Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is a great game. Not only is it part of the Civilization franchise, it introduced a mechanic that the Civ games have recently been trying to redo: Social Engineering. I guess that’s a misnomer, but that is the in game term for it. In it, you choose certain policies and types of propaganda you want to put out to get slight bonuses in certain areas. Don’t want riots when you build more military units? Choose “Police State”. And what is great is that this game recognizes the fact that governments have to decide between alternatives. As such you’ll take some penalties for the choices you make, and many times a few key choices stack negative effects to the point where you’re hurting more than you were before.

Most of these policies are either spot on, or close enough. Central Planning? Yep. Inefficient. Knowledge propaganda? Definitely going to make people want to stop investing in the military. There is one issue I take up with the Free Market choice. You take a penalty to your environmentalism (which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when the planet is out to kill you it is). This is justified in the manual as being a wanton favoring of money at the expense of damaging everything you touch to do it.

Now granted, a free market is only a free market if a government is not trying force one together, so perhaps it’s a naming problem. If the choice were named corporatist, then I could see the penalty, but the problem lies in that a free market is all about conservation.

Now before you start throwing organic tomatoes at me, any problems you bring to me are government induced, I can assure you. You can look at this and be angry, or you can recognize that the contract is time based ($4 million per year for 30 years of access). This is the problem with the Amazon rainforest. You don’t own the land, you just pay to be in there. As such, a company isn’t going to know how much wood and so on they can sell, and so they just rampage and clear as much as they can to make it worth their contracted time. The solution would be to have property rights fix this. If companies had to buy the land and not the time, then they would have incentive to conserve what they have on the land. If you cut down too much, it’s not going to grow back, and you’re stuck with a useless plot of land. If you’re shrewd, you can farm land forever and that initial purchase of land can be paid for in full after awhile. This has the external benefit of the land having it’s initial ecology while we work with it, not against it.

“What if a really big company is just buying the land and torching it without wanting to keep the ecology going?”

Then don’t buy from it. We already have entire countries worth of people trying to ban Monsanto from selling its products because they disagree with Monsanto’s methods. The same can be done to any company that is just being irresponsible. People can just not buy from bad companies. People would just find companies with better reputations, or if the price were skewing the market toward the bad company, then people would find alternatives to what is offered.

“Okay, but how would we fix pollution without the EPA? They do a good job.”

At what? Currently the EPA sets standards for what is acceptable levels of pollution, even though all pollution is harmful in some sense. So long as companies stay within those standards, a person who is getting sick off of pollution can’t bring a case. This needs to be fixed with property rights too. If you’re polluting my air, the air around me I need in order to breath and survive, you’re violating the non-aggression principle. I’m taking you to arbitration.

“We can’t very well do that with non-point-of-source pollution.”

And why not? Presumably you would notice when you’re starting to have problems breathing or fishing or hunting or something. As soon as something odd happens in your environment and you presume it’s pollution, you go look at who’s moved in or done things in your area. You might find it’s a smokestack a couple miles away that opened around the time your livestock started getting cancer. There’s an onus on you to defend your property, and figuring out what the problem is happens to be your responsibility. If you can’t do it yourself, you can hire a private investigator to do it. There would be a market for those kinds of people.

“Then nothing would get done! Pollution is inevitable to some degree.”

Not everybody has the same lungs. Some people can tolerate living in the city, and some people can’t. Part of the decision of where to live is “do I like this place and can I live here?” We’d see places that are industrial with people who can live in those conditions and desiring that work, and we’d see serene mountains with towns banning cars and people desiring those conditions. Part of a company’s defense in a pollution arbitration would include bringing in average residents of the area the plaintiff lives in. Their goal would be to prove that their pollution, while still damaging, is not extraordinary. The resolution of a case might include a payout to cover damages to land, animals, medical fees, and the cost of getting up and moving to a place that isn’t being polluted. It might also mean that the parties come to an agreement: The plaintiff can sell the land and items being damaged to the defendant. As long as you’re only hurting your own things, who else cares?

Not only this, we’re always out to find better ways to do things. If we outright ban industrial behavior, how will an industrial plant experiment with different ways to do their jobs in order to alter their pollution levels? After all, a plant has every incentive to not get its workers sick. That would increase the price of labor in their plant and it also means payouts to sick workers.

“Then how would we protect the Great Barrier Reef and things in the water? We can’t put buoy systems across the ocean.”

No, but we can buy, sell, and trade the rights to specific areas of water marked by points on GPS. We’re already to the point where GPS can be accurate down to feet, which in the ocean is a negligible distance for now, and by the time we’re building ocean casinos and ocean cities GPS might be dead on accurate. We could even make these rights more divisible by rights to altitude / depth of water. Imagine owning a cube of water in the Challenger Deep. That might be worth more than gold in 50 years when we make underwater theme parks.

“Okay. Space junk. You can’t solve that. It’ll be there forever and it’ll damage any future space ships that go by.”

Space junk comes off of a previous space faring object. If a vessel is damaged by junk, you just trace that back to which object it came off of, then take the owner to arbitration. I doubt that we’ll be doing that though, so just as part of having a car is car insurance, part of piloting a shuttle would be shuttle insurance. The insurance company would just ask how often you fly, where you fly, and then run calculations to find the likelihood of your shuttle being damaged by junk / asteroids / other stuff, and give you your rate, deductible, and so on from there. Insurance companies might even be inclined to clean space junk to reduce the likelihood of their clients getting hit and then having to need a payout.

“So is Lord British’s claim to land on the moon legitimate?”

Rothbardian property rights are “you own the land if you are working it and using it”. In that sense no. Although it still makes me smile to think that we have an eccentric wanting to claim the moon, so I’ll let him go about doing that.