If you care about your family’s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room.
Wait, what? This doesn’t follow unless you place about the same utility on cozying up to your fireplace as you do on cozying up to a diesel engine. (Assuming that the two are equally damaging to your health.) Even the weaker claim that if you care about your family’s health, you should stop burning wood in your fireplace doesn’t follow from the facts as he’s laid them out. In order to get that claim, you have to think the health effects of your fireplace have greater negative utility than the positive utility derived from your fireplace. Why think that everyone shares utilities that make Harris’ argument work or that they ought to do so?
I also don’t buy Harris’ legal solution. (I am not a libertarian, but libertarians especially shouldn’t buy his legal solution.) Why not find an alternative way to internalize the negative externalities involved in burning stuff in your fireplace? Here are some alternatives: Require scrubbers on chimneys or some sort of capture system. Require an expensive permit in order to burn anything in a fireplace. Or require an annual permit just to own a fireplace, whether you burn anything or not. Put heavy sales taxes on wood, especially in urban areas, where it is not so easy to collect and burn your own. Add a fireplace tax to regular property taxes. And so forth.
Sam’s isn’t the most reliable analyst on libertarian theory. After reporting that he considers himself in large part a libertarian, in the very next paragraph he shares his view of government:
“Why do we have laws in the first place? To prevent adults from behaving like dangerous children. All laws are coercive and take the following form: do this, and don’t do that, or else. Or else what? Or else men with guns will arrive at your door and take you away to prison. Yes, it would be wonderful if we did not need to be corralled and threatened in this way. And many uses of State power are both silly and harmful (the “war on drugs” being, perhaps, the ultimate instance). But the moment certain strictures are relaxed, people reliably go berserk. ”
Whether you agree or disagree with the quote, most of us would recognize this as the opposite of libertarianism.
Reading between the lines, I suspect Harris self-identifies as the “guns and dope” breed of small-L libertarian (possibly modulo guns). His stated motivations aren’t necessarily inconsistent with that label, although they are inconsistent with libertarian theory.
Which is not to say that he doesn’t have some badly confused views about that general ideological space. Describing Objectivism as “autism rebranded”, for example, is seriously unfair to both Objectivists and autistic folks.
“All laws are coercive and take the following form: do this, and don’t do that, or else. Or else what? Or else men with guns will arrive at your door and take you away to prison. Yes, it would be wonderful if we did not need to be corralled and threatened in this way. And many uses of State power are both silly and harmful (the “war on drugs” being, perhaps, the ultimate instance). But the moment certain strictures are relaxed, people reliably go berserk. ”
While the rest of the quote does make it pretty clear that Harris isn’t a libertarian, the first part—where in he acknowledges that laws ultimately derive their authority from men with guns say they do, and only from “the consent of the governed” (as in Lockean social contract theory) to the extent that “the will of the people” is capable of influencing the guys with guns—wouldn’t sound too out of place in a libertarian argument. Of course, most libertarians go on to add that this state of affairs is suboptimal, and could be improved upon, which Harris explicitly doesn’t believe. Still, he probably has more in common with libertarians than your average politically interested person does.
Wait, what? This doesn’t follow unless you place about the same utility on cozying up to your fireplace as you do on cozying up to a diesel engine. (Assuming that the two are equally damaging to your health.) Even the weaker claim that if you care about your family’s health, you should stop burning wood in your fireplace doesn’t follow from the facts as he’s laid them out. In order to get that claim, you have to think the health effects of your fireplace have greater negative utility than the positive utility derived from your fireplace. Why think that everyone shares utilities that make Harris’ argument work or that they ought to do so?
I also don’t buy Harris’ legal solution. (I am not a libertarian, but libertarians especially shouldn’t buy his legal solution.) Why not find an alternative way to internalize the negative externalities involved in burning stuff in your fireplace? Here are some alternatives: Require scrubbers on chimneys or some sort of capture system. Require an expensive permit in order to burn anything in a fireplace. Or require an annual permit just to own a fireplace, whether you burn anything or not. Put heavy sales taxes on wood, especially in urban areas, where it is not so easy to collect and burn your own. Add a fireplace tax to regular property taxes. And so forth.
Already happens. (This is the website where I found a copy of the woodburning review that Harris cited and I linked to in my other comment.)
Sam’s isn’t the most reliable analyst on libertarian theory. After reporting that he considers himself in large part a libertarian, in the very next paragraph he shares his view of government:
“Why do we have laws in the first place? To prevent adults from behaving like dangerous children. All laws are coercive and take the following form: do this, and don’t do that, or else. Or else what? Or else men with guns will arrive at your door and take you away to prison. Yes, it would be wonderful if we did not need to be corralled and threatened in this way. And many uses of State power are both silly and harmful (the “war on drugs” being, perhaps, the ultimate instance). But the moment certain strictures are relaxed, people reliably go berserk. ”
Whether you agree or disagree with the quote, most of us would recognize this as the opposite of libertarianism.
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/how-to-lose-readers-without-even-trying/
Reading between the lines, I suspect Harris self-identifies as the “guns and dope” breed of small-L libertarian (possibly modulo guns). His stated motivations aren’t necessarily inconsistent with that label, although they are inconsistent with libertarian theory.
Which is not to say that he doesn’t have some badly confused views about that general ideological space. Describing Objectivism as “autism rebranded”, for example, is seriously unfair to both Objectivists and autistic folks.
While the rest of the quote does make it pretty clear that Harris isn’t a libertarian, the first part—where in he acknowledges that laws ultimately derive their authority from men with guns say they do, and only from “the consent of the governed” (as in Lockean social contract theory) to the extent that “the will of the people” is capable of influencing the guys with guns—wouldn’t sound too out of place in a libertarian argument. Of course, most libertarians go on to add that this state of affairs is suboptimal, and could be improved upon, which Harris explicitly doesn’t believe. Still, he probably has more in common with libertarians than your average politically interested person does.