On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 9:54 AM, William Robb <[email protected]> wrote: > > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Keith Whaley" > Subject: Re: OT: I REALLY hate squirrels > > > >>>> Gore is a charlatan, but doing one's best to live cleaner and consume >>>> less is a worthy goal. As long as one doesn't trample on the rights of >>>> others in the process. >> >>> Your car tramples on my right to breathe fresh air. > >> >> Starting to get confused, there, Frank. >> I suppose you want everybody on bicycles now? >> >> That's a head shaker, pal. > > Is it? Many places have laws prohibiting smoking around other people because > second hand tobacco smoke is "dangerous". > I believe in your neck of the woods, Keith, that smoking on outdoor decks is > prohibited, even though the smoke will just waft away, the same way 10,000 > card exhaust gasses will do the same thing. > Car exhaust is equally, if not more dangerous, and yet we not only allow it, > we actively encourage people to drive. > The old adage "your rights end at the tip of my nose could be very > applicable, and at some point it's very possible that some smart person > could use the no smoking in public laws as a precedent to push for no car > exhaust in public laws. > It would likely be a non starter, but that is only because there isn't a > legal system going that isn't rife with hypocrisy.
I said I wasn't going to continue to participate in this discussion. Clearly, I lied. ;-) However, just to clarify and expand (in response to Keith's post), I was thinking exactly what you said, Bill: "Your right to swing your arm around ends at the tip of my nose." Does Paul have a right to live his life without being told by environmentalists or government or anyone else infringing on his rights? Sure. Until exercising his rights affects the rights of someone else. If we lived a hundred years ago and there were a couple of hundred or thousand cars on the whole continent, I'd say, "Sure, go for it, drive to your heart's content!" Because Paul driving a single car in Michigan wouldn't affect me. However now Paul's one of hundreds of millions of car drivers who are contributing to foul air everywhere, so in fact anyone who drives must share responsibility for that. Even beside the question of whether it causes global warming, it's clear that there are more pollutants in the air and the environment generally than the earth can absorb and "process". So, Keith, I'm not advocating that we all ride bikes (although I continue to believe that if we did, the world would be a much better place). I also don't hate cars. What I hate is the result of billions of them worldwide and what they've done to my world (especially if you include all that has resulted from the oil industry and the "protection" of it). Paul has mentioned business and commerce and the economy in other posts, and I would submit that herein we come to a particularly thorny problem. Under a capitalist model, Paul has every right, if he has the money, to buy as many cars as he wants, drive as often and as far as he wants and use as much gas as he wants. Under that model, it's not an ethical issue, it's an economic one, and in fact Paul is a capitalist hero, because he's stimulating the economy every time he fills up his gas tank. Problem is that model doesn't take into account a very important thing: the Negative Externality. It's a term coined by leftist economists (yes, they do exist!) for a negative consequence of an action that a system simply doesn't take into account. In this case, all the pollution, wars, deaths and injury caused by highway collisions, repair and maintenance of roadways and bridges, etc., etc. Paul doesn't pay for that. The car makers don't. The oil companies don't. Some of it is paid for by the taxpayers (how fair is that?) because no one else will take responsibility. Some of it is simply never dealt with at all - and people die and live in squalor and can't breathe, but everyone says, "well, I didn't cause it, so how can possibly I fix it or take responsibility for it?" Do I have an answer? Yeah, but this isn't the place, and most people wouldn't like it anyway. And I didn't mean to pick on Paul, but my initial post was in response to his assertion of rights; in fact in this discussion Paul represents everyone in the west, and increasingly those in developing countries, too (yes, me too, because I'm part of the problem even though I don't drive a car). So to bring this back to where we started, yeah, we all have "rights". But their not absolute, and where they conflict with the rights of others, we have to do a better job of deciding whose rights are paramount, or at least how we can better resolve such conflicts. The model that we use now just isn't working (despite what some here say). Well, my promise to stay out of the fray didn't last long, did it? ;-) cheers, frank -- "Sharpness is a bourgeois concept." -Henri Cartier-Bresson -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
