Quote:
Originally Posted by skewbe
Sometimes government is "for the people" in that one must recognize (and I think you do) the imperfectness of the market system and it's capacity for unintended side effects.
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In contrast to the perfection of regulation?
A short story....
Back in the late 1800s there were no drug laws in the US. Heroin, cocaine derivatives, "laundinum" and many other "hard drugs" were readily available. People had problems with drug addiction. Some coped with it, others fell victim to it.
In 1914 the Harrison Act was passed in the hope of limiting the use of narcotics. In 1937, based on the 1934 National Firearms Act, a "tax stamp" was placed upon marijuana. This gimmick allowed the Congress to regulate guns and drugs under the "Commerce Clause" of the US Constitution.
I've ignored Prohibition though it's a text book case of a regulation that was widely ignored, pernicious and totally counter productive.
By the 1960s drug use became more "fashionable". In response our elites declared "war on drugs". Begun by Governor Rockefeller and President Nixon, the pressure was amped up by Reagan. We even had "zero tolerance" and "Civil Forfeiture", which were meant to curb drug abuse.
In parallel US businesses, especially Corporate America, began to drug test employees.
The consequences?
Two million Americans are behind bars. Many of them are drug offenders. The US has more people behind bars per capita than any other G7 nation. At the very same time street drugs with horrific effects are easy to obtain, easy enough that even grade school aged children can get them. One in seven Americans abuses illegal drugs to some degree or another.
Instead of old fashioned drugs like heroin, coca tea, laudinum, marijuana tea, hashish and primitive hallucinogens we have crack cocaine, crystal meth, Ecstacy, PCP, and a whole legion of designer drugs. In a clear analogue to "everclear" being created by the need to concentrate liquor to make it easier to transport underground today's drugs are more concentrated, more addictive, and more dangerous then the kinder gentler drugs of old.
So I don't want to hear about how well regulation works...
Quote:
Originally Posted by skewbe
Polluting is cheap, but wrong for everyone else, everywhere else (call that dogma if you must). The market system is simply not capable of dealing with this bit of injustice, at least not in the time frame required. It is perfectly fine for many other applications though, no argument.
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The Market System's ability to regulate pollution was destroyed by British lawsuits against polluters which were struck down in the early 1800s. The legal precedent was adopted in the US. The argument was posited in the courts that pollution was the "Cost of industry". Given the primitive level of technology one could argue this, but crude pollution controls might have been attempted.
Since that time capitalism has been essentially helpless to remedy air and water pollution in the Courts. Since most people don't resort to mafia or private adjudication there was just the political process.
What some fail to recognize is that pollution, especially air pollution, is a form of "socializing" costs of doing business. It's not terribly different from dumping one's trash into the street, if one can prove that the items pumped into the air and water were in fact pollution.
NOx, SOx and SOME particulates clearly can be shown to cause health problems and property damage. I am skeptical about acid rain in many cases but damage to buildings and automobiles is easy to demonstrate.
One of the best examples of a toxic airborne waste was tetra ethyl lead. One of the few times I agreed that regulation worked was when this toxic precursor of lead oxide vapor was banned. However this could have been done in the courts decades before had the Market been allowed to do its job. The hazards of lead in paint and elsewhere were very well known to physicians and scientists decades before pressure began to ban its use as an octane booster in gasoline engines.
In contrast, other aerosols and some wastes are not demonstrable pollutants. Two good examples are water vapor and carbon dioxide. The latter is quite controversial, but experimental evidence is lacking, only glorified weather forecasting, argument from authority and some of the shoddiest science since Lysenko seems to support this "global warming" non-sense.
Ironically, water vapor has been demonstrated to do a better job than carbon dioxide at blocking the escape of infrared radiation back into space. However since free hydrogen is not freely available as a fuel nobody seems to mind its presence at the tailpipe or anywhere else. As Dillinger once said, you rob banks because that's where the money is and carbon is easy to hate because it's easy to tax and regulate.
Where some Greens help to maintain socialization of costs is in their zeal to abuse regulation to control industry and "capitalism" rather than protecting the environment against measurable damage. It's one thing to protect the environment, it's quite another to use the cause of protecting the environment as a vehicle for class struggle. Class struggle creates reaction and understandable reservations, which lead to maintenance of the status quo.
Protecting the environment, especially when the suggestions are based upon sound economics and genuine scientific principles, is easy to sell to most people.
Even some environmentalists, for example the founder of "Earth First!", have expressed reservations about the direction that the movement has been taking in recent years.
I am not quite sure where Skewbie fits in here but it's pretty darned obvious that the disasters of Prohibition and the US "War on Drugs" clearly show the limits of government regulation.
Gene
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