Environmental policy: Harm principle vs small government

[The dane]

[Indy]

Actually the quickest way to end the harm vs. gov't argument is to force all the people who insist that cutting polluters free to do as they please... to live in the areas where that pollution fouls everything.

So that means you Dick Cheney, John Boehner, Koch Brothers, all the others who think that regulating pollution is a liberal plot: fine. You can live with the foul water and the arsenic and the fracking and the emissions and whatever else.

That shit would change overnight.

But we live in a country where the barons force other people to bear the consequences of their actions and the political system has been corrupted to the point where they can legislate that other people be forced to eat their pollution. The misdirection is that they tell the people anything else short of this exact setup is "socialism" or "big gov't."

[Bauce]

[Indy]

[Bauce]

[Professor]

I think that we should establish a government agency to monitor environmental concerns, study various things that impact the environment, make general rules that everyone must follow, and then implement those rules on a case-by-case basis.

I propose calling my fictional department the "Environmental Protection Agency". And, it should report directly to the President, though the department itself shouldn't necessarily be a Cabinet-level department.

[The dane]

[John Galt]

the problem with governmental limits as you noted dane is that the government then decides what harm is. or more importantly, it then decides what level of harm is acceptable for a company to do. lets say our government is good and just and omnipotent. perhaps they will actually come up with an accurate number. but if it lacks in any of those departments, the number it comes up with is not going to be perfect, and someone that lives near said area might me more impacted

i live near an oil refinery. and by near i mean a few miles upwind of it. if i was downwind, ugg. that place stinks. i doubt the smoke is especially good for you, and there's probably something bad that can happen because of it. anecdotally, someone told me there is a higher rate of asthma in the town downwind. still, im sure regulators determine what levels of what chemicals need to be scrubbed from the resulting pollutant.

well lets say you're harmed anyway. the company can then hide behind the regulation. companies actually like regulations. think of BigEvilTobacco. BigEvilTobacco cut a deal limiting their freedom of speech and doled out payouts to the states on a set plan in exchange for not being able to be sued about it again. They took the Known over the Unknown. because the Unknown? probably gonna be worse. of course there is talk about beating the last of the candy out of that pinata, but the point is that established companies love regulations more than they hate them because it provides known knowns.

and so we get to the contention that if we to sue a company, that's not good because the burden of proof is unreasonable to meet.

in civil trial it's a preponderance of evidence, and, if they are not physically harmed, then, how can you even justify the regulation?

that all said, i think a regulatory regime makes a lot of sense and i am willing to potentially sacrifice the health of some, by regulating instead of suing, for the greater health (prosperity included) of the nation as a whole. so how do we go about justifying it? well, despite appearances to the contrary i am not a libertarian. what i am in favor of is not national but state regulations. not only for constitutional ones (at a federal level i favor libertarian politics) but also because having 50 shots at similar problems with the ear to the ground will come out with answers closer to the correct one, and other states can learn from that.

like indy starts whining about fracking. fracking is frakking awesome, but i think a state should be able to decide what to do with it. do you want to allow fracking, possibly causing some minor tremors for people, or escaped gas in some cases? if you do, maybe you can make a nest egg like norway and provide for your citizens and their grandchildren's grandchildren with the natural resources of your state. you could look at the trade offs and come up with a more reasonable democratic solution to any problem this way

[Professor]

[The dane]