America's Real Criminal Element: Lead

Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't like you, and since there is no actual way for you to enforce me paying you out, I just won't". Again, if the insurance company decides not to pay, they are enacting bad things on someone and not honoring an agreement. Fortunately since they have lots of free money and no expenses (other than those required to manipulate perception -- cheap payouts etc), they can just have their newspaper buddies out-shout anyone else and not actually be harmed by bad practices.

Violence is always a specter (a potential action) in any conflict between people. The question is; How do we minimize the role of violence in coming to resolutions to conflicts? I think the rules we've evolved to answer that question of the course of human history have done a decent job.

Do you have a different set of rules that you think would better optimize this minimization problem? I'd love to hear it.

Why? Retail stores don't become the government or merge into one. Neither do private security agencies. It's unlikely that any organization could "become the government" unless a vast portion of society accepts them as the sole legitimate purveyor of violence, which is precisely what I don't want to happen.

> Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't like you, and since there is no actual way for you to enforce me paying you out, I just won't".

Then what would you do? Personally, I would stop paying them (and probably switch to another insurance company), and I suspect a vast majority of their customers would do the same thing, and probably long before it got to the point where it "became the government."

The only ways for a private insurance company in a free society to remain dominant while consistently not honoring their agreements would be if society as a whole didn't care about the agreements being honored (which seems unlikely), if they gather enough power to physically oppress an entire region (which also seems unlikely these days, since very few governments are even able or willing to pull that off), or if they convince society that they should be allowed to have a monopoly on violence. That last one is a pretty good definition of "becoming a government," and it's certainly possible, but the whole argument I'm making is that society should not recognize any organization as having a monopoly on violence.

They're more similar than you seem to think. Both internalize cost to the production of pollution. In a tax, the cost is fixed and the total amount of pollution is market-determined. With a cap it is the reverse. However, at the point where the prices agree, they are, in principle, equivalent.

> Trading schemes add a lot of unnecessary complexity and potential for abuse, and enshrine the idea that if you have polluted more in the past, you deserve to keep polluting more in the future.

Allocating pollution licenses to past polluters is only one possible way of distributing them. A cap-and-trade system could also to hold yearly auctions for each year's permits. The former is used many times in part because incumbents are less likely to oppose regulation. They may even be able to achieve efficiencies and sell their allocated permits at a profit because of cap-and-trade. But note that even though the incumbents are receiving the permits for free, they still have an incentive to reduce pollution when the cost of the efficiency is less than the cost of the permit.

> Instead just quantify the total harm caused by emissions the best you can, divide by total emissions amounts, and levy that as a tax per pound of emission.

Two problems is that the harm may be difficult to quantify in a price and more importantly the harm may not be linear in the amount of pollution. You could argue that the optimal solution would be for the government to estimate the harm as a function of the amount of pollution and hold some sort of complicated auction where the price depended on the quantity of pollution permits sold. However, I think this is too impractical for any real-world regulation.

It's pretty clear to me that you have never been involved with "private litigation".