May 23rd, 2010 by Alex

I’m all for Libertarian minded candidates like Rand Paul, and Peter Schiff. Those guys don’t deal properly with my primary political concern, which is monetary reform, but they at least offer underrepresented views. Plus, they are intellectuals in the sense that their political views are grounded in a fairly consistent formula of individual rights and economic freedom. Now, of course, the intellectual subtleties of their views are lost on most voters (and Tea Party participants) and simply provide tinder for political opponents eager to dismiss them as extreme kooks. And that is precisely what started to happen to Rand Paul last week.

As if the 1964 Civil Rights Act is a big issue in 2010, Rand Paul’s political opponents seized the opportunity to question his philosophical disagreement with one part of the Civil Rights Act. Rand Paul believes that it isn’t government’s role to say that a private business can’t discriminate based on race. Rand Paul doesn’t believe in discrimination based on race himself, but he respects the rights of business people to discriminate based on race and not get in trouble for it. And so, following that logic, he supports the rights of black, white, Hispanic, and every other color of business owner to discriminate based on race without legal ramifications.

I personally wouldn’t take that stance, because I think the good outweighs the potential harm to private property rights in that case. But I’m intelligent enough to see his logical stance. Really, Libertarianism is only optimal in a world of intelligent, logical people, because those are the only people that would respect and obey its tenants. In a world of people who think with their hearts (both with love and hate) not their heads, Libertarianism is hard to follow faithfully. The only place Libertarianism really works is in the fictional secret compound of intelligent, talented, logical, freedom loving people found in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged.

And along the storyline of the novel Atlas Shrugged, Rand Paul gave his political opponents even more ammo last week when he said accidents happen and defended BP against Obama’s criticism. Defending BP isn’t a popular thing right now. It is obvious that individuals working for BP were cutting corners and the fact is that that wouldn’t fly in a true free-market.

In a true free-market, where private property is protected, that would mean you can’t pollute other people’s property. Therefore, a venture like drilling for oil in water would be very risky in a true free-market. In a true free-market, if the company really screwed up, the company would be done, because the potential cost of cleaning up such a mistake would be astronomical. So, the risk of ruining the company by messing up would be self-regulating. The venture would possibly be too dangerous to even risk, which means that it possibly wouldn’t even be economically viable in a true free-market, or even legal.

In that sense, environmentalist’s would be wise to seize an extreme Libertarian viewpoint of protection of private property. Because if you really support the right to private property, then other people can’t pollute it in any way that is uncontained to their property: water, air, ground, sound, odor, etc.

But it all comes down to what people value. If oil companies one day pulled an Atlas Shrugged and shut down the oil business, the world would grind to a stop. People can’t bitch about companies they rely upon, because their money does the real talking. But at the same time, what is the potential cost to private property through pollution by things like oil? People don’t want pollution in their back yards. And so people shouldn’t chant “Drill Baby Drill” unless they want drilling done in their own personal back yards.

The fact is that a true free-market economy would factor in the cost of maintaining the sanctity of people’s private property. The cost of cheap energy is pollution. And while I personally don’t really care about an abstract, debatable proposition like global warming, I do care about pollution. I don’t like these pollution tax schemes like cap and trade, but I do like the idea of respecting private property. The cost of pollution should be in the price of products. And the ideal way to do that is to have only products that don’t pollute in any discernible way. That would be the inevitable product of a true free-market that respects the sanctity of private property. We’d pay to be clean in such a system. And so, I don’t think a true Libertarian could really support something like offshore oil drilling as long as it poses a notable risk to the sanctity of private property.