On 11/19/2013 3:11 AM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Tue, Nov 19, 2013 at 8:12 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
On 18 November 2013 22:41, Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, Nov 18, 2013 at 1:02 AM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote:
This is quite simple. Markets ignore the commons, hence a free market
solution can't - or is highly unlikely - to work.
Yes, but this is circular. You're saying that the market cannot work
for things that you do not allow to be part of the market. The
government has to exist, otherwise how is the government to exist?
It isn't a question of not allowing the commons to be part of the market.
YOU try convincing a private organisation to put lots of resources into
fixing the commons. Try and persuade, say, Dell or Oracle or McDonalds that
they should spend a substantial part of their revenue building motorways or
fixing the climate, and see how far you get.
There is a huge market for roads. Both McDonalds and Dell need them to
distribute their stuff. Why would they not be built? Sounds like a
great investment.
Because it's hard to collect money just from users of your road. Have you never used a
toll road? You act as though there is some government conspiracy preventing all these
wonderful libertarian solutions. There's not. They have all existed at different times
and places. There were toll roads. Private police forces. Private fire fighters. Private
armies. There still are some places. But in general they didn't work as well as public ones.
But there would be less roads, that's for sure. For
example, my bankrupt home country probably wouldn't have two highways
running 10 Km parallel to each other, like you can see here (A17 and
A1):
https://maps.google.com/?ll=39.880235,-8.539124&spn=0.658647,1.18103&t=m&z=10
They both charge expensive tolls, by the way. A17 is always empty, but
that's not a problem because the "company" that built it has a
guaranteed minimum profits contract with the government that tax
payers have to support.
Reducing carbon emissions will not be a problem once the alternatives
become efficient,
But the efficiency depends on lots of externalities. When the fossil fuel industry was
getting started the emission of CO2 (and other pollutants) wasn't recognized as an
external cost. If is were, then fossil fuel might already be less efficient than nuclear
and wind. And it's not just overall efficiency that counts, it's incremental efficiency.
The market only considers the return on the increment of investment to be made. The
infrastructure for distribution and use of fossil fuel is already in place, so it's much
easier to profit by supplying more gasoline to cars than supplying electrical power to
cars. Even thought the latter is more energy efficient.
Brent
and thus profitable. Unless, of course, the oil
companies manage to lobby the government to prevent it.
If we are facing an extinction level event where the only chance of
survival is to shut down civilisation for a while, then we are dead
already. That is never going to happen, government or no government.
Telmo.
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