Hey Trooper Thompson, thanks for getting back to me, much appreciated.

"The answer to many environmental problems is upholding property rights, and allowing them where they are currently not permitted. Then the polluter can be made to pay."

Where this works, I'm absolutely in agreement. As with the tragedy of the commons example, if you can successfully internalise yer externalities, I'm all for it. A few questions, though. First, a historical one: you say, "from the time of the Industrial Revolution, courts stopped enforcing property rights with regard to pollution, on the grounds that it was for the 'general good' that we had factories belching out pollution." What `property rights with regard to pollution' existed at the time that they stopped enforcing?

Second, I'm really interested in ways to manage resources and - as I say above - where property-rights-based methods work, great. Question, then: what sort of institutions are needed for internalising pollution? You say property rights, properly enforced. How does that work, though? What's the property? Is it traded permits? I guess Pigovian taxes is taxes, so...? E.g. here's Krugman on the difference between cap-and-trade and a Pigovian tax: "In practice there are a couple of important differences between cap and trade and a pollution tax. One is that the two systems produce different types of uncertainty. If the government imposes a pollution tax, polluters know what price they will have to pay, but the government does not know how much pollution they will generate. If the government imposes a cap, it knows the amount of pollution, but polluters do not know what the price of emissions will be."

Generally, I'm with Elinor Ostrom on this: "Instead of there being a single solution to a single problem... many solutions exist to cope with many different problems. Instead of presuming that optimal institutional solutions can be designed easily and imposed at low cost by external authorities, I argue that `getting' the institutions right' is a difficult and time-consuming, conflict-invoking process". (Governing the Commons, p.14, I'm just quoting from the google book here...)

This is a really random example of Ostrom's point that many market problems lack a one-size-fits-all `property rights' solution: taxi use has all the appearances of a good free market, but none of the actual features of one. If you wanted to actually allow customers to face low search costs and a genuine ability to send proper price signals, how do you structure it? Something like taxi terminals, where you enter your desired destination and let taxis bid, choosing the cheapest? Who knows, but it's tricky to get a good working market there. And you probably can't rely on taxi drivers to sort that out - where's their incentive to?

So whether for commons-managing, or markets generally, I might agree property rights help, but what about the whole bunch of other institutional setup that's needed?

End on a question: just for the sake of argument, can we assume climate change (of the standard AGW sort) is a problem that needs addressing? I'm not asking anyone to agree it is, let's just be purely hypothetical. What sort of institutions would be needed to manage it? Carbon tax, cap and trade, what? What does a libertarian solution to this hypothetical problem look like? Oops, need two comments -->

This is the thing with climate change. If it all turns out to be a massive lie, I'll be the happiest bunny ever. If it's happening, we're still left with the need to argue over how to deal with it. There's another nice quote from the tragedy of the commons man, from Ostrom: she's pointing out Hardin only saw two poles - property rights or socialism. He says: "the alternative of the commons is too horrifying to contemplate." If I thought this was right - that it's a choice between libertarianism and the Leviathan - I'd be a libertarian. There are too many real-world examples of diverse resource management methods that don't involve central control for me to think that. Climate change is pretty f*cking wicked though - how the hell can you come up with institutions to manage a global problem? Maybe there are answers, but not if we can't even agree that it's a problem.

Bloody hell, that turned into a f*ckin essay, sorry. Hope Katabasis is getting on OK out there in the real world.