Van Jones on libertarians, part 4

4. “You’re not a deep patriot if you teach your kid to sing America The Beautiful but then you do nothing when the oil spillers and the clear cutters and the mountain top removers come to destroy America’s beauty to make money for corporations. You’re not a patriot if that’s your position with regard to the environment.”

  As far as oil spillers go, libertarians have very simple solutions to that. If the government didn’t cap liability for oil drillers in the case of accidents, the oil companies’ insurance providers would have a much greater incentive to do thorough inspections of drilling facilities. They would also set much higher standards for their oil drilling clients than the government did.

  Talking about clear cutters and mountain top removers, there’s certainly no easy answer to every single question that faces America or the world. But first, the government shouldn’t give special grant to one corporation or one sector over a specific piece of land – this is corporatism (fascism) and not freedom or liberty. Under a state of liberty, private individuals, companies, or organizations would own most land that currently belongs to the federal government. Under a system of the government leasing land to a company for these purposes, the company might destroy it during the lease and return it stripped of beauty and resources. But if the company actually owned the land outright, they would have no incentive to destroy and strip the land to the point where it will be valueless; if they did, they would have a huge capital loss. Most federal land should be sold at OPEN auction in which any peaceful American (and maybe any peaceful foreigner) is allowed to bid. This would create an open playing field on which anyone could purchase land instead of allowing miners to destroy publically owned land.

  And with regards to the environment in general, Van Jones makes it sound like libertarians don’t at all care about the environment. Not only does he neglect my above “tragedy of the commons” problem, but he also ignores the fact that libertarians believe that no company or individual should be allowed to pollute his neighbor’s land or air.

Oh yeah, and I actually have another part, so there will be a fifth post.