If fossil fuels are so great, surely somebody should be able to make money off them without externalizing ~90% of the costs to nonconsenting others and still getting big subsidies from the state.
If one compares market solar to collectivist coal, of course market solar ends up looking worse than it actually is, because market solar isn’t taking everyone else’s money at gunpoint (or at smokestackpoint via hospital bills, disabilities etc.).
In what sense are negative externalities “collectivist” or “taking everybody’s money at gunpoint”? Because they wouldn’t exist in ancap utopia, because in ancap utopia all problems would be fixed?
Calling things with unaddressed negative externalities “collectivist” sounds like some kind of psyop to trick libertarian capitalists into accidentally becoming socialists. I mean, I’m happy to see capitalists acknowledging the seriousness of externalities, but trying to roll them into a capitalist economic model takes you to weird places.
Externalities tend by their nature to be subtle and off-book: they’re very hard to quantify or even identify, and companies and NGOs expend considerable resources on further obfuscating them. So you might go 20 years under a policy before you have even a crude measure of its externalities, and even then, getting that information is so costly that the crude measure will be heavily influenced by the interests of whatever group first chooses to bear that cost. And then, what? How do you actually price externalities from air pollution and climate change into carbon? As far as I can tell, you can’t except via a carbon tax (which will almost surely not price it “correctly” since it’s imposed by political fiat). Which might not sound like a dealbreaker for a capitalist, but the problem with handling broad externalities this way is that there are so many of them.
Like, okay, one thing I like to go on about is that small neighbourhood stores have major positive externalities on their neighbourhoods and broader communities, and the move toward big-box stores is one of countless ways in which companies improved margins by declining to provide those externalities. Thus big-box stores have an “unfair” advantage and which eventually leads to a world where no one can afford to provide those classic benefits and all the social structures dependent on them collapse. Morever, economic monoculture (in this case, The Only Store Is the Wal-Mart) is itself a negative externality, since it reduces the ability to weather shocks. If you really want to get serious about accounting for subtle and diffuse externalities in a capitalist model, you end up with massive interventionism and forced wealth redistribution through taxation and subsidy pretty fast, at which point you’re not really letting “the market” do things in the first place.
It seems like at some point you just have to give up and accept that the market will price things not just in accordance with their real value but also according to the ease of pricing them and of slotting those prices into a transactional model. There are countless cases where things that are very valuable are handled poorly by the market simply because they have issues with that second criterion. As long as costs and benefits vary in legibility, profit-seeking will optimize for illegible costs and legible benefits at the expense of other varieties, irrespective of their true importance.
I mean, you say that about a Capitalist model, but any model is going to have difficulties effectively finding, evaluating, and pricing externalities. …even models that insist on “not using prices”.