The Antiregulation Case - Eric Perkerson - Mises Daily

The Antiregulation Case - Eric Perkerson - Mises Daily: "In addition to the government's major contributions to the risk of this type of disaster, including an incredibly generous liability cap and heavy incentives to drill in deeper, riskier waters, there is virtually nothing in the economy outside the sphere of state intervention.[3] As columnist Sheldon Richmond succinctly puts it, the free market 'has an airtight alibi. It didn't exist.'"

"Regulation, as a proposed solution to this issue, limits the scope of actions that can legally be taken by entrepreneurs and businesses. It either gives them regulations that tell them what they must do, or it gives them regulations that tell them what they must not do. The calculating decision-making of entrepreneurs is replaced by the arbitrary direction of bureaucratic regulators. Profit and loss are no longer tools of decision-making. They are circumvented and ignored.

Litigation, through tort law and strict liability, can provide monetary evaluations of the costs of environmental damage. The costs then imposed on environmental offenders are monetary costs, determined by legal standards in a court of law and by the damages to third parties. Governments can also make businesses pay directly for perceived damages.

The crucial difference between regulation and methods that put monetary costs on environmental damages is that monetary costs can fit into the framework of the market. They enable economic calculation in environmental policy. The public's value of the environment is weighed against the public's value of resources in the calculating and information-gathering market process. Simply assuming that the benefits of environmental policy will outweigh the costs is hardly satisfactory."

"Indeed, most externality problems occur where different actors on the market have conflicting goals with respect to a particular resource, such as ocean water. This arises when property rights are ambiguous or simply nonexistent.[6] In cases where property rights are clearly defined, then damage to any one's property by any other can be dealt with through tort law, and the externality problem is dealt with."

"No voting member of society is in a position to compare the full costs and benefits of an economic decision as complex as those involving resources and the environment.

Oil, as a factor of production, is not valued directly by consumers. It is valued based on the value given to the products it can be used to produce. Many people looking at the effects of the Deepwater Horizon crisis see the oil-soaked pelicans and the fishermen out of business, but these same people cannot possibly see all of the benefits of the use of oil accruing to everyone in the entire economy!

The information about the value placed on oil is communicated and known only through the market in the form of prices. It does not exist in the minds of voters, of individuals, but only in the market. If it is profitable to drill for oil even when all of the environmental damage is charged to the drillers, then the market signal is clear — people value the products more than they dislike the effects on the environment."

Bailouts for Journalists? | Jim Powell | Cato Institute: Commentary

Bailouts for Journalists? | Jim Powell | Cato Institute: Commentary: "An estimated 20 million citizens of the Soviet Union were killed by their own government, and Stalin was responsible for more those deaths than any other Soviet ruler. English author H.G. Wells reported that he 'never met a man more candid, fair and honest ... no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him.' The English playwright George Bernard Shaw hailed Soviet prisons where victims 'could stay as long as they liked.' President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's ambassador to Moscow Joseph E. Davies purred that Stalin's 'eye is exceedingly wise and gentle.'"

ACTA: The War on Progress, Freedom, and Human Civilization - Gennady Stolyarov II - Mises Daily

ACTA: The War on Progress, Freedom, and Human Civilization - Gennady Stolyarov II - Mises Daily: "ACTA tramples on essential rights that have achieved even mainstream recognition: innocence until one is proven guilty, due process, personal privacy, and fair use of published content."

"Under ACTA, governments would be able to crack down on the fans of these creators, against those creators' own wishes!" "who would be the rights holder here — individual creators, or governments"

"Under ACTA, the very suspicion or allegation of having downloaded or even accessed copyrighted material online would render one's computer open to search without a warrant. Fines and other penalties would apply to refusing permission for a search" "Under ACTA, even viewing a website containing material that infringes a copyright — without the viewer being aware of said infringement's existence — would be considered aiding and abetting the infringement."

" On July 16, 2010, federal authorities shut down Blogetery.com, a site that hosted 73,000 blogs, under the allegation that some of these blogs reproduced copyrighted material. Any reasonable person will recognize, of course, that most of the blog owners probably committed no violation whatsoever, but millions of hours of human effort were nonetheless wiped out by this new kind of random, arbitrary censorship."