[extropy-chat] Extinctions

Damien Sullivan phoenix at ugcs.caltech.edu
Tue Jun 13 02:53:33 UTC 2006


On Mon, Jun 12, 2006 at 02:21:24PM -0700, KAZ wrote:

> > If taxes don't work, regulation will.  I've seen it.  Breathed it.
> > Perfect?  No, but neither is the alternative.
> 
> You've seen regulation work? In what universe?

The universe which contains Los Angeles, where the air is still crappy
but has gotten a lot better.  Private technology did the work, but it's
not obvious it would have been developed and deployed without government
mandate -- after all, a pollution filter in your tailpipe does very
little to make your own life better.

> In this particular one, authoritarian government never does anything
> better, on the whole, than freedom of choice.
>  
> Note that, per erg of production, marxist countries like India and
> Russia pollute far more than the US. 

I'm not sure India is Marxist, but I know Soviet Russia was a disaster.
And our own military has generated some nasty sites, since it's exempt
from the strictures of the EPA, unlike the rest of us.  But the effects
of regulation need not be linear, in quantity or quality; a well-managed
democratic government might be better than either the absence of
regulation or the craptastic fiasco of the USSR.

> One thing that the eco-fearmongers miss, because of their complete
> ignorance of economics, is that pollution is inefficient. Which means

Heard of negative externalities, KAZ?

-xx- Damien X-) 



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