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In article <1992May11.193951.13092@pbhye.PacBell.COM> mjvande@PacBell.COM (Mike Vandeman) writes:
>-Fine.  I also have this odd notion that people should be held
>-accountable for behaviour if it has an adverse effect on society.  
>-If someone wants to commute in a way that pollutes the environment
>-X amount they should be totally free to do so.  They should simply
>-be held monetarily accountable for someone to clean up after them,
>-in proportion to X amount.  The more pollution your personal choice
>-generates for the rest of us the more it costs to clean up after you,
>-and the more you pay.  If I dumped my garbage on my neighbor's lawn
>
>More economists' nonsense. If people die, or species go extinct as a
>result of your actions, there's no way to "pay for" that monetarily.

Sure there is.

Welcome to the world of hidden costs and opportunity costs.

What you are talking about is finding out a way to charge the opportunity
costs involved; roughly speaking, what opportunities have you eliminated
and what is the value of them?

First, the value of a life: Figure the total amount that that person could
have made, plus more to represent the loss that others will have dealing with
her death, plus more to represent whatever unknown advances might have been
discovered. Then, if you wish, add a "disincentive" on top of that.

$2 million might be about right. Now figure out who to pay it to.

For species: (This also applies to other things, such as oil drilling):

Consider imposing a tax on things destroyed (killed, drilled, etc.). The
amount of tax would increase as the amount of the thing got smaller, and
would decrease as the amount got larger.

This would make it prohibitly expensive to extinct animals. It would
encourage exploration and discovery of gas, oil, etc.

What should be the basis of the costs? How about "How much would it take to
re-discover what might have been found strictly in the labratory in artificial
situations". Amount? I dunnow, maybe a couple of million. (:-).

		Michael
-- 
		Michael Gersten		michael@stb.info.com
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