darkenedgy

A Libertarian friend of mine sees no contradiction in the fact that Gary Johnson supports governmentally-mandated pollution controls because he doesn't think private companies will pick up the slack there.

I, personally, do. I also don't see any empirical evidence that suggests the market, without any guidance, self-corrects for things that do not presently have an economic valuation.

Oh good, I'm not the only one. The hardware on that thing was great.

You know she'd pick out great beer/wine, too.

Certainly a number of industries follow this model of preventing, not fixing (I want to say nuclear in particular) - but how does it help when, say, a natural disaster where cleanups do need to occur? I guess you could try an emergency slush fund or something.

That said, I'm a bit confused because isn't part of ensuring a mistake doesn't ever happen having a rigorous checklist to create adherence to safety procedures? I don't know if you've ever read Atul Gawande's 'The Checklist Manifesto', but that's what comes to mind here - he mentions that pilots have some very strict procedures they follow and that is why most flights are totally safe. If anything, I'd think the FAA's slowness to adopt - while maintaining a very, very high standard of safety (they require 99.9999999% assurance) - is what is the safest. Which, yes, does stifle the fuck out of innovation.

But then again, there are arguments that regulations - such as meeting a certain 'green' standard - are good for business, because they place actual valuation on what were previously unvalued items. (I will say that a carbon tax sounds good in theory, but in practice I've heard there are a lot of issues with implementation in a way that doesn't just encourage people to pay fines.)

Of course, I'm not in this industry, so maybe your insights are totally different.

What I'm not getting any sense of is a) how Libertarians are going to pay for the aspects of government they want to keep and b) what the line is for keep vs don't keep, in terms of shrinking government. The latter in particular strikes me as somewhat arbitrary - at best, based more on personal experience than empirical data.

Thanks!

Homebrew by Martha Stewart? Shit, I'm so there.