I wonder if that graphic was created by the Underpants Gnomes from South Park?
 

Lol! The reference to installing windows made me chuckle.
 

It's funny that you mention Bastiat, considering that your entire discussion of the environment has been a prime example of ignoring the unseen.

"Having to buy a permit to burn coal? Gosh, what a burdensome cost! I'll pretend not to notice all the people f'd over by coal use, and maybe, everone else will forget about them too!"

***

By the way, I've got some great ideas for satirical substitutions to the graphic's text...
 

Those estimates for how much the carbon emissions fall may be reasonable, if for a different reason to the one they had. If a fall in GDP leads to less manufacturing, haulage, or car use, and therefore emissions, then their "economic recovery" and "job creation" schemes only need to cause real GDP to drop by 83% for them to have been correct. (I remember reading that American emissions dropped after 9/11 because of damage to the economy.)
 

Careful, Silas. The casual reader might infer from your post that you are in favor of cap and trade.
 

I think Silas makes the right meta-comment: while this case for green jobs is obviously flawed, where is the analysis observing the flaws in the current system that prompt the support for green jobs?

Rockwell has pointed to the public utility monopoly as at the root of consumer frustration, and Block and others point how industrial rent-seekers prompted the courts to abandon the protection of property rights as leading to tremendous pollution, a popular backlash and a wave of regulation (which still favors upstream polluters over those downstream).

But libertarians and Austrian these days seem to be interested in a close analysis of one side of the issue, while ignoring the rent-seekers profitting from the state-sanctioned status quo, and shirking the difficult task that Cordato refers to of trying to solve problems (as perceived by people whose preferences are currently frustrated) stemming from a lack of clear and enforceable property rights or other mechanisms that allow parties to engage in transactions that advance their preferences.
 

Holy Broken Windows! That is fantastic!
 

By way of stepping back and looking at the big picture, if this was about fixing the "tragedy of the commons" in many fisheries and started out with the government putting a stop to the destructive race to catch by granting fishermen transferrable catch rights, the diagram would be identical.

But would it still summarize Bastiat?
 

TT said:

By way of stepping back and looking at the big picture, if this was about fixing the "tragedy of the commons" in many fisheries and started out with the government putting a stop to the destructive race to catch by granting fishermen transferrable catch rights, the diagram would be identical.No it wouldn't. The diagram would show no net job creation, but much richer people.
 

Uh oh, I went ahead and did it! See the graphic with my words instead!@Bob:

No it wouldn't. The diagram would show no net job creation, but much richer people.*falls out of chair*

Did you just admit that government pollution caps would mean much richer people? And that you recognize that government-imposed restriction on the use of a resource can reflect scarcity?
 

"The diagram would show no net job creation, but much richer people."

I agree with the second, but the greater wealth resulting from improved allocation and management would enhance job creation generally, even as it ended wasteful over-investment in the race to catch fish before others do and in the bureaucratic micro-management of such race. Money and jobs would flow toward enhancing and protecting the fishery, getting the freshest fish to market, etc. And less inefficient fishermen would sell out to the more efficient, and find more productive livelihoods.

While our heavy-handed anti-pollution laws in the 70s were less efficient than a straightforward protection of property rights, did they lead to a less-productive economy and a loss of jobs compared to the status quo ante?

Don`t look now, but it`s those evil enviros who are also calling for property rights in fisheries and for governments to end their destructive subsidies to fishermen:

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2009/01/14/for-crashing-fisheries-coalition-of-mainline-us-enviro-groups-calls-for-property-rights.aspx
http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2008/07/09/fuel-strikes-why-do-governments-subsidize-the-rush-by-fishermen-to-destroy-unowned-ocean-fisheries.aspx

Not that I approve of the "green jobs" mantra, mind you, which is both confused and being used to sell a faulty and grossly government heavy package.

But the effort to enclose / better manage the commons is, in and of itself, wealth-enhancing. We should not examine solely the costs/benefits of new actions, while ignoring problems with (and beneficiaries of / losers under) the status quo.
 

Silas: TT changed it to privatizing a common fishery. So I said yes, that would make people richer. I don't think it carries over analogously to GHG emissions, for the reasons I spelled out in that paper (you don't like). There are all sorts of factors involved in the "optimal" boundaries of property rights, and that's why I don't think even an an-cap world would yield a separate market in GHG emissions.

Tokyo Tom: You need to make some type of long-run sticky wage argument to get "job creation" being boosted by greater wealth. If you start out with 10% unemployment, then OK privatizing some previous commons might reduce that number. But that's because of wage stickiness, search costs, etc., and I didn't think you had all that in mind with your original statement. But if you did, then sorry for "correcting" you.
 

@Bob:

TT changed it to privatizing a common fishery. ... I don't think it carries over analogously to GHG emissions, for the reasons I spelled out in that paper (you don't like).[line break]

What he said was that the government would, instead of other inane regulations, issue tradeable limits to fish catches. Global cap and trade involves the world's governments issuing tradeable limits to CO2 emissions. That's not analogous because ... You Say So?

There are all sorts of factors involved in the "optimal" boundaries of property rights, and that's why I don't think even an an-cap world would yield a separate market in GHG emissions.Yeah, good point, an ancap world would involve such "enlightened", superior practices as:

-Requiring everyone hurt by CO2 emissions to hire a hitman to kill the emitters and then roll the dice in court (yes, your paper describes that as being the mechanism by which courts have to rule, don't deny it this time)

-Naively trying to pay people to stop using "inefficient" technologies, while hoping no one else is smart enough to start using the technologies in hopes of getting a payment.

-Rich people making big bets on coastal areas not getting flooded and therefore want to prevent the warming, but not a single person being a counterparty to this bet and doing the opposite.

A free world would surely never do something as efficient as recognizing the atmosphere's carbon sink capacity as another scarce resource meriting property rights! Property rights are for, like, land and stuff. Well, and maybe abstract stuff like EM spectrum. But CERTAINLY not emission rights ... that's just so, you know, weird.
 

Silas wrote:

What he said was that the government would, instead of other inane regulations, issue tradeable limits to fish catches. Global cap and trade involves the world's governments issuing tradeable limits to CO2 emissions. That's not analogous because ... You Say So?
No Silas, there are plenty of differences that could be relevant for this issue. For example, if someone in Australia decides he's hungry, the fish in my hand doesn't suddenly disappear.

In contrast, if someone in Australia decides to turn on his car, then my property title to an atmosphere of X concentration of CO2 has just been violated.

To repeat, it's not simply a matter of whether some type of action should in any way be influenced by property rights. There's also a question of bundling.

Incidentally, every once in a while it should be repeated: It might be easier for people to argue with you--and to read carefully what you say and really try to understand your position--if you didn't constantly accuse them of lying and hating poor people.
 

No Silas, there are plenty of differences that could be relevant for this issue. For example, if someone in Australia decides he's hungry, the fish in my hand doesn't suddenly disappear. ... [line break]

Another failure to make a proper baseline comparison. The right TokyoTom referred to was a right to *catch* a certain amount of fish, not a property right in fish already caught.

So, again:

1) Tradeable fishing limits: The government caps the total fish that can be caught. If someone exceeds his limit, he's violating the rights of others.

2) Tradeable CO2 limits: The governments cap the total CO2 emissions. If someone exceeds his limit, he's violating the rights of others.

Next post, please prove you understand these distinctions and the area of dispute.

It might be easier for people to argue with you--and to read carefully what you say and really try to understand your position--if you didn't constantly accuse them of lying and hating poor people. [lb]

It would be easier for me to not accuse you lying if you didn't actually, um, lie. You've lied about my position several times by now, and I've given unambiguous evidence that I took a different one. There was the geoengineering thing, the "go read Coase thing", and plenty others.

And let's not kid ourselves; you "accidentally" ignore the content of position, and pattern-match it to the nearest stupid argument you can find, LONG before I accuse you of anything.
 

OK this is the last post I'm doing on this thread, Silas. You're right, Tom talked about catch rights, not fish rights. So my example was unhelpful.

It would have been better for me to say: A major difference is that we can easily monitor how many fish people are catching in a certain pond or (small enough) lake.

If someone proposed world governments emitting "catching rights" to fishermen all over the world, applicable to every single body of water on the surface of the earth, then that might not be very good at all.

So the reason it makes sense to issue property rights in catching fish, is that where these have been done, the water is defendable from poaching.

In contrast, proposals for privatizing the oceans etc. often talk about tagging the fish (or whales etc.) themselves, not through instituting a property right in the ability to draw fish from anywhere in the ocean. Thus my original analogy works perfectly for these proposals.
 

If you concern was about enforceability, you could have just, you know, said so, instead of expecting me to infer that from your example.

Also, you could have spend part of the last 12 months better developing the thesis that "CO2 emissions are difficult to monitor", instead of just assuming it. I can only respond to arguments you put into words.[1]

So, now that that's established, you're severely overestimating the difficulty of monitoring such emissions: the permit check can be performed at the place of resource extraction (which there are relatively few of and which are large operations), rather than having to watch everyone's behavior.

[1] Okay, in fairness, Bob has kind of, in passing, made reference to the enforeability issues in the dispute. For example, when he compared C/T to bizarre methods of capping buffalo hunting. Yet in every single case, it was irrelevant to the point he used it in defense of. IIRC, when I explained how assignment of property rights and ownership means it "is a market solution", Bob brought up the example, as if somehow showing that a market is inefficient makes it somehow "not a market". Yeah, I never figured it out either.
 

Silas, I believe you when you say that I have been missing your points for the last year, but by the same token, you have done the same to me. The whole POINT of my paper on this was that it's not merely a matter of armchair theorizing about abstract property rights. The ability to enforce particular bundles of rights is also crucial, and can affect what the outcome would be in an an-cap world. From that paper:

"The case of AGW falls in between the above scenarios. The anticipated free market response to the warnings issued by climatologists might involve pure adaptation within pre-existing property rights, especially the lower the anticipated damage from “business as usual” emissions. However, if the danger were catastrophic enough, and the time horizon short enough, and the administrative and enforcement costs low enough—i.e., as we approached the second Martian scenario above—then the law might evolve such that people were no longer viewed as having the unfettered legal right to emit carbon dioxide (and perhaps other greenhouse gases) into the air."

OK I'm really done now; I have to earn my keep.
 

Bob: It might be easier for people to argue with you--and to read carefully what you say and really try to understand your position--if you didn't constantly accuse them of lying and hating poor people.Silas: It would be easier for me to not accuse you lying if you didn't actually, um, lie. You've lied about my position several times by now, and I've given unambiguous evidence that I took a different one.Guys, welcome to human nature! We are all much better at seeing the failures of others than perceiving our own, and on top of that have predilections in the course of dispute to see the "other" as evil and ourselves as pure:

Nick Kristof on politics: why we conclude that I'm right, and you're evilWhile it remains possible that Bob is indeed a conscious liar, and that Silas (and I are scheming to hand the world over to people whose objective is to enslave mankind), I think we can have a more productive conversation if we recognized our common weaknesses, didn`t question each other`s motives (pointing out error remains fine) and kept in mind these words from Cordato:

"by placing environmental problems within the context of personal and interpersonal plan formulation, we discover that they are not about the environment per se but about the resolution of human conflict."

""Humans cannot harm the environment. Instead, they can change the environment in such a way that it harms others who might be planning to use it for conflicting purposes."

"The focus of the Austrian approach to environmental economics is conflict resolution. The purpose of focusing on issues related to property rights is to describe the source of the conflict and to identify possible ways of resolving it."

"Environmental problems are brought to light as striking at the heart of the efficiency problem as typically seen by Austrians, that is, they generate human conflict and disrupt inter- and intra-personal plan formulation and execution."

"[T]he Austrian approach to solving pollution problems may face implementation problems at the margin, i.e., with certain "tough cases," defining and enforcing property rights already stands as the fundamental way in which interpersonal conflicts of all kinds are avoided or dealt with."
 

Sorry for the pontification (which I intended literally as "bridge-building").

But let me note again, Bob, even as I agree with you that most of the "green jobs" argument is wrong:

- where is the analysis observing the flaws in the current system that prompt the support for green jobs and for carbon pricing?

- your focus on green jobs contains the gross unstated premise that the effort to manage the atmospheric commons is itself unjustified; shortcutting discussion of this premise does a disservice to the debate.

Further, regulating one commons is surely analogous to regulating anther. The hard questions relate to whether the benefits of regulating a commons exceed the the costs - as a government-managed commons may exacerbate the problem, as we see with traditional, pre-ITQ (individual transferrable quotas) regulation.

Bob, I agree with most of this: "if the danger were catastrophic enough, and the time horizon short enough, and the administrative and enforcement costs low enough ... then the law might evolve such that people were no longer viewed as having the unfettered legal right to emit carbon dioxide (and perhaps other greenhouse gases) into the air."I would simply note, as Mises does, that far from simply "evolving" by itself, "property rights" represent institutions deliberately established and often formally enacted to abate tragedy of the commons-type problems.
 

Ooops, almost forgot:

Bob, on the "catastrophic enough front", did you see the May 19 MIT report?:

"Climate change odds much worse than thought; New analysis shows warming could be double previous estimates

"The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth's climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago - and could be even worse than that. ...

"The new projections, published this month in the American Meteorological Society's Journal of Climate, indicate a median probability of surface warming of 5.2 degrees Celsius [9 degrees F!] by 2100, with a 90% probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees [6.3 to 13.2 degrees F!]. This can be compared to a median projected increase in the 2003 study of just 2.4 degrees [and the temps reported are averages, with many places warmer]. ...

"Without action, "there is significantly more risk than we previously estimated," Prinn says. "This increases the urgency for significant policy action." ...

"There's no way the world can or should take these risks," Prinn says. And the odds indicated by this modeling may actually understate the problem, because the model does not fully incorporate other positive feedbacks that can occur ...." [of course, there may be unknown negaticve feedbacks as well]

When can we move the discussion to "administrative and enforcement costs"?