321–330 of 528 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Individuals have immediate, direct incentive to wear seat belts. Seat belts are not a collective action problem the way climate change is.
When health costs are socialised - and insurance is a way of socialising costs - it does become a collective action problem, because the negligence of the few increases the costs of the many.
For all the talk by liberatians and their ilk that regulation is bad and unnecessary, that chart of median fuel effeciency due to government requirements should give them pause. Wow. Well over a decade of non-progress until a path forward is mandated. Suddently the needle starts moving, with car owners, the environment, and energy import needs as big winners here.
It's unproductive to discuss political labels. It's sufficient to say this is a case where regulation was helpful - as are most cases involving protecting common resources. Issues are independent from each other. Continuing to discuss each point as it fits into the frameworks of the popular ideologies only serves to polarize when productive change requires unification.
I agree with you that labels create sides, but the reality is those that want labels (e.g. each respective party) attach their label to their causes and vocabulary. Regulations (and the abolishment of) is one that the right seems to want to claim.
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Libertarians are not anti-regulation, they just believe that the good and bad consequences of regulations should be understood. Often, those who are not libertarians will support a regulation simply because they agree with its stated aim... things like "the patriot act" or "the affordable care act". Those names are chosen to sound good, not because they reflect the intent of legislation or the outcome of it. To give…
It would be great if you'd clarify that you are generalizing about mainstream libertarianism thought in the US. US libertarians are a special breed that hacked up classical libertarianism to fit within the framework laid down by the US Constitution. Basically they are believers in the US Constitution first and libertarians second. Not a rigid definition but neither is the parent post
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Based on the libertarians I've talked with about seat belt laws, their argument would probably be to hand-wave it away with "It would have happened anyway thanks to the magic of the market."
The seatbelt argument is not about saving people's lives, its about not forcing people to do a precaution. If you can make the argument that you can force someone to use a seatbelt for his own protection, can you ban alcohol? loud music? driving altogether? bad food? Bathtubs? What is fundamentally different of the seatbelt than the other million things that endanger our lives everyday and we live with ?
We also have regulations on building safety and construction, or would you rather not force people to have the precaution of getting a structural engineer when building homes and buildings?
Alcohol has been banned for a while, but eventually it was decided as a society that we were willing to accept that risk and negative outcome. Bad food is also banned via food safety standards via the FDA. I could keep going on... but ultimately everything comes down to a cost : benefit analysis that's done collectively as a society. Recently we have the example of marijuana being rethought as a society and now those bans are largely going away. Things can shift in either direction.
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When health costs are socialised - and insurance is a way of socialising costs - it does become a collective action problem, because the negligence of the few increases the costs of the many.
That is applicable to alcohol, unhealthy foods, lack of exercise, improper sleep, smoking, etc. Should we ban all those too?
You can't take an all-in or all-out approach to things. Each case is its own contextual matter that must be independently considered. If you want to see an example of where anything goes, the world has many examples of lawless societies. Not somewhere I'd want to live.
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And the libertarian response to that issue is not the ounce of prevention, but the pound of cure. Rather than have a priori environmental legislation, the libertarian position is to wait until the (possibly irreversible) damage is done, then try and find the person who did it (if you can, and good luck if it was a variety of entities), then take them to a court, then prove them at fault (not a given, especially if mo…
Not at all. A perfectly viable libertarian response to your hypothetical is a carbon tax or pollution tax - some cost applied to a negative externality.
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So when gas prices went through the roof in the 1970's and there was rationing, you don't think that created consumer demand for more fuel efficient cars?
Clearly not, or not enough to make a difference. America didn't stop producing gas guzzlers after the 70's. If anything mpg went down as trucks got bigger
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>You forgot oil changes in you calc. Are you, perhaps, being sarcastic with your comment? Anyway, there are few countries (if any) on Earth where EVs make financial sense for an average person. Their time will come, but buying into it now is not investing – indeed, as the GP commented, you do it for altogether different reasons.
No, he's not being sarcastic. Are you? EVs don't require oil changes. Or muffler/exhaust service. Or transmission service. And their brakes last longer.
45 mpg (bought 2002) 35 mpg (bought 2013) 42mpg (bought 2017)
For all the talk by liberatians and their ilk that regulation is bad and unnecessary, that chart of median fuel effeciency due to government requirements should give them pause. Wow. Well over a decade of non-progress until a path forward is mandated. Suddently the needle starts moving, with car owners, the environment, and energy import needs as big winners here.
Libertarians are not anti-regulation, they just believe that the good and bad consequences of regulations should be understood. Often, those who are not libertarians will support a regulation simply because they agree with its stated aim... things like "the patriot act" or "the affordable care act". Those names are chosen to sound good, not because they reflect the intent of legislation or the outcome of it. To give…
You have picked a bad example.
"Pollution" in the sense you're using it is entirely independent from carbon emissions. Old cars pollute because they have poor emissions controls. Carbon emissions are directly proportional to fuel consumption regardless of emissions controls. For example, a fifty year old VW Beetle gets the same 30MPG as a brand new car, which means it emits exactly the same amount of carbon, but much more pollution, meaning particulates and smog.
The purpose of fuel economy regulations is not to reduce particulates, it's to reduce carbon emissions and oil imports. There are separate regulations covering particulate emissions for new cars, but nobody complains about those because highly effective modern emissions controls are a solved problem. How to make a big fast car that gets 100MPG is not.
The correct solution to the smog problem is to impose emissions limits on all cars. If your old car pollutes too much you either pay to retrofit some modern emissions controls or you don't drive it on the road.
The correct solution to carbon emissions is an energy cross charge. You tax carbon (trivial to do at the pump for gasoline) and use the money to subsidize non-carbon energy. That lets you use half as much carbon tax for the amount of price differential you're creating between carbon and non-carbon energy, and it takes no money out of the average person's pocket. It just means you pay more for gas and less for electricity, which makes you want to use less gas and more electricity by buying an electric car.
In other words, CAFE is stupid but not for the reasons you said.