What America looked like before the EPA, in photos

Thanks for digging up the links, really awesome collection of photos.

The original libertarian explicitly argued for public ownership of almost everything: Joseph Dejacques, in the first use of the word libertarian, used it to chastise Proudhon as being "just" a "moderate anarchist" and "liberal" rather than libertarian over his views on women, but then went on to rail against the limitations on humanity, including property, setting his views strongly apart from Proudhon by going much further, and in particularly by denouncing property much stronger than even Proudhon's "property is theft" [1]:

> Be then frankly an entire anarchist and not a quarter anarchist, an eighth anarchist, or one-sixteenth anarchist, as one is a one-fourth, one-eighth or one-sixteenth partner in trade. Go beyond the abolition of contract to the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but also of property and of authority in all its forms. Then you will have arrived at the anarchist community; that is to say, the social state where each one is free to produce or consume according to his will or his fancy without controlling, or being controlled by any other person whatever; where the balance of production and consumption is established naturally, no longer by the restrictive laws and arbitrary force of others, but by the free exercise of industry prompted by the needs and desires of each individual. The sea of humanity needs no dikes. Give its tides full sweep and each day they will find their level.

The argument against public ownership came first about a century after libertarianism was first conceived, with the rise of right-wing libertarianism, which took left wing libertarianism and turned it pretty much upside down by adding a focus on property right enforcement which is in direct opposition to the original principles of libertarianism.

A key point of Dejacques original libertarianism was the view that enforcement of property rights pretty much inherently deprives the public of liberty by using the state to add restraints on people that take away far more liberty than they grant.

Having grown up in Norway - one of a few countries with extensive freedom to roam [2] - I will tell you that nobody can convince me that strict enforcement of property rights is anything but theft from the public; once you are used to it, you feel the loss of that freedom deeply when you go elsewhere and are quite literally fenced in in situations where you'd previously be used to be able to roam free.

[1] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/joseph-dejacque-on-t...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_to_roam

It really is a shame that is considered a "conservative" view.

I think a lot of Libertarians are coming around to have a view similar to your's. That the commons belongs to all of us and polluting and destroying it should be punished. Republican's on the other hand seem to thing liberty only applies to corporations.

In fact if you delete the part about wanting big government, I could have almost mistaken you for a Libertarian.

However, if you look at the Libertarian's who do support protecting the environment you will find there are ideas out there to address the issue without a huge centralized government organization like the EPA. Some might require changing our laws and our legal system so it is less of "whoever has the most money wins" but there are ways.

Like all political parties Libertarians have their extremists too (anarchists) but by and large I think they are reasonable people.

Edit: Those people in the Republican party that the media likes to call "Libertarians" are not. They cherry pick what liberties are important to them and what are not based on their moral code and special interests.

Edit 2: My original post has the word "not" where it should't have been. See bellow.

EPA could do nothing but spend 100% of that 8 billion on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Superfund_sites for the next 20 years and it wouldn't be enough to cover it.

That's just to cover previously made mistakes. Reducing enforcement is going to keep adding to that list, and reducing safety and quality of life for all Americans.

The vast majority (60-80%, Robert L. Glass) of costs for software is also in maintenance, as any of the classic software project management books will tell you.

> parts per billion versus parts per trillion

It turns out that even things you can't see can be bad for your health. There are some extremely important climate change feedback loops involved.