commons, But that's sort of equivalent to me saying, you know, my car doesn't work when I don't have a car, right?
	Because I have to walk either way, right?
	If my car's broken or I don't have a car, I have to walk.
	So the problem of the commons is where no property rights are allowed, right?
	So when you have no property rights for a particular resource, then of course everybody's going to want to exploit it with as short a set of objectives as possible.
	So one of the differences that occurs in something like replantation of forests in Europe, you buy the land, right?
	So you buy the whole land and you then, you plant your trees, you grow your trees, you harvest them, you make a killing as a big fat capitalist guy with dollars in your eyeballs and a cash register for a heart.
	And then you replant your trees, right?
	Because you want to get the long-term value of your resource, so you keep replanting.
	In Canada, you buy the rights to the lumber.
	You can't buy the land because the land is federal.
	So you only buy the rights for the lumber, so you decapitate all the trees and you run off laughing into the sunset with all the money falling out of your pockets with no incentive to replant, because you don't have property rights in the land, only in the harvesting of the resources.
	So where there's an absence of property rights, it's really hard to logically say there's a market failure.
	It's like calling communism a market failure.
	There's no prices, no property rights.
	Of course it's a market failure because the market's not allowed to operate.
	So that's another thing that you get.
	And then the major premise of environmentalism, the most fundamental premise of environmentalism, is that the government will solve all these problems.
	That's the fundamental, right?
	There's all of these market failures, and of course, where there's an absence of property rights, government involvement, yes, no?
	People like to have property, right?
	So the government is going to solve all of these issues, and that's the sort of fundamental premise that is in the environmental movement.
	I would certainly argue...
	That that's not what environmentalism is, it's not what the goal of environmentalism is, is not to have the government solve these issues.
	And again, I'm not trying to be joke conspiracy here, I'm just sort of working logically, right?
	If I say, I want to be a great driver and I keep borrowing your car, And I keep driving it off a cliff.
	You get a new car and say, hey, I want to be a great driver.
	And I go drive it off a cliff, right?
	At some point, you may question my motive about whether I really want to be a great driver or whether I just get a kick out of that Thelma and Louise situation where I'm going off the cliff, you know, shrieking like a madman.
	So... With environmentalism, the premise is always more regulation, more government involvement, and so on, will solve the problems of resource depletion, of harmful effects of human activities in the ecosystem, and so on.
	And it never does. Because violence doesn't really solve problems, except in certain Situations of self-defense.
	So the fact that people keep calling for more and more government intervention, despite the fact that the government doesn't solve resource allocation issues, means that you could have some skepticism, I think legitimately so, for the premise that what they really want is to solve these issues.
	Because what they seem to continually go for is just more government power.
	Of course, they're well paid for. They're well paid by the state to do that kind of stuff.
	Again, it's not sort of conspiracy, it's just economics.
	So... And of course, the moral premise at the center of this is that human beings are selfish, greedy, and not in a good way.
	Selfish and greedy, that they want to exploit resources in the short run and make everybody else sick.
	Who cares? As long as I get mine, make my profit, make my shareholders happy, then that's all that drives us as human beings and so on.
	And I'm certainly willing to concede that.
	I mean, I don't even like to argue that kind of stuff because economics is about, you know, maximizing self-interest and so on, and that's why you need a multiplicity of property rights and power bases so that the competition produces something productive, but...
	So... All of these propositions are testable, right?
	I mean, I don't know about you, but when I started first really looking into the environmental stuff, I had to fight a lot of sort of ingrained bigotry in myself, because you just, you hear this stuff like a broken record over and over and over again, and it's just hard to start thinking outside of it.
	But when you accept that the propositions people put forward, you know, everyone's greedy, they want to destroy resources, the government can save you, and so on.
	All of these sorts of things are testable, and I think it's very important.
	When we're talking with people to just, you know, these are all hypotheses and they're testable and so on.
	So let's run through a few of them and see whether they pass empirical and logical tests and then we'll talk about how a non-governmental solution can solve these sorts of issues.
	So, government will solve the issues associated with environmental predation.
	Well, that's a testable hypothesis, and all you would really do is you'd say, okay, let's look at governments that are more powerful and see whether their environment is better.
	If the government can solve these issues, then where there's more government power and control over resources and where there's more government regulations, there should be a better environment, right?
	Now, if anybody saw the pictures of the rivers on fire in the Soviet Union after it came down, after the wall came down in the late 80s, the Soviet Union had the greatest amount of environmental regulations in history, the most control over resources and the socialist economies, We totaled the environment.
	I mean, it's still unlivable in vast areas of the Soviet Union.
	Chernobyl, and you had lakes that you could almost walk across, like squelch your way across.
	They were so full of toxic waste, which is exactly what you'd expect from publicly owned or non-owned resources.
	The other testable aspect of the hypothesis that the government can solve these issues would be to say, well, if the government is really concerned about the environment and the private sector is not, then what you'd do is you'd say, okay, who pollutes more, government agencies or private sector corporations, right?
	Anyone? Guess?
	Guess? Government agencies are horrendous.
	I mean, there is no worse polluters in the West than government agencies.
	The estimates alone for the environmental problems that have been created by the U.S. military, I mean, it's one of the smaller problems that they've created, but it's still, in the realm of what we're talking about, is fairly significant, running to the hundreds of billions of dollars to clean up.
	The Superfund sites, if everybody remembers that, you know, they had a hundred quintillion dollars set aside in the 80s and 90s to deal with environmental issues.
	Unfortunately, 90% of the money went to lawyers, but that's the government at work as well.
	But the majority of the issues that they were dealing with were with publicly owned lands.
	I mean, this is perfectly logical.
	And to take a micro example of this, I mean, I've recently moved into a new neighborhood because my wife wanted to go there.
	And We have a lot on the street that's not built.
	I guess it's still owned by the municipality or whatever.
	And it's fascinating. It's just a simple thing where you can see the difference between private ownership and public ownership, right?
	That you've got these lawns that are like billiard tables, right?
	That's smooth, they're flat, they're de-weeded.
	They're watered. They're, you know, perfectly fertilized and landscaped.
	And then there's this line where the private property ends, right?
	And then you've got this unowned lot, you know, which is like a little chunk of Kosovo in our neighborhood, right?
	Broken crap, and it's like weeds and stones.
	Because, you know, why would you want to improve that?
	It's not owned by anyone.
	You can't reap any rewards.
	It doesn't add value to your life or anything.
	This is exactly the metaphor you can work with in terms of private and public, whatever you like, but that's one.
	We walk past that every day.
	I'm like, ooh, economics in action.
	My wife says, okay, we're going to talk about something else for a while.
	That's okay. You can also ask questions about public versus private ownership and say, okay, how many times have I rented a car and had an oil change in that car?
	Not really, right? Because you don't own the car.
	You don't say, oh, before I return this car, I really better wash it, right?
	You don't say that, right? Because you assume that's built into the cost.
	You don't actually own the capital good.
	You don't spend any money to improve it, right?
	So that's another sort of example, which is where the sort of custodianship of the state in terms of public property becomes pretty questionable, right?
	So let's just take a dive into a quick mad sprint through the history of how we sort of ended up where we were.
	Because there is this general belief that the environmental destruction and predation of the evil capitalists was, you know, going on since time immemorial, was a terrible, terrible thing, and then the government, you know, swooped in, you know, with a heroic cape and saved us, right?
	So... I'd sort of like to contrast when we look at environmental problems where we are, you know, 19th, 20th, 21st century versus another sort of time in history where you could make a very strong argument that environmentalism was a particularly bad issue.
	I'm talking about the Middle Ages, right?
	So in the Middle Ages, you've got a life expectancy 20 to 25 years.
	You've got infant mortality that is wretched, waves upon waves of starvation rolling around through it.
	Some estimates in the 16th century that About 10% of the population every year died from starvation.
	And to me, that's bad environmental stuff, right?
	That's an environmental ecosystem that is not conducive to the success of human life, to put it mildly, right?
	So this is when human beings were heavily controlled by the state in the form of the aristocracy and so on.
	And... The environmental predation, sorry, the destruction of the human life because of the environment was terrible, right?
	So we had state control throughout most of human history, even if we don't accept that the Romans may have gone mad from lead poisoning or whatever, right?
	But There's this huge amount of state control throughout history, which was then broken, and then we start to get improvements, right?
	So everyone talks, oh, the Industrial Revolution's so bad.
	Life expectancy kept growing, infant mortality kept falling, and so on.
	The environment, since the power of the state was sort of restrained, environmental success, or having an environment that helps human beings survive and flourish, has gotten stronger and more powerful, right?
	So the environment has become a lot more friendly since the power of the state was withdrawn.
	Question? Well, we see the opposite now happening.
	We see the state now starting to hold itself again.
	This will probably not continue by the one time.
	Well, yeah, for sure.
	That's a very complicated issue for sure, and I'll talk about it a little bit later if you don't mind.
	But for sure, you can say that even if you just take things as simple as stuff like war, I mean, the fact that state power is growing and so on doesn't mean that the environment, so to speak, is becoming a little less friendly towards human life.
	But yeah, I'll get to that in a moment if you don't like.
	So the British common law tradition, or the sort of Western European common law tradition, is very, very clear about pollution and always has been throughout history up until the time period that I'll talk about, which was that basically if I pee in your coffee, I have to go and get you a new coffee.
	I mean, that's really, maybe it wasn't a copy example, but I think you get the general idea that if something that I do causes a negative impact on your person or property, you know, whether I swing a bat at you, or I, you know, dump a whole load of garbage on your lawn, or I have a huge bonfire that, you know, turns all of your house black and causes your dog to get emphysema, then I'm liable for that.
	I mean, there was no clear distinction in the common law tradition between hitting someone with a bat And causing any kind of problems with their person or property.
	This was going along fine, just perfectly fine, up until about the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s.
	And what would happen, there's sort of two examples, and I'm taking one from Walter Block and one from Murray Rothbard.
	The first one is that it's the black laundry problem.
	So you've got some sweet little old lady in London in the 1860s, 1870s.
	She puts out her laundry because it's nice and clean, and it goes out, and it's wet, and it's clean.
	A couple hours later, she comes back.
	She rolls in her laundry, and it's dry, and it's dirty because the fumes from the local factory have caused it to become messy and filthy and so on.
	So, what she does, which is what everybody would do in a sort of free market situation, is she goes to court and she seeks an injunction and she says that this is a destruction of my property and, you know, I have to do my laundry forever and so on.
	I can't hang it outside. And an injunction is granted and, you know, so on.
	This was all going on in the 19th century.
	The other example is apple orchards in London, in the same sort of time period, mid to late 19th century, that you still had.
	This is like going way back from, I grew up in London, so it's hard for me to even imagine this, but they had apple orchards and farms and all that in London at this period.
	And the apple orchard, the farmers, were getting all of this rolling, horrible, sooty smoke from these dark satanic mills coming down over their orchards.
	And... Was killing off all their trees and their apples and so on.
	So they're saying, look, this is my land.
	I've invested in it. I've got the apples.
	Here's my income. My income has gone down.
	I seek restitution and injunction damages and so on.
	And the courts perfectly upheld this.
	This was like an ironclad tradition that you don't get to mess up with other people's property directly, indirectly, and so on.
	And it wasn't really that hard, right, to figure out.
	It wasn't like there was some manufacturer in China that the trade winds brought the suit of, right?
	This was like, you know...
	Huge factory next door, smoke pouring over, you know, people dying and so on.
	So, the courts upheld this, and what started to happen was the companies began to invest in what we would call sort of primitive scrubbing and cleaning of their sort of technology, because this was the cost of business, right?
	That when they got sued for damaging other people's property, they didn't want to pay that money.
	They're evil capitalists. They want to maximize their resources, so they don't want to get sued, so they found it's cheaper to clean the stacks.
	Then, you know, a couple of things happened.
	One of them is conjecture on my part.
	The other is a bit more historical fact.
	So we'll start with the fun stuff, which is my conjecture.
	The capitalists, who are, you know, I know there's the Randian idea of the perfect noble capitalist.
	I don't happen to subscribe to that.
	I think people are people in just about every situation.
	So the capitalists, you know, they twirl their evil mustaches and they say, you know, I won't do my Mr.
	Burns voice, but if you want to translate it in your head, you can.
	But they sort of say, ah, you know, these evil people are suing me for all of this soot.
	And the one problem that's occurring is the courts are ruling in their favor.
	So I have two choices, right?
	I can either clean up my act or I can go and bribe a judge.
	So this is sort of the problem with regulatory agencies.
	And there's many, many examples and lots of documentation.
	When you start to regulate an industry, Basically, the industry turns around and starts bribing you to raise the barriers to entry to competition.
	Like, it never works, right? Because people are fallible, right?
	That's the basic principle of there's no perfect human being, so nobody should have that kind of power.
	So there was my theory, which would make sense from an economic standpoint, which, of course, there's not a lot of documentation from under the cash-in-envelope bribes from 1860, but this kind of stuff started to occur where the government would simply start to change its approach.
	And the argument, and let me know if you've heard this argument before, it's a new one.
	They said, sure, your private property is important to you, and we understand that, and Boy, we sympathize.
	But there's a larger thing that we have to take into account as good judges, and that is the good of society as a whole.
	Now, we've never heard this argument before that you must surrender your property rights and rights of protection from predation and violence because of the larger social good.
	But they managed to come up with it, and it was quite a revolution at the time.
	And I would say, again, this is more my conjecture than historical fact, but I would say that you probably, this was really occurring in the late 19th century, about, interestingly enough, about 20, 25 years after the creation of public schools that were run by the government as a monopoly.
	I think you kind of have to get kids going through public school before they'll buy this kind of nonsense, right?
	I mean, you have to get people to To get, you know, they have to get stamped with the public good repeatedly and then they go, oh, public good, that's good.
	We've got to have the public good.
	And I think, sorry, question? Well, no, I'm just a geographer, I'm a little lawyer, but I think that you're referring to a scholar of the balance and structure and the argument that, well, you know, there might be like 3,000 factory workers there and, I don't know, standard orders and factories, right?
	But the greater good are 6,000 factory workers.
	That was the rationale. Yeah, for sure, but it was a fairly new rationale in history, without a doubt.
	And I'll throw this point in just as a sort of lure to where we're going in a few minutes, but it's related to this, I think.
	So, if we take the idea that people are selfish and greedy and want to maximize their resources, that's fine, right?
	Let's say that this is true of the state employees as well as the private sector employees.
	Like, you can't divide human beings and say, well, all the private sector people have these traits.
	But all the public sector people have the, you know, they're noble and virtuous and think only of the public good and so on.
	So if you think that capitalists want to maximize their resources by, you know, preying upon this, that, and the other, I would sort of make the argument, again, this is no proof, but I think it's an interesting idea, I would make the argument that if you look at the resources that the public sector has, it's the taxpayers, right?
	That's the resources that they want to maximize.
	And so I would guess that where they're saying, well, there are 3,000 factory workers and there are only 10 orchards, I think that the politicians or the bureaucrats or the state as a whole is saying, who's paying me more taxes?
	Who am I getting more out of?
	And so I would sort of say that public good be damned.
	They're just looking at which side of the bed is buttered for them.
	So they want to maximize their resource consumption in the way that they get as much taxes as possible, which I think has a skewed effect.
	It certainly wasn't a failure of concepts of law or restitution or suing or injunction or whatever.
	It was a fairly conscious decision on the part of governments to begin to favor the industrialists over individual tenants and landowners and so on.
	And there was imperial rivalry.
	This occurred first, I believe, in England and then spread.
	Because, of course, England then got more efficient, I mean, in a horrible kind of way, right?
	If you don't have to pay for any of the costs of your pollution, your industry becomes, in a horrible kind of short-term way, more efficient than other people's because you've lowered one of the costs of doing business, which is that it's like if you have slaves, it's a little cheaper for you to produce cotton in the short run than if you don't.
	So it's totally immoral, but just from a purely resource-maximizing standpoint, if as a capitalist you can get the government to prevent people from suing you, and up until recently this was also the case in the U.S., that you could not have class-action lawsuits for air pollution.
	It became impossible. It was simply disallowed.
	So if you can cause people not to sue you for this, then you become more efficient from an economic standpoint, which means that the government in power, not the government as an abstract entity, but the people in power Get more taxes from you.
	You grow faster and the economy grows and so on.
	It's just the basic principle that I like to work with that anything you say about the private sector and its evil rapacious nature, you must also say about the public sector.
	Again, there's no big magic divide between human beings in the private and public sector.
	As far as pollution growth then, I just want to talk about a few policies that the state has put in place that I believe has really enhanced, that's the wrong word, has really increased the amount of pollution and then how a free market system would solve this kind of stuff.
	Oh my God, I'm actually on time.
	Let me just wait a moment because that's never happened to me before.
	Let's take a moment of silence for my efficiency.
	Well, let's just take a couple of examples.
	Can you guys see this?
	Alright, so for those of you who've ever studied the joyful history of the robber barons in the United States and other places, right, these evil people who made lots of things cheaper for everyone.
	So you had these private railroads, right, so if you wanted to go from A to B in the 19th century and you're some evil capitalist, right, you make a railroad that goes sort of like that.
	Makes sense, right? I didn't come here from Mississauga by way of Borneo, right, so you kind of go in a straight line, so it makes sense, right?
	Now, if you are a government railroad, I don't think that there's a big enough canvas here, but basically, you're going to go, you know, and you're going to do some loops, I think, and you're going to end up sort of over here.
	And the reason for that, of course, is that Here, you're serving the customers, and the customers kind of want to get where they're going as quickly as possible.
	And if there are people along the way who are happy that your railroad is coming through, so much the better.
	Here, as a politician, you don't care about the customers.
	I mean, maybe you do it in an abstract way, but not in a practical sort of economics way.
	But, you know, if you take the railroad up here, this guy will donate to your campaign because it's going to make his factory work.
	And then if you come down here, these guys are going to give you some money to stop the railroad where they are.
	So basically, this is really what happened.
	This is sort of an example of a big waste of resources and so on that occurs out of public sector stuff.
	Think of this as back when the trains were these big puffy things and all this stuff going up into the air.
	That's a minor example, but it's something important to understand.
	Now, in the late 19th, early 20th century and going forward, most of the roads were publicized, socialized, were nationalized.
	That's what I was thinking of. And so you had dozens and dozens of road companies in the private sector that ran all of the roads in the past, and they would do things like they would charge you, if your wagon wheel was really narrow, they would charge you more because you'd chew up the roads.
	Think like an ice skater, right?
	You'd go faster with narrower wheels.
	This is back in the carriage days.
	If you had wider wheels, they'd charge you less.
	All these kinds of things that occurred in the private sector of roads that would try to maximize the use of the roads and make people who destroyed the roads pay more for it.
	Then, of course, a friendly neighborhood government comes along.
	All of that goes away, and the government starts building all of these roads.
	All of these roads are built.
	The reason being, of course, and of course they're not built.
	This way, it follows the same sort of principle as the railroads, that you'll get votes from these guys if you go to their town, because if you don't, they're going to be toast and so on.
	And so you have all of these free roads.
	The government loves the free roads, not just because they get campaign donations and contributions from the people that they stop the roads at, But they get to employ a lot of people.
	They get to raise a lot of taxes.
	They get to sell a lot of bonds.
	They get to do all of that stuff that gives them all of the goodies, the greenbacks that they want, right?
	Because they like to maximize their resources in the government, just like the private sector.
	It's just a little bit more of the whole gun thing involved.
	So, you get all these free roads.
	Does that have an effect on something like the growth of car use?
	Well, yeah, of course.
	If you have a free road system, it means that cars get developed that much more quickly.
	And when the road system is kind of convoluted, it means that they have to drive a lot more.
	And these are just sort of minor examples of the ways in which government policies have really messed up resource consumption in the world.
	Another example is...
	Free garbage collection.
	Walter Block has a very good example where he talks about...
	Have you ever had this where you go to a grocery store and they say, do you want plastic bags or paper bags?
	It's the example he uses, but I've never seen it.
	Anyone? Is it in the States or is it here?
	Is it Canada? Okay.
	Right. So he gives this example and he says, okay, so if you're there, the environmentalists get frustrated because they want us all to choose paper bags, right?
	Because they're biodegradable and they're friendly and so on, right?
	Plastic, you know, it's the effluent of the devil.
	It's just evil. It's not biodegradable and so on.
	And so, but each one of these costs a penny, right?
	Now, so one of these is much harder to dispose of and the other one is not.
	So why, economically speaking, you wouldn't expect that to be, they'd be both a penny.
	So, guesses?
	Why is it both a penny?
	But the reason I would suggest, and I think this is fairly true, basically because Walter says so and I think he's a smart guy, but the reason that they both cost a penny, although one is much more expensive to dispose of, is because the garbage collection and disposal is government-run.
	If I run a garbage dump and I get somebody who wants to dump off a plastic bag and it costs me five bucks to dispose of it for whatever reason, because if everyone just gives me paper bags, then once I've filled up the landfill, I can sell that land to somebody to build a mall or whatever.
	The land has value because it can be resold.
	If somebody gives me all this battery acid and, I don't know, like, horrible stuff, right, then I can't resell the land, or at least it's going to be a much more narrow market.
	Someone's going to have to go in and clean it up.
	So that costs me, as a landowner, if I get junk that I have to put into the ground because I can't resell it.
	Everyone's going to go and check and say, oh, my God, there's a cesspool down there.
	I don't want it. I can't build a parking lot.
	I can only build a parking lot here.
	I can't build a residence or whatever, so it's worth less.
	So if you get junk coming into your garbage dump that is not friendly to the environment, you're going to charge more for it because it lowers the value of your property, right?
	But that's not the case if the government runs it.
	Or I think in this case it's the mafia that runs it with the government front.
	I'm not sure exactly, but I think that some of the stuff that goes into the landfill are people who didn't pay their...
	Anyway, we don't have to get into all of that.
	There are taxes, so to speak.
	But... So...
	So what that does is it means that there's no incentive for people to make environmentally friendly stuff to dispose of, because it's all run by the government, so there's no cost for people to come up with crap that's hard to get rid of, right?
	So this is just another example of how state-run stuff makes the environmental issues worse.
	Okay, the last one. I don't want to go on.
	I could go on like this for a while, but I have some compassion, so I won't.
	The last one I'll talk about is free water.
	Now, I know water's not totally free, but to all intents and purposes, if you're an industrial concern, water's kind of free, right?
	So, any guesses as to what happens to consumption of water when it's free?
	Any economists? Ooh, ooh!
	You get the prize, yes, it goes up, right?
	So, when you subsidize things like water, and you just, hey, all the water you want is totally yours for free, what happens Is that people base their entire industry and their entire process of making stuff on massive water consumption.
	Because it's free, right?
	I mean, why wouldn't you, right?
	So what happens then is that water consumption goes up, right?
	It's like, you know, oh, I have a sniffle, I'll go to the doctor, right?
	I mean, this is the same thing that happens in socialized medicine, right?
	So, because the government has made all of these things available for free, it doesn't enforce property rights in water or air, and we'll get to air as a solution in a sec.
	What happens is that people just base their entire business decisions around free water, which means it's going to get overused.
	Anything that's free is going to get overused, right?
	That's why the cost of medicine is always going up.
	So... You can sort of get this sort of principle and you can dig up dozens of these in just about every field, but every time that you make something, the price, every time you remove price from the elements, which happens when you socialize something, roads means that people use roads more, because it's free, right? I'm on the 407, and I have to use that to get to work, so...
	I'm more conservative about my use of that.
	I'll try and go off peak hours and so on.
	But whenever you make something free, you fundamentally change people's decisions, right?
	So in the air pollution example, people were trying to fix the problem of air pollution.
	Because it was very expensive to pollute.
	People would sue you. And it was unpredictable.
	You didn't know if you were going to win, lose.
	So businessmen don't really like unpredictable costs.
	Even a fixed cost that you know is coming.
	I just know this from running a business.
	But you couldn't tell.
	So investors, your stock price would be depressed and you'd always be monitoring your air to see if you were doing anything that was going to cause you trouble.
	As soon as the government no longer prosecutes you for these things, then it actually gets worse, right?
	Because people then say, well, if I'm going to have no social repercussions, no economic repercussions for pollution, I can now make the stinkiest, most horrible kinds of decisions because, like where before, there was some minimal and they gave up researching this stuff and so on, right?
	So there's lots of decisions in the public policy arena that have very strong effects upon pollution.
	Any questions about that? I'm about to turn to the sort of solution side of things, so...
	Does that sort of make sense?
	Hey, first time for everything.
	Okay. So, let's have a look at a way in which...
	Now, this is not totally originally my idea, but I've certainly been working fairly hard on this in the environmental sphere, so be gentle.
	So, this is not a final polished total solution, so feel free to take swings at it, because I certainly want it to be as good as possible.
	You guys can't see this.
	Can you see that? Is that right?
	So I call these things DROs.
	Because, you know, the world could use more acronyms.
	And DROs, it stands for Dispute Resolution Organizations.
	This is a way of being able to resolve disputes between people without invoking the state.
	This is sort of the idea. Again, start with no state.
	And I won't talk about how this deals with things like contract law, tort law.
	I won't deal with how this deals with Crimes of property or crimes of aggression.
	I'll just talk about this within the environmental arena, about how, and I'll take the toughest problem of all, which is air pollution, right?
	This is the one that drives libertarians, at least it did for me for quite some time, sort of nuts.
	And I'll give you the breakthrough and you can tell me whether it makes any sense or not.
	So, we've got guy A here, who's got a house, right?
	And he's got a house. Obviously, because he's a guy who's got a house, he wants nice air.
	I mean, he's got kids, he's got a dog, he doesn't, you know, he doesn't want to fall over choking and he doesn't want to live like he's got his face in a barbecue the whole time.
	So he wants some clean air, right?
	Now, what do people do in a free market situation when they want something?
	They take out their old gold card and they slap down some greenbacks for it, right?
	That's what they do. They'll buy it, right?
	So the question is, how do you buy air quality?
	Well, the general thing that occurs when you have a risk that you share with a bunch of other people that's not just specific to you, like hurricanes or something, right?
	Is you'll buy insurance. That's the general idea that you do when you have...
	A diffuse good that you want that affects a whole bunch of people.
	There's no insurance company that serves just one person.
	You need the law of averages to make a profit.
	So, guy A here has a desire for clean air.
	And, you know, there's a couple of people here, you know, guy B, guy C, and so on, right?
	So, what they're going to do is they're going to go, or somebody's going to come over and say, ah, new neighborhood.
	I'm Joe Blow from the DRO company.
	I will guarantee you clean air.
	I will guarantee you clean air for 20 bucks a month.
	Ahead, right? So you pay me 20 bucks a month, you all, homeowners association, and we'll get into the problem with the free rider later, but the free rider being the person who's like, hey, everyone else is paying for it, so I don't have to, but we'll get into that in a sec.
	So, you all pay me 20 bucks a month, and I give you a big list of, like, these particulates, a certain amount of it is allowed.
	You can have one pot per billion or whatever, right?
	But above a certain rational amount wherein health consequences are going to occur, I will pay you a million dollars each.
	If your air quality gets worse than this for more than...
	You know, maybe there's a forest fire, so you can have it for a week, right?
	But if it's more than a week, and it's over these, and it'll be a...
	I'm just making it as attractive as possible.
	Who knows what it'll actually look like?
	I will pay you an increasing amount of money back if your air quality dips below a certain amount.
	Sorry, it gets worse than a certain kind of grade, right?
	But that seems like a fairly good deal.
	20 bucks a month. You never have to worry again.
	About air pollution, right?
	So then the question is, how does this work, right?
	So you guys have given me all this money, and I'm going to take a fairly simple example just for the sake of time, but we could make this as complex as we want.
	So here we now are shielded by this DRO, right?
	DRO. So, let's just say that this is a residential neighborhood.
	Obviously, if we live next to, I don't know, Joe's belching paint factory of hell or something, the premiums are going to be a little bit higher or whatever, but the idea is that 20 bucks, 20 bucks, 20 bucks, there's a whole bunch of money coming.
	Let's just make it three. 60 bucks a month going to the smallest insurance company in the world, which then has a liability of $6 million if the air quality gets there.
	So what you have now here is an economic group that only makes money as an insurance company.
	Your insurance company only makes money if you're not dead.
	Once you die, they take a bit of a hit.
	So they have an economic stake, and we all know, as good libertarians, that there's nothing more powerful than self-interest and the Adam Smith hand of benevolence and so on, rather than you just get the one thing from the government from the hand, which is not the whole hand.
	But... So you've got $60 flowing to a company that, if it keeps the air clean from now until the end of time, assuming these houses are always going to be populated, makes $60 a month.
	And if the air quality gets bad, then they have to pay out money $2 million a head, $6 million, or whatever.
	Whatever makes sort of sense, right?
	So what are they going to do?
	Well, the first thing they're going to have to do is they're going to have to set up some kind of monitoring.
	In the same way that the gas company doesn't phone you up and say, hey, how much gas did you use this month?
	You say, uh, none.
	Yeah, I like the cold.
	So they set up monitoring the same way gas company does.
	The same way the phone company doesn't phone you up and say, did you call anyone long distance?
	No? Okay, don't worry about it then.
	They set up their own monitoring.
	So you've got monitoring for the air quality.
	Now, what happens if, let's just say, you have to keep monitoring this as a situation.
	So then, an evil capitalist guy...
	ECG. Evil capitalist guy.
	We'll even give him little horns.
	He comes along and he says, what I really want to do is build a really filthy plant right here.
	Smokestacks, explosions, human sacrifice, whatever.
	The most evil thing in the world.
	I want to build it right here.
	And this is the wind direction.
	So let's just say you guys are the DRO representatives and you get wind of this.
	Do you want to take a moment to save that pun?
	No? Okay. So you get wind of this factory.
	What are you going to do? Well, you're going to discourage it, right?
	And I would suggest some sort of bombing.
	What I would suggest is that if this thing gets built and starts pumping out all this crap, you owe six million bucks to these people because their air quality is going to go off the charts and you've got a contract.
	Forget about the contract enforcement without a government.
	We can come back to that another time.
	There are solutions for it, but I don't want to get too much off on a tangent, at least for once.
	So you're going to discourage it.
	So what could you do? You could buy the land.
	Fantastic. Okay. Buy the land, right?
	In fact, you may want to do that right away.
	You give people, you buy the land, right?
	And maybe you buy the land, and it's not that you can't get value out of it, but you only allow other people to build houses there.
	Right? So everything in a plume sort of direction upwind or upriver, because this could work for water as well.
	You buy the land, absolutely. Let's just say you missed it, right?
	Your Google Alert didn't work, and you didn't get a notification that the land was going to be bought.
	And this guy gets the land, and he's going to, you know, his evil orcs start building the factory from hell or whatever, right?
	What are you going to do then? Well, okay, so what you're saying is that the DRO is going to come to evil capitalist guy and say, you now owe me six million?
	But why? He doesn't have a contract with them.
	I mean, you could show up and say, give me six million.
	If you find people like that, let me know, and we'll talk later.
	But they're not going to pay it, right?
	For sure, right? But what else could you do?
	You could pay these people to move, absolutely.
	That's probably not too cheap.
	And, of course, why would you move if you get two million bucks?
	That may not be a bad thing to you, right?
	You may, in fact, be funding these guys, whatever, right?
	I mean, it's possible.
	I'm just looking at the worst-case scenario, right?
	But it could be the case that they don't want to move, right?
	Because they go, yeah, two million bucks, I can get a nice house somewhere, right?
	So maybe they don't want to move.
	What else could you do? Well, you know, the camera...
	No state, yeah. But let's just pretend the contracts can be enforced and so on just for now.
	You mean if you went to the state in the current situation?
	Well, yeah, unless these guys happen to bribe the state, right?
	In which case, we're in the general situation of problems, right?
	Because the state is going to say, as they often do, okay, so if this factory gets built, I get an extra $5 million a year in taxes.
	Hmm... Which way am I going to swing here?
	Right, so this is why the state doesn't work, and this is why this kind of air pollution problem doesn't get solved by the state, because there's just too much money involved that the state gets, right?
	If we're going to assume this guy is going to maximize resources by making money, the state's going to do it, which means that they're going to support the building of this, right?
	You get this all the time with airports, right, the general social good, and too bad it sucks to you if you don't have any years left.
	So, somebody else had a...
	Yeah? A fence for wind.
	That absolutely could work, right? Now, as long as your fence for wind can be subsidized with 60 bucks a month or whatever, right?
	I mean, you'd obviously have to have a fairly large group here.
	For sure. You can spend, I mean, anyone else?
	One last. Dude!
	You rock. Sorry, a little California moment there, just for everyone.
	Hang ten. Hang ten. Yeah, absolutely.
	Look, you've got six million bucks here at stake as your dispute resolution organization, as your pollution insurance dude.
	You've got six million bucks at stake.
	You can spend up to $5.9 million to control the pollution, even if you didn't buy the land, even if you missed the whole ticket, even if you couldn't bribe this guy to not build it with five million bucks or whatever, right?
	You've got up to six million bucks Minus a buck, or whatever, right?
	To spend in controlling, right?
	So, you might go to this guy, and you might say, hey, I'll spend three million bucks on pollution and control equipment for you.
	That's perfectly, you know, you did that very quickly.
	I'm not even going to tell you how long that took me to come up with, so I wish I'd talked to you earlier.
	Anyway, sorry. I can externalize my cost by using the government, but I can externalize my cost by turning to the DRO. Sure, absolutely. The big difference is that if you externalize the costs here, the air pollution goes down.
	If you externalize the costs by bribing somebody in the government, the air pollution doesn't go down.
	I agree with you that businesses are always going to want to externalize their costs.
	Because the DRO knows that, it's going to make sure that this never gets to that.
	And if it did, whoever was responsible for this would get fired, right?
	I mean, if you didn't notice that this huge evil mortar plant was going up or something...
	Then you would get canned.
	So they're fully aware that people might just do this in order to get free pollution control equipment.
	So they would try and act, I would say, they would act to their own economic advantage to prevent that.
	But in this situation, I'm sort of trying to take the worst case, that if this thing does get built and you've got these insurance situations, That even then, even though you end up subsidizing the plant or whatever, at least the air pollution gets controlled and reduced, which doesn't happen in a situation where you have public ownership and government property, but you're absolutely right. It would be pretty negative for the insurance company if it got to this, which is why they probably would buy this land up ahead or whatever.
	Now, this could work, of course, in a wide geographical area, right?
	So, we all know the problems if you've dealt with this kind of stuff.
	You've got a plant here, a plant here, a plant here.
	The air goes in a whirlpool and, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
	Who knows, right? You get stuff beamed down from outer space, right?
	But the issue, of course, is that you would simply pay people to go, if it ever got to that, you'd pay them and you'd say, I'm going to put, you know, effluent ABC in, I'm going to trace where it goes and so on.
	You could do all of this kind of stuff.
	I mean, when you think of cell phone companies and reciprocal agreements that you can go to Europe and use your cell phone even though you don't have a contract with the people there, this is what's called coopetition in capitalism where you're competing but you also cooperate because it maximizes your profit.
	You can get very complex in terms of the way that voluntary and non-state agencies can solve these kinds of problems.
	You can apply this. Again, I'm not saying it solves every solution.
	There's not every problem solved with this, but this is the way that I'm sort of working on it.
	Right. And now, usually in the case of the white government, it should be the.
	That's a fantastic argument.
	I just wish I had time to say, no, I'm kidding.
	Whatever, this is my time here. Okay, we've got a few minutes.
	That's great. Okay, so let's take this DRO in and put the GOV in, right?
	So let's go with the antonym of voluntary cooperation and go with top-down coercion, right?
	Now, there's a couple of differences that are kind of key in this area.
	One is that there's no voluntary payment.
	Like here, this is all voluntary, right?
	Right? So if the DRO is not protecting you in some manner or another, then you don't pay them, right?
	Like if your life insurance company, if you hear and read on the internet that they don't pay out, right?
	Then, you know, it's like the model on eBay, right?
	Like if somebody's got a bad rating and, you know, 100 times out of 100 times, you know, they've shipped a live eel instead of the book you wanted or something, then, maybe not live unless it's expedited.
	But, you know, it's voluntary, right?
	So because this 20 bucks a month and the 2 million payout is voluntary, it's going to be optimized, right?
	So that's very important.
	If it's the government that you're doing this with, the government gets your 20 bucks regardless of whether your air quality is good, right?
	That's a fundamental difference between these two.
	Whoever is going to offer you this clean air situation Has to win and keep your business.
	And there's some other jerk, let's say, there's some other jerk who's always coming along in business and saying, oh, they're charging you 20 bucks and they're only paying you out 2 million?
	I'll charge you 18 bucks and pay you out 3 million.
	This is always going on, right?
	I don't remember the last time, with the exception of the Libertarian Party, that a government agency has come along and said, hey, let's voluntarize a whole bunch of this stuff so that we make sure we provide you the best conceivable service.
	I don't think that happened with the income trust people this last week, and I don't imagine...
	So the fact that it's not voluntary with government, that you get the 20 bucks, regardless of whether you actually control this, and also...
	The other issue is that you have two relationships here between the government and the people in the houses and the government and Joe's house of evil polluting paint production or whatever, which is that the government gets money here whether the air is clean or not.
	The government gets more money if this factory goes up.
	Right? So, I mean, it would be a total conflict of interest.
	If you found your DRO was getting money from you and from the polluting paint, whatever, whatever, right?
	That would be pretty bad.
	You'd drop that guy. It would be pretty...
	So, the fact that the government gets paid whether or not the air is clean and the government makes more money if the air gets dirtier...
	In terms of taxes and economic growth and so on in the short run, right?
	And then, of course, with all the health issues, it says, oh, I'm sorry, we have to raise taxes to pay for these health issues.
	I mean, you know, it makes more money the worse things get, right?
	That's the sort of fundamental difference between the free market and the government.
	But, I mean, that's an excellent, excellent question.
	Does that... I mean, again, I know I'm doing a real surface thing here, but...
	If we were allowed to see the government getting a fat air for not working on the...
	Right. Oh, you mean if the government was going to pay you the two million?
	Yeah. Right. Right.
	Right. Okay.
	Now, if you sue the DRO, let's just say it's a private corporation, right?
	The DRO is making a whole bunch of money and you sue them, who pays?
	Well, the people who own the DRO and the share.
	If you sue the government and the government then pays two million, who in the government pays that?
	Right. Well, the future generation, or the inflation through printing more money, but they go into debt.
	Like, nobody pays directly personally, so it's a painless situation.
	So if you said the government's in the government would put in the solution to make sure that the people still provide their jobs, they probably include it.
	It might.
	And look, government accidentally does something right from time to time in the same way that I can be a good rifleman, blindfolded, I'll hit the target every, you know, randomly, just law of averages, right?
	So, yeah, it could be the case that you've got a real do-gooder in the government who's going to do all the right things.
	I mean, that's not something, you know, that's a real cross-your-fingers, right?
	It's like saving for your retirement by playing the lottery.
	But it certainly could happen, but there's no incentive for it to happen on a reproducible basis, because they're going to make a lot more money.
	If the air quality gets bad, people get sick, they have to charge more taxes, they get to hire more doctors, these guys will pay more in taxes, and if they get sued, there's no negative repercussions, right?
	Like, what was it, George Bush said the Iraq war was going to be $50 billion, it's now $400 billion.
	Like, I don't think that's going on anyone's tab that we can see, right?
	I mean, that's the next generation or whoever loses their money based on a currency crash.
	But there's no personal liability.
	And where there's no personal liability, things get kind of loosey-goosey, right?
	So what you've set up here is a situation where there's no nuisance rights.
	Normally, if the factory is ballooning in a certain progress, then you'll see agencies, you know, Sure.
	...instead of having to go to an insurance agency and have to go for it.
	But your example here doesn't allow for that.
	You're saying there's no state until we enforce a lawsuit against the agency.
	Yeah, and well, no, you're absolutely correct, and I wish I had all day, maybe you guys don't, but I wish I had all day to go over this sort of theory.
	Yes, you do get lawsuits without the state, whatever, but we can get into that another time, and this is also on my Lou Rockwell articles, I go into this sort of stuff in perhaps mind-thumbing detail, so it's up to your discretion of that, but the whole point of economic productivity is prevention rather than cure, right? I mean, It's the same thing with medicine, right?
	I mean, if you can not get sick, that's a whole lot better than getting better, right?
	So prevention is better than cure, which is why, you know, nutrition and exercise versus, you know, amputation and antibiotics.
	So here, we want to put an economic situation in place which prevents the air from being polluted in the first place.
	So you buy insurance and so on.
	If the air does get polluted, then the DRO is going to jump in and take action to reduce or eliminate that pollution, and you don't have to lift a finger.
	Yeah, you've got to sign a contract with the DRO to begin with.
	But you don't have to lift a finger, because all you're doing is rubbing your hands and saying, ah, you know, either my air becomes clean again, or I get two million bucks.
	Either one is a win-win for me, because they would have to make it balanced that way, so that either one would be good for you, right?
	Otherwise, you wouldn't go for that.
	Question? Oh, sorry, are you the professor?
	Yeah, sorry, no. I don't take questions with people who actually have knowledge in the area.
	If I may, I don't want to plug And I know you walked in a little bit late at my presentation, but at one point, I discussed the importance of.
	And the images that are out there, as I'm glad I'm not trying to go into it, is actually an out-of-the-treaty period of Jewish history.
	And I think that, to give you your email, I didn't know what I've written about that, but in case of you describing, it's particularly what happened in the 1850s and 1860s in England, when our manufacturers began to lose their neighbors.
	And at first, what happened was I've done some research that's, you know, a lot of the land next to these, you know, devilish factories.
	Evil. And so we went out a guy who, for a year, you know, was just there sitting and taking notes, seeing how much smoke was running out of it.
	What happened in time is that the government imposed what was recognized at the time as the first sort of command and control regulation to deal with pollution.
	What I found in my research, which I didn't read elsewhere, is that the only way the state eventually came in was that the technology had already been developed, which was some form of primitive stronger.
	That sort of transferred the pollution from the air into the water.
	But what happened over time though is that The businesses found ways to collect that pollution and turn that into something out of which they made a lot of money which was eventually laundry detergent.
	At the turn of the 20th century you had a lot of these plants which were still running even though their technology was obsolete because they were making so much money from that laundry detergent that it actually made sense for them to keep the old technology rather than Switch to new, less polluting technologies in the first place, because we're actually making money from the pollution.
	So I would suggest that there might be, even in the most devilish cases, and I'd be glad to email it to you.
	I'd love to read it, sure. There might be some win-win situations there where everybody will be worse off and better off and where you won't have any losers.
	Right. No, that's good.
	That's excellent. I mean, that's the kind of creative problem solving that occurs in voluntary interactions, right?
	Which just never occurs. Just the last thing I'll sort of say before We close off, or at least you guys' day.
	It's up to you. When you get a big regulation, I think you mentioned this as well, it just destroys creativity.
	If somebody says, cut your emissions in half, people don't come up with creative solutions.
	They're like, oh man, we either got to bribe the state for an exception, which often happens, or we got to move overseas, or we got to install all these scrubbers, but there's not a lot of continual problem solving.
	It's purely reactive.
	It's like, oh, the government passed the law.
	Let's go buy some scrubbers.
	Or let's move our factories overseas.
	There's not a process of continual improvement and optimization that occurs.
	And so it really doesn't help that much.
	And of course, we can see the effects of that in certain areas where pollution just doesn't get productively solved with.
	Even if global warming is true, and that's a whole other debate, but even if global warming is true, this kind of model would solve it very effectively in a way that the state doesn't.
	So I'm never one to say that environmental is not an issue and that governments aren't used by corporations to externalize costs.
	I mean, corporations will use it if it's there.
	It's like a government subsidy, right?
	Here's a check for 100 million bucks for everyone in your field, you'll take it, because otherwise you're going to go out of business, right?
	But this kind of situation would deal very well with global warming because if there were negative effects for persons of property, then people would start making proactive things to maximize the resource allocation so that the net effects of changing would be less bad than staying the course.
	So that's really the basic idea.
	When he said that he said that he was only going to call the government and that is very, very, very happy.
	So, I guess we did.
	What happens? What is common?
	You don't have the interest of the leader or the leader, and that's it.
	Oh, from turning into a kind of government?
	Right. Right.
	This little example occurs in a magical place we call Ancapistan, which is an arco-capitalist society, which is where there's no state.
	And again, I know you guys are libertarians and minarchists.
	This is just a possible way of looking at it that you can talk about with people.
	If there is a state, this doesn't work.
	Because the first thing these people will start to do is start to try and get...
	The state is a huge evil temptation.
	It's the heroine of the human soul.
	Because it's a huge temptation.
	It's like, I can either become more productive...
	Or I can go and get the state to do some regulatory thing for me, right?
	Like the whole Microsoft thing where all the people in Utah who lost money on Netscape got the DOJ to go sue Microsoft because they were mad.
	I mean, this is what happens. It's a great temptation that people are going to use the power of the state rather than innovate and create themselves.
	This doesn't work without the state.
	I mean, without a doubt. There is, of course, the risk which people believe that each one of these DROs is going to turn into some sort of ninja squad of ultimate...
	Government evil or whatever, and so there's, you know, things you'd have to put in place so that consumers would have to put in place to make sure that didn't happen, but you're absolutely right.
	If there's a state involved in this, A, this will never come about, right, because people will believe there's a problem to be solved, and where the state has a monopoly, there's no capitalist creativity, right?
	And if there is a state introduced into this mix, I think it would very quickly fall apart, but I think in the absence of a state, And you can just pretend there's a state elsewhere if you want that's not dealing with the environment, though I think that you have to have a bit of a purist approach here.
	This doesn't work with the state, for sure.
	One more question. Oh, sorry, were you taking notes?
	Right. You had to buy it, right?
	It's the law? Sorry, my wife handled the purchase of the house.
	What's title insurance? Oh, I think I know what that is.
	I think that is somebody else has a claim on the land that the lawsuit is going to be paid for.
	I think that's required by the government.
	I think that's something you have to buy.
	I'm not positive. No, it's not?
	And is that because there can be these conflicting claims that could be historical?
	Somebody says, my great granddaddy built this house and they come forward and so on.
	No, you're absolutely right.
	That's a non-state solution where people are minimizing risk, and they won't do business with you if you don't.
	And the way that you deal, just the last thing to deal with the free rider, if person C doesn't want to do it, then the DRO might say, I'm only going to sell you this house if you buy this air insurance, or whatever, from whoever.
	or whatever.
	There's lots of ways to deal with the free rider problem, but yeah, that's an example of minimizing risk that obviously people have found it cheaper to just pass the cost along to you and that's the condition of doing business relative to maybe there's going to be some multi-million dollar lawsuit.
	I have a comment.
	I think, you know, I've heard some of your stuff.
	Some?
	I've heard some of your stuff on the new office.
	I think you should take the deal, but not saying that it has to work this way.
	No, no, absolutely.
	It could work this way, yeah.
	I haven't patented the future. Right.
	Right, right.
	Yeah, for sure, yeah.
	Okay, here's how we're able to work, and that has to be used in a different way, but that here's one potential.
	Yeah. No, thank you very much.
	I haven't been able to put a patent on the future yet.
	Still working on it. Yeah, this is a possible way.
	Right, right, right.
	Or say, where did it work in the past this way?
	Right, right.
	Yeah, because if you can't even come up with one way that it could work, it's kind of tough to advocate it, at least for me, right?
	I think it's probably a good thing, like some sort of, a very good thing that factories are going to buy just a speed of the use of the company.
	So, they can see that land with the company, they can see the factories that are inside the whole system.
	Yeah, the factory, in order to buy the land, somebody would have to guarantee them against maybe this exact title things.
	They're going to have their own DRO, they're going to negotiate, and you're quite right.
	Right, so they might have their own DRO, which has a Right.
	For sure, yeah.
	Nobody does business with them anymore and they go out of business.
	Alright, listen, I know you guys have got your own tight schedule, but thanks so much.
	I really appreciate the time and glad you guys had a great job.

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