“It’s my property. I can do what I want.” You’ve probably heard it a thousand times–but not from someone who cares about reducing air pollution and saving the last of the black-footed ferrets. Private-property advocates tend to view the environment as a dubious cause for mush-minded liberals or, worse, as socialism in green clothing.
P.J. Hill: It’s true private-property rights have a pejorative connotation. Sometimes they’re used by people who are polluting to say, “Look, I can do whatever I want–it’s my property.” Well, part of it is their property. But to the extent that they’re polluting air and water, it’s not their property.
For many years the common law ruled water pollution, and ruled it fairly well. If there was a factory upstream–a paper mill or something like that–the factory knew that people downstream could take it to court and show that it was the polluter. This would get expensive if they had to sue every time, but knowing the precedents, the paper mill had a strong incentive, number one, to reduce its pollution and, number two, to go downstream and actually sign a contract with people saying, “Will you allow us to pollute your water a certain amount–if we pay you?”
With our air, the difficulty is that we don’t have defined and enforced property rights, so we don’t have a good mechanism to decide whether my breathing or your driving is worth more. I don’t think we’re going to be able to get that just by saying “Let the free market work,” because it’s not working.
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PJH: It’s not always the old clunkers. It’s the ones that aren’t tuned up. What you need to do is to define and enforce rights–force those people to pay more. I would like a system where we use this guy’s pollution monitor: he monitors cars, and you get a bill [based on the amount of pollutants your car emitted]. Then you decide whether you want to continue to pay it, or whether you want to fix your car. In most cases it pays you to fix the car. We could reduce our automobile pollution a lot if people were simply charged for what they are doing.
HH: You’re proposing a certain role for government here. It should step in and tell drivers that they’re getting off too cheap. Ideally, from your point of view, wouldn’t it be better if you could identify the affected people and go to them? But in this situation–
HH: What else would you have the government do?
