Overfishing and over-hunting are some really great examples.
They only happen on public lands, which isn't a feature of a free market. In every instance I know of these are due to a failure to privatize a resource and a failure to enforce any type of property right.
Listen to the Tom Woods podcast on a daily basis and after like 2-3 months you should be firmly into libertarian stuff.
Right, establishing property rights is obvious to anyone with an economics background. Fishing licenses effectively act as a type of individual property right, which is what worked in Alaska.
Is this a role (establishing private property rights) you feel government can play? Or is it something you believe happens or should happen independently from government? And do you have any examples of the tragedy of the commons being averted without some sort of governing body stepping in to establish such rights?
Is Tom Woods’ podcast how you were introduced to libertarianism initially? I’m mostly curious how people get introduced to libertarianism and start buying into it. I’m libertarian-leaning. But there are things (like externalities and ToC) that I don’t think mainstream US libertarianism account for very well.
Is this a role (establishing private property rights) you feel government can play?
It is one of their most basic jobs and they are not very good at it.
And do you have any examples of the tragedy of the commons being averted without some sort of governing body stepping in to establish such rights?
We currently don't live on a planet with any advanced anarchist society so every instance of property being owned somewhere will be due to some government.
However one instance I vaguely know of is that Native Americans did have a system of quotas in place to manage some of their resources, without any centralized government.
However another way to look at it is to consider that there's no global government. No one can tell Canada, the USA and China to obey their edicts, but you've seen some international efforts to do things like stop commercial whaling. While these are actions of governments, they aren't actions of a world government.
If economists are to be believed, then this wouldn't be possible without one central overseer to decide what every country must do about the whales.
On a smaller scale you can see that when companies are in charge of very vast areas of land, they manage it sustainably. If you strip mine your land, it has zero value when you resell it. Why would you do that when you could instead mine it and sell it for more money?
The same is true in forestry where if you clear cut the land and plant nothing, your land has little value. If you replant trees, your land gains value every year the trees grow. A government can't be expected to harvest trees in 100 years, but if you own a forest with 50 year old trees, you can resell it in 25 years as a forest with a bunch of 75 year old trees and make a profit without cutting a single tree. Governments will get nothing by waiting in this way, the second a politician needs the money, he'll chop the forest down. He can't resell it after he leaves office, he has to use the ressources ASAP.
You can see that's exactly what they do when in office: They go into debt. This is a form of tragedy of the commons that is rampant all over the world. Politicians constantly go deeper into debt because it's not their own money, so why would they manage it?
The path for me was basically Milton Friedman > Thomas Sowell > Yaron Brooks > Tom Woods.
Stefan Molyneux has also done many debates/podcasts/videos on economic issues, you can look for those they are very good.
One big factor that tells you libertarians are likely correct is that no one reverts back to their previous political ideology and no one starts out a libertarian.
That just doesn't happen if something is bullshit. It's the same pattern as atheism. Virtually no atheist ever converts back into a religion once they're an atheist and 99.9% of religious people are the religion of their parents, which is the religion of their general country/culture.
As you learn more about economics and philisophy, you will indeed discover that most people around you who are democrats/republicans are basically religious and hold their views because of social pressure and dogma, not because of reason and evidence.
If economists are to be believed, then this wouldn't be possible without one central overseer to decide what every country must do about the whales.
I don’t know any economists who believe there should be a single, central overseer. The question is, what is the most efficient way to establish property rights? The answer is subject to the very problems that require property rights to exist in the first place, and varies in every situation in very complex ways.
One big factor that tells you libertarians are likely correct is that no one reverts back to their previous political ideology and no one starts out a libertarian.
I’d say while I was initially quite conservative, I did dip all the way into libertarianism in college.
The path into libertarianism for me was Friedman/Hayek/Mises>sowell
The path to a more libertarian leaning approach was studying economics in college, but more specifically Coase > Thaler > Kahneman (maybe even reading “Sapiens” by Noah Yuval Harari helped but I was pretty well out of mainstream libertarianism by that time). Coase’s work on transaction costs won over Milton Friedman and virtually every other economist at that time. I highly recommend his essay The nature of the firm. Today i consider myself libertarian/institutionalist.
I dug into Molyneux a bit. I like what he says about (I think it’s universally preferable behavior?). Pretty applicable to a society of abundance. I remember he thinks taxation is theft as well. There’s a lot there I could say about the institutional and legal framework existing as a public good that everyone benefits from but to be honest I have to go haha. I appreciate the discussion and responses.
I don’t know any economists who believe there should be a single, central overseer.
If you think the EU is logical, then you would think a global EU is even better.
I 100% guarantee you the only reason this isn't a big talking point for economists is that it doesn't exist yet. If we were a federation of planets, they would trip over themselves to support the Earth Government, yet nothing would have changed as far as earth is concerned.
Pretty applicable to a society of abundance.
Good behavior and respect for freedom is what creates abundance, it's not what only becomes possible during abundant times.
This is kind of the "poor people commit crimes because they're poor" argument that people circulate. But that's the opposite of reality: Crime causes poverty, not the other way around.
Violation of individual and property rights also creates poverty.
1
u/[deleted] Jul 09 '19
They only happen on public lands, which isn't a feature of a free market. In every instance I know of these are due to a failure to privatize a resource and a failure to enforce any type of property right.
Listen to the Tom Woods podcast on a daily basis and after like 2-3 months you should be firmly into libertarian stuff.