Do you mean in terms of financial compensation or regulatory compensation? That was the one I almost used!
No, I didn't. I'm aware of google, and would have used it in the first place if I was motivated to. Instead I asked a Politics forum, which told me to google it, so I just came to the point. So they have the right to pollute the air, and if it harms me I have to try and get compensation out of them. If that's your position, it seems fair enough. But that prompts a new question. Do I have the personal liberty to live my life without being harmed for the sake of business profit? The apparent answer is no.
What I meant was financial compensation. If a business/corporation/person pollutes and someone else can substantiate a claim that such polluting has caused harm to their property (self or other material things) then the person should be made to pay reparations for these damages. The effects of this would be good for the environment. It would force business to make decisions based on how much they will have to pay in reparations for any damages they cause, effectively creating an economic incentive not to pollute. Economic incentives usually work pretty well on profit driven groups.
My first reaction is not to expect businesses to change their pollution practices, but to expect them to employ an army of lawyers. Wouldn't it be more profitable in the long run to simply pay lawyers to put the brakes on every case until people gave up on them, or others who were considering such filings were simply discouraged from filing in the first place?
Aggression happens. Sorry. The best answer to aggression that I'm aware of is to seek redress in a court of law where the court can establish that aggression took place (prove someone is guilty). From there they can establish that you deserve compensation to help pay for whatever damages/losses said aggression caused and that the aggressor deserves some form of punishment suitable to whatever crime they committed. Do you have a better solution? Armies of lawyers cost money. It would be more profitable in the long run to simply stop committing aggression against people, especially if those people were able to prove in court that they were aggressing against them. At the worst, the victims would receive a massive settlement. At best, the victims would take a lump sum in losses/damages and those responsible for the aggression would be charged accordingly in a court of law. Unless you're being propped up by some monolithic institution (read: government, regulatory capture) it's going to be pretty hard to compete when you're fucking people over. Why would anyone want to buy product Y from company X when they're committing aggression against people?
Well what do you want? Wouldn't making the polluters pay reperations be a good way to deal with this problem? This is like competition between rights. You have the right not to have your property damaged. Business has the right to operate and their operation entails the creation of some pollution. The pollution may or may not harm other people and it is possible to take steps to negate the harm it may cause. So we can't just tell business that might pollute that they can't operate, instead we should hold them accountable for any damages they do actually cause. In the end business practices that reduce the harms of polluting will be rewarded. Kinda seems that way, but I think it's just that we can't intervene to make this problem go away unless we want to outlaw any form of pollution, which is kind of ridiculous and would be harmful to our society. Would we try and make gas powered cars illegal to prevent any damages they may cause? No, because gas powered cars make our lives kick ass, and so do these polluting businesses to a certain extent. They should be held responsible for the damages they cause though, and if they were held more accountable towards the damages they would be pressured to cause less damages, since it would cut into their profits.
Freedom. But shit happens, so I'm not free. Instead, we let the Gray Fox run around committing all the crimes he wants, because I'll be damned if he hasn't got that Gray Cowl we let him make, and we can never seem to find the guy after he takes it off. There's a certain amount of hypocrisy here, but its unavoidable. We can't all be free, no matter how much we want freedom. I'm not trying to judge Libertarians, I agree with a lot of it. I am just quite down on the notion of corporate freedoms lately.
We take the Gray Fox's cowl off by holding him accountable for his damages though. By my solution the Gray Fox's actions are punishable by law and require him to make reparations to the parties he has caused damages against. It seems as if you are asking the law to prevent any and all pollution. How should it do so? I think that's where the unavoidable hypocrisy lay, in the answer to that question. Are we going to outlaw gas powered cars?
There's no hypocrisy. We're presenting the least bad solution to the problems you've presented. Libertarians aren't claiming that we can make the world perfect or that everyone's rights will always be respected. Corporations have no more freedom than you or I when it comes to aggression.
They are always punishable. Smoking pot is punishable. I got punished once. It taught me that I shouldn't get caught doing it. I "take off the cowl" by not doing it in public. The people who make the decision to pollute do it by hiding behind a corporation. You don't even want to know. I start to feel awfully Authoritarian about punishing corporate big wigs and decision makers when something happens like what happened in the Gulf of Mexico, to the point that if I were honest you'd invoke Godwin's law on me. It might be enough to simply make punishments more personal, but that kind of kills the point of the corporation in the first place, right? Of course we are not going to outlaw the cars we love so much, one should only hope we will replace them with something better. I'm aware of a technology that is concept proven but under development (NDA demands vagueness), and I think it's possible we'll have cars with no emissions in 15 years. I dare say in 30 years a discussion about air pollution might be a thing of the past. But, we do give competitors the right to try and squash a business like this, so I may be wrong. I usually do not want to be involved in a discussion about "global warming" but when I hear them, I still think... okay, it might not be real, but should we have to breathe each others' poisons?
I'd just like to say that I'm loving the elder scrolls thief guild references that are happening in this thread. And so that I'm not completely off topic: Go libertarianism!
Yeah and I'm talking about holding that corporation responsible financially, which would create a disincentive for them to cause harm with their pollution. But yeah, it's like they're using the cowl to do their crimes lol. It's not like it would be much different for an ordinary person, though. If you dumped oil on your neighbors yard it would be considered just compensation, IMO, for you to pay to clean the yard until it was in its prior condition. I would expect a corporation to be held to a similar level of accountability for any damages they cause. I honestly think they should be made to pay every single person what they are due in terms of financial losses, and also to clean up the whole spill until the gulf is in its prior condition. I wouldn't jail anyone I don't think, as long as that is done. Wouldn't that be good? And I think this is that unavoidable hypocrisy, no offense. You would do Hitler things to the BP CEOs but you won't renounce the use of fossil fuels, instead you just hope for something better. These big companies are just providing us with what we demand, and shit happens while trying to get it to us. Yeah, in BPs case it was negligence to a certain degree but lets not go there lol. If they pollute the air/water and your property gets damaged they should be held accountable, and until these cleaner technologies come out we kind of have to deal with it, no? Should we have to deal with it? No, and I think time will solve the problem more than anything.
i don't really see how a "corporation" could exist without an oppressive government granting that (most odious) legal fiction to companies. in a truly libertarian system each person could decide for themselves whether or not they respected the fiction of incorporation, and the companies couldn't force individuals to respect that fiction, which would immediately defeat its usefulness to the companies in question.