Glibertarianism of the Rand Paul variety is neither common sense nor common law. Crooks and Liars posts his answer to a question about the practice of mountaintop removal in coal mining:
I think whoever owns the property can do with the property as they wish, and if the coal company buys it from a private property owner and they want to do it, fine. The other thing I think is that I think coal gets a bad name, because I think a lot of the land apparently is quite desirable once it’s been flattened out. As I came over here from Harlan, you’ve got quite a few hills. I don’t think anybody’s going to be missing a hill or two here and there.
And some people like having the flat land. Some of it apparently has become quite valuable when it’s become flattened. And I think they do a good job at reclaiming the land, and you know, adding back in topsoil, bringing in help. So the bottom line is, it’s not just me pandering to coal. It’s me believing in private property.
If they bought the property, they own the property, they can do with that property, as long as they don’t pollute someone else’s property. And I don’t think they want to. If they dump something in the river that goes to the next property, your local judges here will stop them. But I don’t think they’re doing that. I think what they’re doing is what they can do with property they own, and doesn’t appear to me to be something the federal government should be getting involved with.
In other words, to Rand Paul, “ownership” of land is just like “ownership” of chattel. If I buy a bottle of old brandy and want to use it for starter fluid on my barbeque, that may be stupid but it’s none of anyone else’s business. So, Paul reasons (to use the word somewhat loosely), why isn’t the same if I buy a 100-million-year-old mountain? It’s mine, and that means I’m free to trash it.
Well, actually, no. At common law, landholding involves the right to use a piece of land, but not to commit “waste” on it: that is, not to treat it in a way that permanently reduces its value. [This turns out to be a mis-statement of the law of waste. The relevant common-law category is "nuisance."]
What’s astounding is the way that the right wing manages to say such appalling nonsense in tones that suggest it’s just traditional common sense. It’s not. It’s bad, bad craziness.
Hmmm, I’d avoid the “waste” argument, since that invites a calculation of economic return from destroyed land (from the resources extracted) vs. return from leaving the land capable of functioning as part of the ecological system where it is. Our crippled accounting methods ignore ecosystem services but are very good at totting up the value of coal (while ignoring its costs, which it treats as zero since they are shifted to others); inviting more use of the same crippled logic is bad.
Of course, even that formulation presumes that the land, once flat, won’t have a functioning ecosystem.
Anyway, I assume your postion is that this is illegal, too?
Depends on what you mean by “functioning ecosystem.” If you mean anything like a mixed mesophytic forest that is the most ecologically diverse on earth and has been intact for time so deep you cannot appreciate it (the Appalachians are more like 300-400 million years old than Mark’s 100,000,000…much older than the dinosaurs we are familiar with), then the answer is no. If you mean virtually sterile, acidic gravel covered in a sparse planting of Lespedeza, then I suppose you have a point. Not one that any sentient human being not in the thrall of Bill Caylor and the Kentucky Coal Association would appreciate. Once these mountains and their adjacent valleys are destroyed by Mountaintop Removal they are gone forever on anything resembling a human or biological timescale. The “we need flat land in the mountains for economic development” is a common trope among Mountaintop Removal partisans, none of whom apparently live in Hazard or Perry or Pike Counties.
Brett, you need to work harder. The Crazy Horse Memorial is no more offensive than Mount Rushmore, and in fact is a nice counterweight to Borglum’s “masterpiece.” Aside from that, the carving of one statue out of an exposed rock outcrop in the arid West is no more similar to Mountaintop Removal in the Appalachians than lightning is to a lightning bug (apologies to Mark Twain).
And note that the Paul quote appears to assert that the most obvious externalities are being priced - that neighbors can object to the pollution or destruction of their rivers - which is sadly untrue.
It’s worse than objecting, it’s
“if they dump something in the river that goes to the next property, your local judges here will stop them.”
No idea that there should be rules before hand that limit what you can do, rather than after the fact.
And that local judges often have conflicts of interest, lack of experience in the matter, or some such.
But no matter, what we as a country have set up now is an agency that looks at those things called the EPA, and imposes national rules.
As Paul stresses, he’s inspired by Martin Luther King. Didn’t King once say
“I have been to the mountaintop,
and I removed it” ?
“If they bought the property, they own the property, they can do with that property, as long as they don’t pollute someone else’s property.”
Isn’t this the key issue?
http://www.cotf.edu/ete/modules/waterq/wqacidmine.html
Who pays the negative externalities? These Libertarians seem to think everyone else pays them. And that’s the issue with libertarians isn’t it. They pretend that negative externalities don’t exist.
They make a desert & call it a functioning ecosystem.
Paul almost certainly thinks the Surface Mining Control & Reclamation Act is at least bad law, & probably unconstitutional. Voters will want to know whether he’d vote to repeal or substantially gut it.
It’s not entirely from his comment what grounds he’d see to object if the owners of the large majority of the territory of the US that’s privately owned decided to excavate it ad infernos, leaving holes where the country had been.
“If you mean anything like a mixed mesophytic forest that is the most ecologically diverse on earth and has been intact for time so deep you cannot appreciate it (the Appalachians are more like 300-400 million years old than Mark’s 100,000,000…much older than the dinosaurs we are familiar with), then the answer is no. “
How about as complex as a corn field, which they pretty unambiguously COULD legally do?
Even industrial RoundUpReady+Bt corn couldn’t grow in the acidic gravel left behind by Mountaintop Removal. I have been to those former mountaintops, and if there is a God the perps are going to be surprised in the hereafter.
@Benny Lava: it’s actually only the most debased libertarians who believe that (hence Mark’s “glibertarians”). Milton Friedman pretty unambiguously approved of torts to remedy externalities-and quasi-Pigovian regulations to mimic the collective effects that those torts would hypothetically have. Granted, the glibertarians mostly dominate the libertarian tendency in American politics-though not in academe.
Actually, I think the explanation is simpler. It’s not that the glibertarians have a strange theory of externalities or waste. They have a perfectly reasonable theory of externalities and waste—but one that values nature at precisely zero.
It’s not only the glibertarians who value this particular externality at zero. None of the coal operators ever, EVER, spoils the view of the owners or the politicians and judges they have on retainer in Kentucky and West Virginia. Out of sight, out of mind. It’s not an accident that the Kentucky Coal Association has its office in Lexington instead of Pikeville or Hazard.
Paul’s comments point to another deep weakness in libertarian theory - they view a property right in despotic terms. This is ultimately incoherent, for a right really determines what are appropriate relationships rather than absolute and impermeable borders between despotisms. It is their despotic principle of property ownership that makes it impossible for them to appreciate issues of power in bargaining positions. A corporation and a single consumer have equally despotic rights, and that’s the end of the issue because any imitation on despotism involves a “taking.” Similarly, this despotic model makes them almost utterly blind to ecological issues where boundaries interpenetrate. It is equally blind at social levels, where as we become ever more intimately intertwined the despotic model simply becomes an apology for power masquerading as justice.
Keep in mind that ecosystems and views are not even as simple as “externalities”. If 100 neighbors each have 1,000 acres of old-growth redwood forest, you’ve got a national-park-quality ecosystem. If half of them decide to mow it down for timber—well, you *may or may not* have half of a national forest left. It matters who cuts down what, and when. You might be left with 50,000 acres of contiguous forest, next to 50,000 acres of wasteland. You might have 50 tiny island-forests with no corridors between them, each one too small to support large wildlife, each one with rapidly degrading margins, etc.. Those outcomes are economically identical—they’re both “50 people decided the timber on their sovereign land was valuable”—but ecologically complete opposites.
Even if Mr. Paul and the glibertarians *do* think externalities should be priced, (which is a long way closer to reality than any GOP officeholder I’ve seen), who do they think is doing the pricing? There would have to be a benevolent, far-seeing, and incorruptible central committee, wouldn’t there? A committee smart enough to decide what externality-tax to apply to “Bob cuts down his redwoods” and what tax to apply to “Phil cuts down some of his redwoods but leaves a corridor”, etc.. If those committees get the taxes exactly right, then the Magic Hand of Libertarianism means that landowners will make ecologically-sound but sovereign-freedom-respecting decisions, right?
Wrong, in two ways. First of all, if you think central planners are that omniscient, I have some shares in an Soviet tractor/combine factory to sell you. The stupidity and corruptibility of planners is a *core tenet* of glibertarianism—why do they become infallible in this corner of the philosophy? (Oh, because it’s the corner the glibs aren’t planning to implement.)
Second, ecosystem losses are on a ratchet. Even if the externality prices are set “perfectly”, sometimes a mountain owner will “misjudge” and blow it up anyway. Boom, the mountain is gone. If the prices were right then the miner goes bankrupt, but—oops! The mountain is gone and it doesn’t come back. Sometimes the regulators will set the price too low and a bunch of mountains will blow up—oops! The (hypothetical) perfect regulators will notice this and fix the price, but the mountains are gone and don’t come back. Keep ratcheting and more and more ecosystems go away. Underprice oil-well-safety-systems *just once* and you lose a millenium’s worth of reefs forever. (Contrast this with mistakes in the normal economy. Some people bought DVD+ and lost money? The government over-subsidized mohair and wasted some money? Nothing irreparable was lost. Things continue growing.)
“..as long as they don’t pollute someone else’s property.”
This reminds me of Ayn Rand promoting selfishness… as long as you don’t act like an a-hole. Yes, 2 + 2 is actually 5… as long as you add 1. Milk is brown… as long as you add the chocolate. Rainbows fly out of my ears… if you use special effects. Reality… has its own ellipsis!
And libertarians wonder why people call them fantasists. The intellectual dishonesty is mind-numbing.
[...] Rand Paul thinks no one will miss a few mountaintops « The Reality … [...]
How exactly does someone obtain legitimate ownership of a mountain, anyway?
So, the negative external effects are taken care of by filing suit in local courts. Wait — I thought conservatives were in favor of tort reform! Are these the same people that run around saying our society has gotten too litigious?
Brett Bellmore says:
“Of course, even that formulation presumes that the land, once flat, won’t have a functioning ecosystem.”
Outstandingly bad analysis - which it isn’t, because it’s based on slogans.
For example, if the water running through your land was laced with toxins from mine tailings, you’d still have a ‘functioning ecosystem’. It wouldn’t be worth much, though.
Heck, we could have had a full-on late 80′s thermonuclear war, with both sides launching on warning, and very few nukes destroyed in their tubes, with several gigatons of nuclear explosions, and a nuclear
winterfull-on Ice Age finishing off 99% of surviving humanity, and there’d *still* be a ‘functionaing ecosystem’.Josh G asks: “How exactly does someone obtain legitimate ownership of a mountain, anyway?”
Good question. First the King of England gives a land grant to a bunch of privateers who get the king’s thugs to empress (kidnap) a bunch of men who are delivered to a boat that takes them to the New World and those guys slaughter the native people or some other guys who some other king gave the mountain to who had already slaughtered the native people. Now you have the first “owner” who sells the mountain to somebody else and so on.
I once saw the map of the original land grant for Susex County Delaware. On that map were the family names of every rich family in the area. These people are still living off of the inherited wealth their ancestors recieved from the King of England in the sixteen hundreds. That’s the free enterprise system in a nut shell.
“How exactly does someone obtain legitimate ownership of a mountain, anyway?”
The same way you obtain ownership of boring, flat land?
Barry, “functioning ecosystem” is indeed a pretty hollow demand, but I’m not the one who originally made it. JMG was. “a mixed mesophytic forest that is the most ecologically diverse on earth and has been intact for time so deep you cannot appreciate it ” on the other hand, is a demand nobody could satisfy while suing the land for anything more than looking at, and certainly one that farmers, to name a major user of land, can’t meet. Where do we draw the line inbetween?
Betsy,
That’s a very good observation! It seems to clear the way for corporations to pollute without impunity doesn’t it? More evidence that libertarians are at heart corporatists?
Andrew Sabl,
Color me unconvinced. The argument is that if someone creates negative externalities, by say polluting, they can be brought to court and made to pay. Doesn’t that mean that the creation of negative externalities has to be illegal in order to make it prosecutable? And if it is illegal, doesn’t that mean law enforcement should prevent it from happening? Doesn’t that lead to the creation of law enforcement and regulatory regimes? Isn’t that the exact thing that libertarians hate?
Contra regulatory regimes, what is to prevent a company from polluting, getting sued and losing, and then declaring bankruptcy and discharging all debts leaving cleanup bills unpaid or left in the hands of the state? Doesn’t that make all libertarians pretty glib?
“And I don’t think they want to [pollute].”
Paul must have a really, really low bar for interpreting “want.”
I’m sure drunk drivers don’t “want” to kill anyone.
Equally true, coal mining companies may not “want” to pollute in the sense that most don’t intentionally seek to pollute, but they sure aren’t very interested in affirmatively preventing the obvious and inevitable consequences of how they conduct their mining activities.
Paul also seems to presume that ALL coal companies effectively reclaim and that ALL coal companies don’t intentionally pollute. This simply indicates Paul’s pathological separation from reality.
One major difference Brett ignores between using a field to grow corn and using a mountain to provide coal is that the corn can grow year after year with proper care, but the mountaintop can only be strip mined once.
Paul’s explication isn’t worthy of a 4th grader. Can anyone say with a straight face that one can grind down the entire top of a mountain without having a substantial effect on surrounding lands? Is that really possible under any circumstances? Never mind his imbecilic grasp of the concept of real property going back to its ancient roots. This man is a dangerous fool.
Brett Bellmore says:
“Barry, “functioning ecosystem” is indeed a pretty hollow demand, but I’m not the one who originally made it. JMG was. “a mixed mesophytic forest that is the most ecologically diverse on earth and has been intact for time so deep you cannot appreciate it ” on the other hand, is a demand nobody could satisfy while suing the land for anything more than looking at, and certainly one that farmers, to name a major user of land, can’t meet. Where do we draw the line inbetween?”
When the results spill over onto other people’s property, perhaps?
With intermittent fallow periods and crop rotation, a corn field will produce for a long, long time. Coal from a mountain top, only once.
A corn field requires no expensive reclamation or reconditioning to be returned to nature and it doesn’t take a generation. Not so with a stripped mountain top.
A corn field supports life, even if in reduced diversity, during its existence. A mountain top being strip-mined? Not so much.
Corn fields have limited off-site effects. A mountain top both during and after strip-mining? Not so much.
A corn field does not change the fundamental topology of the land. A mountain top strip-mined? Not so much.
“A corn field requires no expensive reclamation or reconditioning to be returned to nature and it doesn’t take a generation. ‘
On the contrary: My former home in the country, before losing my job put me in an apartment in another state, was on a former corn field. I watched it’s transformation from field to something you’d never guess had been a corn field, and it darned well did take a generation before you couldn’t tell it had been a farm field. I know because I was there the whole while.
“On the contrary: My former home in the country, before losing my job put me in an apartment in another state, was on a former corn field. I watched it’s transformation from field to something you’d never guess had been a corn field, and it darned well did take a generation before you couldn’t tell it had been a farm field. I know because I was there the whole while.”
Then the people doing the reclamation were incompetent.
“A corn field requires no expensive reclamation or reconditioning to be returned to nature and it doesn’t take a generation.”
The claim was that a corn field returned to nature in less than a generation without effort. Wrong, in my experience. I have no doubt that you could do it in a few years by spending a lot of money to bring in experts. Money we didn’t have.
“A corn field requires no expensive reclamation or reconditioning to be returned to nature and it doesn’t take a generation. ‘
Brett Bellmore says:
“On the contrary: My former home in the country, before losing my job put me in an apartment in another state, was on a former corn field. I watched it’s transformation from field to something you’d never guess had been a corn field, and it darned well did take a generation before you couldn’t tell it had been a farm field. I know because I was there the whole while.”
I’m willing to be that the groundwater was drinkable. With mountaintop removal and processing of ore, not so much.
What kind of idiot equates [farming a cornfield] with [removal of an entire mountaintop]? By what infernal casuistry are we even engaged in such a patently ridiculous debate? One is usufruct. The other is waste. Period.
Setting the bar to be “something you’d never guess had been a corn field” is way to high.
There are plenty of semi-wild areas out west with large signs of man’s hand.
The Desolation Wilderness area, west of Lake Tahoe has small dams. The Trinity Alps high country has various dams too. All over the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, there are curious lumps left over from placer mining near otherwise natural looking streams. Beautiful redwood forests with the occasional stump 10 feet high and 20 feet across. In the end, the point is not to erase all Man’s work, but to have an ecosystem.
Well, and have enough food so we don’t starve too. The California Central Valley used to be a carpet of flowers, but now is a leading agricultural area.
Mountains are geological vandalism of old seabeds.
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“The claim was that a corn field returned to nature in less than a generation without effort.”
This is a lie. “Without effort” does not appear anywhere but in your imagination and your own post. Thus, such a claim was never made, by me or anyone else. “No” modified “expensive [X]” and can in no way be interpreted as “without effort” or even the equivalent “no effort,” even if “effort” is dishonestly limited to “reclamation or reconditioning.” “Inexpensive [X]” is not equivalent to “no [X}" or "without [X].”
Unless you are using the bizarre alternate dictionary that libertarians and conservatives like to pull out from time to time when the meanings of words don’t support their arguments.
And in any event, the fact that your family had NO money and took a LOT of time to recondition a corn field doesn’t mean that it is the general case when there is SOME money less than “expensive” that it takes a generation to reclaim a corn field. The point was not that every person who attempts to reclaim a corn field to nature can and will do so in less than a generation, but that a corn field CAN be rescued in less than a generation without EXPENSIVE efforts, while a mountain top CANNOT be rescued in a generation without expensive efforts. After all, it CAN take 5 years or 10 years or 20 years to build a house if I want to do so or have no funds to do it all at once, but that doesn’t mean that it REQUIRES 5 years to get a house built. It does require expensive efforts to reclaim a stripped mountain because you have to bring in top soil and remove toxic materials that have collected and leached into the immediate environment from the mining process, the topology and therefore the movement of water resources in the environment has been affected and must be taken into account, and the land area involved is far more extensive which means far more expense in importing trees (or waiting for them to grow) than for “a” corn field (which is a direct quote of your post).
Which points out the absurdity in the comparison in the first place: a corn field might be a few hundred acres at most, but a stripped mountain top will be a few tens of thousands of acres or maybe hundreds of thousands of acres, so by area considerations alone, the expense and time required are not comparable.