Political Memes

Disclaimer: I support pigouvian taxes on greenhouse gas emissions.

Long ago, one libertarian solution to climate change was insurance. So you'd buy disaster insurance for your house, then the insurer would bet that pollution would go up. This creates a financial incentive to reduce emissions. Best case scenario, your insurance payments are a slight reimbursement for a voluntary reduction. Worst case scenario, your insurance payments essentially bribe their workers to sabotage.

However, the Coase Theorem says this only works while transaction costs are low. And you'd need long-term contracts that aren't realistic with today's interest rates. So it would take decades to establish the financial infrastructure necessary.

Anyone who is a libertarian is unfamiliar with game theory. Some problems happen when individual people act in their own self-interest, but the collective outcome is harmful. Climate change is a prime example.

Libertarianism also was my first stop out of my childhood religious right upbringing. I still tend to see issues from a libertarian framing -- i.e., if it's not hurting anybody why should the government care? -- but most US libertarians seem weirdly fixated on ideas like "why can't I dump 5,000 gallons of hydrofluoric acid into a hole in the ground if the hole is on my own property?" or "why shouldn't I be allowed to enter into a contract with somebody that allows me to hunt them for sport?" or especially "why can't I have sex with a minor if they say it's OK?", where there's really obvious personal and societal harms involved and the only way that you can think otherwise is if you've engaged in some serious motivated reasoning.

Whereas my thinking these days is more like, "who does it hurt if somebody decides to change their outward appearance to match how they feel inside?" and the like -- i.e., the right to personal autonomy and free expression, rather than the right to do whatever I want to others as long as I can somehow coerce them into agreeing to it. I don't have much patience for the anarchist side of left-libertarianism -- in my experience you need robust systems in place to keep bad actors from running amok, and a state without a monopoly on violence is simply ceding that monopoly to whoever wants to take it up for their own ends -- but that starting point of libertarian thought, that people sold be free in their choices until those choices run up against somebody else's freedoms -- is still fundamentally valid.

As I became more concerned about climate change, I could not see a viable Libertarian solution to it.

The libertarian solution to climate change would involve privatizing the commons: sell off the atmosphere to some private entity which would then issue licenses for emitting, have standing to sue unlicensed polluters for violating its property rights, etc.

In other words, basically cap & trade but with a for-profit corporation in charge instead of the government, for no good reason.

At least, that'd be the theory. In reality, that's how you get Spaceballs.

I always say it's not crazy to become a Libertarian as much as it is to remain one. It just astounds me that anyone could debate those positions for a length of time without starting to realize how tenuous most of them are.

The problem with Communism is that it requires non greedy people.
The problem with Libertarianism is that it requires non greedy rich people.