laura@utcsstat.UUCP (Paul Torek) (09/27/83)
The following article is from Paul Torek, not Laura Creighton (me). If you want to reply to this, you had better send mail to allegra!umcp-cs!prometh!paul. While I will forward any mail for him that ends up here, the turn around time is not guaranteed to be fast -- laura) ******** begin forwarded article ************ The following is from Paul Torek. Send replies to ..umcp-cs!prometh!paul Response to Tom Craver's response on "Bud Wiser": In the first two quotation-response pairs of your article, your responses put words in my mouth. I did not claim that Ed Pawlak INTENDED his example for the use to which I put it. And I did not claim that your position is absurdly absolute; only that that was one horn of a dilemma you faced. You take the bull by the other horn: you claim that a line can be drawn at the boundaries of one's property rights in terms of what steps to compensate people are "normal". And that a line can be drawn at the boundaries of the region that Bud Wiser might earn the right to pollute if he was there first. And although it might be of only "academic" interest, it must (for your position to be viable) be *possible in principle* to draw this line exactly. You say of Bud Wiser: He is not obligated to seek out all complaints - merely respond to them. One does not have to go out of one's normal way to look for damaged parties - if they are truly damaged, they will complain. WRONG! First, the victims might not know that they are being damaged: for instance, someone might not know that his lung cancer is not due to natural causes. Second, they might know that they are damaged but not by whom -- they might not know who the polluters are, and if the damage is small, it might not be worthwhile to find out. (The Kentucky hillbilly might have to drive 60 miles to the library, govt. office, or wherever such info is available.) Or are you going to tell me that small damage is not a violation of rights? (The first point remains even if you do say that.) - he may have the necessary property rights or arrange to get them. He may not, and it may be practically impossible to get them. In order to buy the rights to use the air, he must contact the millions of people in the affected area who have earned rights to breathe the air -- a problem at least as difficult as compensating all victims. Not to mention extreme ecologists who think that nature's unspoiled purity is priceless (they won't sell their air rights to Bud), or profiteers who hold out for big money. Why should [the rest of the world] have the right to give permission? If Bud settles down in an area and starts polluting, other people are no longer able to plan to move there in the future and use resources (e.g. fish) that the pollution destroys. Therefore, Bud going there and polluting restricts their liberty. I am presuming that you object to such restrictions of liberty, since you seem to share many views with libertarians. You answer your own question - one does not create property by agreement - one agrees upon what property rights exist. However, a right to a particular property is not "natural" (intrinsic), but rather artificial (taken from nature by a person). OK, good answer. Now how does one *discover* what property rights exist and how far they extend? Take the case of Bud Wiser polluting -- suppose he was the first person in what is now Wherisit County, and there were only a few people in neighboring counties. Also, some of his pollution once blew over a part of Australia which was then uninhabited but which now is inhabited. Occasionally some more blows over there. What is the extent of his pollution rights? I find your claim that they could not get organized ridiculous, in the light of the large number of special interest groups in existence today. (A) Not all people in special interest groups are selfish. (B) Many special interest groups have only a few tens or hundreds of members (e.g., alliances of corporations or labor unions). (C) There are still many groups which are not organized -- perhaps they vastly outnumber the organized ones. (D) Some interest groups (e.g. labor unions) have been organized through govt. coercion. I addressed the "PD" problem quite a while ago, showing that it has no altruistic implications. I never said it had any. I don't advocate altruism, remember? I didn't see what you said before, and I'd like to. Leaving responsibility for obtaining your benefit means giving them control over something affecting your life - which is not selfishness. Tom, if you are trying to say, however indirectly, that a selfish person will contribute to the pollution control effort just to "have responsibility" for something which benefits her, then I disagree. A selfish person will give ($, time) only if what she gets in return, due to her giving what she gives, is of more benefit to her. And I don't see how that could be the case for most people in most cases of pollution control. By not contributing, one does NOT relinquish control, as long as one has the option of contributing or not. --Paul Torek, ..umcp-cs!prometh!paul