While it's cool and all that this has been done, it's many years after credible people started warning about the dangers of these products. The fact that manufacturers kept making this stuff with knowledge of the damage it was causing is pretty damning, and is the kind of thing that makes me mistrustful of arguments that the free market will sort things like this out. There's just no good mechanism to stop massive harm to common resources (even now, we don't have a good mechanism to stop this kind of thing, since it took years to do so, even for something as uncontroversial as this...our system barely even puts a dent in the ecological harm of fossil fuels, animal agriculture, etc.).
> mistrustful of arguments that the free market will sort things like this out. There's just no good mechanism to stop massive harm to common resources
Most arguments that the free market can handle these problems start out with the recommendation that the resources involved (rivers, lakes, ocean) should be privatized. Economist Walter Block and others have written about ways this could be done. To fault free market arguments for not working when the waterways aren't privatized is to misrepresent the arguments. Most people aren't arguing that the free market is going to solve problems relating to unowned, unownable, or government owned property without first recognizing private property rights in those resources.
Governments often protects polluters by limiting their liability. If that were changed, and assuming these resources (bodies of water) were privatized so non-governmental parties had standing to sue, if you have an argument why a class action lawsuit or something like that can't handle these problems, then that would be an interesting comment. But just saying the free market doesn't solve problems where there are no property rights is rather uninteresting, because free marketers agree with that.
Also it's pretty amusing that a failure of government (who owns the waterways, and most of the sewer systems) to solve this problem sooner somehow gets twisted into a failure of the free market (who doesn't own these resources). Without property rights there's no free market.
I agree that governments, who subsidize animal feed, water, land, and waste, and prosecute activists, do a great deal of harm to the environment by promoting and protecting animal exploitation. I'm fine with banning animal exploitation, even on private property, and I see that as no more anti-free market than banning slavery on private property.
Yes, because a private entity completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests, will completely prevent those resources from being ruthlessly exploited. Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision, and certainly wouldn't exploit those resources until there's nothing left.
There's certainly merit in trying to make people pay for externalities (offsetting carbon pollution for example), but you can't do that for everything. Privatizing everything might be an appealing free-market pipe dream, but unless we can completely/mostly stop externalities from happening, such an experiment would be a disaster.
I'm reminded of when hedge funds bought out old family owned logging companies via leveraged buyouts. The only way it made business sense was to clear cut everything and then close the mills down when the trees were gone.
I guess it would work in the magical world of economists. In that world, there would be active competition for the ownership of the rivers (i.e. lots of players) and consumer have perfect information and are rational (i.e. they will avoid product that directly or indirectly cause pollution )
This doesn't reflect the content of any econ course I've taken, nor the views of any of my econ professors. There's a ton of study in economics about the types of effective roles government can play when dealing with positive and negative externalities, and "tragedy of the commons" situations.
Economists that believe everything can be sorted out in the free market are pretty fringe.
You can't take your wealth with you upon death -- Property owners of valuable resources nearly always maximize exploitation in the short term and could give a shit about the long term.
If they took a long term view, we'd still have old growth forest in the US.
> Yes, because a private entity completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests, will completely prevent those resources from being ruthlessly exploited.
I don't think this has anything to do with exploiting resources. If someone owned all the rivers, then they could sue the companies producing microbeads for any damages.
Not caring for the long term is still a massive problem for our civilization. I don't know if that has anything to do with privatization. I'm very skeptical that governments or voters care more about the long term than private markets. At least individuals care about leaving money for retirement. And even if you don't care, it's still senseless to deprecate your assets' value more than you gain from exploiting it.
> completely owning natural resources like lakes and forests
They wouldn't completely own them, they'd have property rights in them. Depending on how the property rights are structured you could have many owners of say a lake or a river.
> Those private entities would rationally take a long term vision
If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s
Or the polluting company with deep pockets would just buy the land and do whatever they wanted.
An unregulated free market is a terrible idea. It ends in massive monopolies and natural resource destruction at an absolute level.
It's not a bad thing that that's what a free market moves towards, per se, but that's why it needs to be and is regulated. Any worthwhile conversation isn't about whether or not to regulate it, it's a what level.
I spent many years trying to work out how that could be made to work, in a world where the people with the most money and ability to buy those resources being destroyed are also the people with the most interest in seeing them destroyed without impediment. I just can't make the math work out. When the oil and gas industry can cause wars involving the world's largest nations, in pursuit of their profits, how can I believe empowering them to buy every river will save those rivers? In a world where they can literally buy armies (even more directly and with even less impediment than they have today), how can I believe there will be less violence over oil?
I've read the same authors you've read on the subject (believe me, I hear you, and I have made the same arguments you're making more times than I can count). I was for many years a libertarian (big L and little l...card-carrying member of the party, worked for ballot access, etc.). I just don't believe in the premises of libertarianism any more. At least, not the free market uber alles part of those premises.
Also, I can't reconcile the idea of unlimited capital accumulation in the hands of a few that spans generations (e.g. land, water access, etc.) in a world of limited resources with my own beliefs about fairness, justice, and human freedom.
How do you feel about the notion of breaking from our feudal tradition and advocating for basic income? What excites me most about the idea is people would be free to check out of the system and use their own creativity to survive and thrive. Soon, when intellectual capital is understood to be the most valuable, this investment will be returned with dividends.
I support a basic income. Honestly, I think it is inevitable, or a lot of people will starve as we move past the need for a lot of unskilled labor. There simply won't be work for everyone...if we adhere to the old notion that everyone has to earn the basic necessities of survival, well, the results will be catastrophic. It's unfortunate that we'll have to wait until everything else has been tried before settling on the one thing that could actually positively change outcomes for huge swaths of people. There's already a lost generation of people who will never escape their school debt.
> I was for many years a libertarian (big L and little l...card-carrying member of the party, worked for ballot access, etc.). I just don't believe in the premises of libertarianism any more.
Limited exposure to some parts of the real world. I read a lot, worked a lot, and didn't make time for travel. I had few friends who were significantly different from me in terms of money/education/class/race/etc. Kinda like most people. A few years traveling full-time, getting to know homeless folks and undocumented folks, and seeing how class and race plays out in our "free market" system changed my mind on a few things.
And, I think dismissing libertarianism out of hand, as though it has no interesting/valuable ideas, is somewhat silly. The LP was literally decades ahead of the curve on LGBTQ rights, ending the war on drugs, and opposition to war (of all sorts). All at a time when those ideas were extremely unpopular in mainstream politics. I disagree with the premises behind their economic policy ideas, but it doesn't mean I don't understand the allure of the non-aggression principle (I just think they're mistaken about capitalism being free of aggression).
So, how about you? What took you so long to come to your views? Why weren't you born with the correct ideas on every issue? Or were you? You reckon you're right on everything now? How embarrassing it'll be when you find out in five years you were wrong about something today.
I think you misread my comment as sarcasm. It was an honest inquiry, if a little facetious. I should have written it differently. Thanks for sharing.
Given that you ask, my views on these things seem to be very similar to yours today, based on what you've written here. I've considered myself a small-l libertarian for most of my life. I think the difference is that I've never found the ideological purity of big-L Libertarianism very attractive.
That's why I asked the question. I really would like to understand what it takes to convince someone who buys into the Libertarian party line to embrace ideas like basic income, and to realize that privatizing everything simply will not result in the outcomes they think it will. I wonder if it's possible to convince them without their having had the kinds of life experiences you have had.
I think that libertarian ideas and libertarian activists could be a effective force for reform in this country--if only the most motivated (people like you who are motivated enough to work on things like ballot access) were willing to make the kinds of ideological compromises and embrace the kinds of ideas (like basic income) that could make libertarianism more broadly appealing.
My inquiry was also sincere, even if the tone seems harsh online. I was joking, on the assumption that most folks here are at least willing to examine their views on occasion.
The answer to what it takes to change minds on any subject?
Not taking a tone of "you're clearly an idiot". I do it all the time (particularly on issues I'm passionate about, like the horror that is animal agriculture), but it doesn't convince anyone, it just puts them on the defensive. And humans have somewhat broken brains such that defending a position makes one believe that position more strongly and more fiercely (even if it is demonstrably ridiculous; e.g. anti-vaccine folks).
Convince them to get outside of their comfort zone. Travel, activism, and volunteering, is what did it for me. Activism and volunteering probably need to be with and on behalf of folks unlike oneself to have any impact.
Ask questions rather than arguing. If someone discovers the uncomfortable points of their position on their own, they'll be willing to change their mind. One of the founders of CFAR (Center for Applied Rationality) once asked me a few questions that may have even planted the seeds of my change of heart when we happened to meet in NYC...specifically, she asked about the source of property rights, since I don't believe in gods, so I can't simply handwave it away as a " god given right". That stuck with me, because it's clear to anyone who is sincere that property is merely a fiction we all agree on, and it is a fiction that can be taken to unhealthy extremes. Asking the right questions is harder than ranting, but it actually works to change opinions, and serves to keep the conversation on a level of friendly chat rather than two ideologues bloviating.
Those arguments are based on the premise that the free market can solve all problems. Thus when something fails it's because there's not enough free market.
The other explanation is that the premise is wrong.
If the free market doesn't work together with anything that isn't organized as a free market then it's a flaw of the free market system. There always will be things that aren't a free market.
More specifically, a free market system can solve most problems it is applied to, given:
1. Property rights exist and are enforced.
2. There are minimal barriers to entry.
3. Transaction costs are low.
(#2 is of less interest here.)
The classic market failures all involve a violation of one of these. The tragedy of the commons is a property-rights failure, monopolies are a barrier-to-entry failure, and lots of other miscellaneous exploitation and big-corporate-player centralization issues are related to transaction-cost issues.
In this case, it's quite clear that property rights do not exist and are not enforced on things like the Atmosphere or the Ocean (good luck doing that internationally), and even if they did, imagine the transaction costs of tracking exactly how much in microbead pollution a given person has flushed down the drain? Anyone crying 'free market solution!' is being quite silly.
> What would prevent someone from, say, buying up all the water and then not selling any of it, or selling just a little to a handful of rich people?
First, no one has enough money to buy up all of the water. Second, even if they did, it wouldn't make sense not to sell it. Most people like making a profit and having more money. It wouldn't make sense to only sell it to wealthy people, because they don't use enough more water to exhaust supply in most places people inhabit and they'd be forgoing a lot of profit from selling water to normal people. Also governments also often sell water to politically connected business and agriculture groups at a lower rate than they sell to normal people.
It sounds like you see profit as the sole motivation of people's actions.
If someone owned all the water, they would have not just profit-making potential, but they would have a lot of power. In particular, they would have the power of life and death over virtually everyone on the planet.
In a free market utopia, these people could kill as many people as they liked by simply refusing to sell them water, and believers in a completely free market wouldn't lift a finger to stop them -- because, after all they're just freely doing what they like with their own property.
The world is full of people with malicious motives. The prisons are full of them, and there are plenty more outside of prison. Wars, ethnic cleansings, and genocides have killed people by the millions. Some of this was done for profit motives, but some done for other motives.
Don't for a moment think that people like that would hesitate to use the power in their hands to harm those they hated or wanted dead for whatever reasons of their own.
Then there the sociopaths, who would let others die simply because they think giving them water would be worth their bother, or maybe because they were just more interested in other things.
Also, you don't have to buy up all the water in the world to be able to wreak havoc. All the water in a particular water-scarce region might be enough.
Of course, water is just an example and an analogy. The fact is that free market believers have very little to nothing except faith in the free market that would prevent the concentration of wealth and power (in whatever form) and the subsequent abuse of such at the whims of those who wield it.
I appreciate your post and line of thinking, but am not at all convinced that our natural resources and spaces would end up better off being owned by a private company for financial gain. I don't trust private owners to take the required long-term view on those resources and spaces. And in cases where some benefit is derived (i.e., quicker action against microbeads), I think there are likely accompanying outcomes that are even worse (e.g., decreased access to fresh water or natural parks).
Unfortunately it seems the current market for public opinion that is the modern media is too inefficient, we need a high frequency bid/ask system that can implant ideas directly.
Free market can't prevent short cited assholes who don't understand what they're doing.
Smart people with the public good and long view can, however, do better in public policy that sets limits on wreckless actions.
If you want to see what happens when people don't give a shit look at China where Beijing recently had to close schools for several days because of the pollution.
> being owned by a private company for financial gain
This doesn't necessarily follow. Private ownership can be structured as something other than for profit. Non-Profit Land Trusts are big thing in many areas of the US for example. But even industry motivated groups might be a choice. Think a home-owners association of beach property owners (including resort hotel conglomerates) or fishing rights cooperatives. If either had stronger property rights and standing to remedy damages they would be motivated by longer term aims to ensure water quality. You might be right that this could have adverse consequences but I wanted the raise the possibility of options other than BigWaterCo.
> I don't trust private owners to take the required long-term view
If there's anything we know about politicians up for re-election in two years or unable to run for another term it's that they take a long-term approach to problems. /s
> Governments often protects polluters by limiting their liability.
Exactly, exactly, exactly.
As an environmentalist and libertarian, I can't stress enough how government is more often than not a partner in crime when it comes to polluters. One of the big reasons places like China are so polluted is the advance of industry is considered to part of the common good. Therefore, the polluters are given immunity and protected by the political system - giving no recourse for regular citizens.
China's pollution because of coal powerplants left over from industrialization, not special favors to industrial leaders or under-the-table deals. The Chinese government is also the largest green energy producer in the world.
What forms of recourse would citizens have against polluters without government intervention?
I hope you're not going to suggest 'they can shop elsewhere' as it's been proven time and time again that most citizens don't choose what they buy based on the greater good.
Sue them in court for damages. Folks sue corporations all the time for various reasons and often win. We should be able to sue polluters as well, but governments often protect them for various reasons (like tax base, campaign contributions, etc). Oil spills are a great example of corporations having immunity thanks to government.
The court system is an arm of the government. Are you saying the government should pass regulations and/or set out citizen rights that limit the potential behaviour of corporations?
No, I'm saying corporations lobby and have laws passed that protect them from (as well as from competition), making them immune. Going full-libertarian is not even necessary, just roll back those laws.
I think if you're going to claim that we're not taking one part of a philosophy into account, that part needs to be remotely possible, or you need to show how we can privatize the ocean.
Selling ownership of fishing rights over tracts of the ocean, while it has flaws, would be infinitely better than the free-for-all we have now, where nobody has an incentive to preserve any fish stocks.
What are you talking about? This is the absolute definition of the Tragedy of the Commons -- when you have a public resource it is in everyone's interest to exploit.
The free market does not just mean "anarchy! take everything!" There's no market here!
If you're resorting to arguing the semantic meaning of Free Market, then it is definitively "an economic system in which prices are determined by unrestricted competition between privately owned businesses."
With natural resources, the free market is certainly an unrestricted first-come first-serve market. Fishing quotas are restricted competition and price influential, which makes it not a free market, despite your attempts to redefine it as such to fit a narrative.
Quotas, seasons, and permits aren't really as good. As a fisherman you have no incentive to catch below your quota, since you aren't rewarded for leaving anything on the table. And the quotas are usually too high for political reasons, to avoid losing votes. Either way, they are centrally planned.
A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.
> And the quotas are usually too high for political reasons, to avoid losing votes.
This is a problem with some of those quotas - they're not being set up right. That's the failure of democracy though, not of central planning per se.
> A market solution would allow a fisherman to catch below quota and be rewarded in later years by replenished stocks in the waters he controlled.
That may work, in a type of business with big inertia (i.e. where you can't go out of business over a single season), if we could parcel water like that. Sadly, fish colonies don't respect arbitrary lines we draw on maps. I don't know if such a market solution is ecologically possible; fish need space, and they often need to travel.
Adding onto that, I can't imagine the logistical nightmare of privatizing the entire ocean including international waters, besides the root of the issue in which it solves nearly no problems.
What if I buy a 1 meter by 1 meter parcel of the ocean and charge bottom of the barrel prices to dump industrial waste in it? What if that square of ocean was 100 meters off shore from a beach in Los Angeles? If you don't want that then we're right back to government regulations.
It's possible to determine negative externalities before a product goes to market, and this 'pre-filter' regulatory framework and barrier to entry is decidedly not 'free market'.
Any solution that does not implement the above is a 'post-filter' approach which can result in permanent, irreversible damage to a system.
Even if we accept your post-filter scenario (which is not rational from a system design perspective), your 'privatize common resources' suggestion relies on the erroneous idea that public property rights are not equivalent to private property rights from a legal perspective.
Either type of right can be reduced to a legal right which gives the rightsholder standing to take legal action. Whether a rightsholder enforces those rights is simply a matter of whether the rightsholder is competently managing those rights, and both public and private entities can be good and bad at this.
In a situation where there are shared resources used by all actors in a system the simplest and logical solution is to have one entity which represents all actors managing those resources.
Your suggestion of transferring ownership / management of shared resources to a narrow subset of beneficiaries seems unavoidably complex, convoluted and illogical to me, having surveyed various arguments online for 'privatize all the things'.
What is the best resource you'd cite online? I've reviewed Walter Block and to be honest he seems like a total lunatic, but that won't necessarily stop me evaluating his arguments.
I just don't want to read a 494 page book on privatizing roads to get the gist of his arguments.
I wasn't actually arguing for water privatization, but rather I was arguing against blaming the free market for the current situation, one where the government owns most bodies of water and allowed this pollution.
I'm no expert on water privatization. I know a few economists have written about it, but it's unrealistic to expect them to come up with a great solution on their own. A good solution would have to evolve over time with decisions by judges etc.
AFAIK most proposals don't have a single entity owning a river, but rather people own rights to a certain amount of water from the river at a certain quality.
I wasn't referring to Walter Block's book on roads, but this one: "Water Capitalism: The Case for Privatizing Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, and Aquifers." I haven't read it.
AFAIK most proposals don't have a single entity owning a river, but rather people own rights to a certain amount of water from the river at a certain quality.
Isn't that pretty similar to how things work now, minus the quality part?
There is a common idea in economics that explains the problem with what you say: externalities. This is when my behaviour affects you in a way not captured by the market.
For example, if a forest is privatised and cut down the owner might be acting in their best (market) interest, but people living nearby will be negatively affected.
We could try and put a price on these negative effects, but it's very difficult so the better solution is normally to keep things private.
Essentially, you're arguing the solution to one set of externalities is to privatise, but that very privatisation will create a whole host of even worse externalities.
We see with climate change and carbon emissions that ensuring companies pay for their externalities (pollution) is very difficult post the event because there are strong vested interests against this, and the people affected negatively are many but spread out, there is little incentive on an individual level for them to go to the vast effort to fight against the polluter.
You are conflating privatization with free market economics. The two are not mutually inclusive, even though there is surely a large commonality among the respective advocates of each. Free market economics has more to do with the state intervention disrupting competetive markets. You're still correct that it has nothing to do with the government failure described in the link.
If the government "owns" a bunch of lakes and rivers, and someone else is polluting those lakes and rivers, then the government should sue them for damages (cost of cleanup) in addition to ordering them to stop doing it. After all, that's exactly what I would demand if I owned a swimming pool and someone kept dumping trash into it. Simply telling them to stop is not enough. They should pay for the cleanup as well.
So yes, I agree that this is a failure of government. The government should be a lot more zealous in protecting the value of all the natural resources that it claims for itself, perhaps even more so than private landowners.
> Most arguments that the free market can handle these problems start out with the recommendation that the resources involved (rivers, lakes, ocean) should be privatized. Economist Walter Block and others have written about ways this could be done. To fault free market arguments for not working when the waterways aren't privatized is to misrepresent the arguments. Most people aren't arguing that the free market is going to solve problems relating to unowned, unownable, or government owned property without first recognizing private property rights in those resources.
> Most arguments that the free market can handle these problems start out with the recommendation that the resources involved (rivers, lakes, ocean) should be privatized.
Either that, or you need to use the tax system to internalize the externalities. (Think carbon tax or London congestion charge.)
> There's just no good mechanism to stop massive harm to common resources
In economics, this is called "internalizing the externalities". There is a good mechanism that works very well, it's taxation. Instead of taxing productive things people do, tax the polluting things.
Also, the most polluted countries in the world tend to be the ones with centrally planned economies. There's nothing inherently environmentally conscious about central planning.
1. there are always uses of something that makes sense, and may contribute only insignificant downsides. Getting a regulatory exception is slow and expensive.
2. they produce revenue for the government, whereas banning is a cost sink
I'm a big free-market guy, but I agree that sometimes there are items which need regulation to prevent massive environmental damage. CFCs are the classic example, since they were eating a hole in the ozone layer.
A lot of these products feel mildly deceptive. When I buy a face cream I should not have to worry that it may be killing sea creatures. If that unexpected harm in unavoidable they should have to be honest about it and put it on the label.
> When I buy a face cream I should not have to worry that it may be killing sea creatures.
Exactly. But having to put such things on the label is a failure. We pay taxes so that the government can set up agencies ensuring, by means of regulation, that what we can legally buy is environmentally ok. If we have to worry if our face creams are bad for the environment, someone is not doing their job.
Government will never be perfect, in view of that why not regulate and inform the consumer? Allowing companies to do things like change product sizes (hidden by using the same size package) and alter ingredients without informing the consumer means that companies can more easily avoid backlash over their negative actions.
I actually used Native because it was legitimately natural, not the "natural" claim that Unilever/P&G make but still pack it with chemicals that shouldn't be in my body.
Would also like other recommendations for other bathroom products that are truly natural
Baking soda is pretty versatile. I wash my face with it, and I bet one could use it in combo with some other natural minerals or oils to make an effective toothpaste.
I've used baking soda and vinegar to replace shampoo and conditioner for three years now, great cost savings and I've finally learned to shave my face after I rinse the vinegar from my hair.
Well the free-market is a-moral, and as humans we much prefer things to be moral; like not letting homeless people die or not letting banks swindle retirees. In limited situations, concentration of wealth can produce good things. Pure free-markets have never worked because they've never existed, probably because people don't want them to begin with. Obtain your free-market, socialist, communist, etc policy proposals at the government cafeteria. A well balanced meal is the best meal.
I'm pretty libertarian myself so I understand your concern, but only if the "market" actually knew about this. The point I'm trying to make is that this article (posted here and Reddit) is the first time I'd ever heard of this.
I'd say I'm a pretty average person so I don't think the masses had a clue about microbeads.
What I believe and hope is that if the masses did know about this, the market would have reacted and forced action.
I think this is really naïve. The masses knowingly engage in a hell of a lot of wasteful and/or harmful behavior. I know flying uses a lot of hydrocarbons and literally affects global temperature [1], yet I still fly. A minority are much worse than average. I live in SF and I once had a roommate who “couldn't be arsed” to put recyclables in the recycle bin (which was literally next to the rubbish bin), for example. This man is well-traveled and is educated enough to be a private-school teacher.
Most people know they are supposed to recycle, but are unable to comprehend the negative consequences of not doing it.
It's even harder for people to be aware of their carbon footprints and the consequences of global warming. It never enters the brain of anyone I know that they might be increasing their footprint by flying. And they could tell you by what percent, even approximately, if you asked them.
You know and still fly. I literally feel nausea when I think about what I do when I fly, but I still do it to make my family happy. If anyone is behaving criminally you and I may be among the worst.
I don't think there's cause to feel guilty about flying or other technology. The transition to an advanced industrial society, in a competitive and violent world, requires ruthless forward progress if you want to create and defend your prosperity and freedom. In the long run, improved technology will allow us to stop damaging the environment. The best way to get there is to move full speed ahead. Between nuclear power, electric cars, biofuels, and other renewables, we are almost there.
But flying and transportation is mostly required for a functional society. We can easily live without micro-beads, so it's a bit easier to outright ban them.
The point here is that the government can be smarter than the market. The effort required to educate enough members of the public that microbeads are bad to the point that they become unprofitable is WAY larger than the point required to convince legislators and regulators to outlaw them.
Agreed. I've been using a brand of face soap with little scrubby beads in it for years, and had no idea the things were made of plastic. There's no way that the level of public awareness on this is anywhere near that of something like CFCs.
This is not what I was trying to convey. Doesn't absolve a company from wrongdoing. If a company is doing something horrific, but no one knows about it, that doesn't make it okay.
I was just trying to rebut the initial comment that this proves the market couldn't solve this.
I don't necessarily have an answer, but I am just saying, if the market isn't even aware, how could they even act?
The masses shouldn't matter. The companies shouldn't be making this crap in the first place, no matter how much the "market" wants it. Hence, market failure.
It's a kind of abstracted version of the tragedy of the commons, which is known specifically as an exception that the free market does not handle well (that is, assuming the pollution is being done to a shared resource rather than a private one.. If it was 'polluting' my septic tank and causing some kind of damage, I'd have a market-style incentive to fix it).
In reality, the market is usually the solution to the tragedy of the commons. In the case of the original, creating a propertization scheme and allowing the market to trade on the property and giving individual owners the responsibility for stewardship gives people incentive to not have their sheep overgraze, and this is better than having a central authority decide how the land should be used, which buts against the knowledge problem, or worse, capture.
The tragedy of the commons is somewhat distinct to regulation of things which directly cause harm (in the extreme example, murder) which we generally don't consider to be part of the 'free market'.
I think you're confusing free markets with artificial markets.
There are many shared resources that are easily exploitable by the free market. A central authority can create artificial markets on that resource to combat the exploitation by the free market, but it's still being heavily regulated which is not a free market characteristic.
One example of this is carbon credits with global warming, another is the Alaskan tradeable fishing quotas. Even following the common example of the Pilgrims, it was the enforcement of property regulations that solved the free-market exploitation of the land.
I think most free marketers would lump (certain) fishing quotas and property rights under "free markets", artificial though they may be.
SOX and NOX markets as well. Carbon markets (as they exist), not so much, but mostly because of completely insane equivalencies baked in, and weird credit schemes.
Not in any sense of the word free market is an enforced artificial market "free".
In fact, free market socialists see property rights on any productive property as skewing markets to favor the owners, which leads to wealth disparity and disproportionate ownership, making it not a free market. We see that today with free-market capitalism and the top 1%, which is why we have social welfare programs in place to redistribute wealth.
Free in free market usually refers to free will, and has little to do with disparity or disproportionality. You can choose to define free market however you wish but I think it's worth noting that you're out of line with how most people use language. Your point that property ownership is enforced is taken, but usually that's within the scope of "free" markets.
It's weird how people's brains work. Some people are quite capable of seeing all the bad things governments do, but are like totally blind when looking at the bad things corporations do (many of the free-market people, libertarians etc.). But you also have many people who see perfectly well all the unsavory things private corporations do, but who seem utterly incapable of seeing the negative aspects of governments (socialists, many liberals etc.).
Most free-market people are not incapable of seeing all the unsavory things private corporations do, they just disagree with the solution, contending that the State is often ineffective and regularly makes things worse, by protecting those companies from litigation (a cornerstone of most free-market theories) and preventing property rights that would incentivize people to defend the lakes and sea.
There are also many anarcho-socialist branches, which obviously see plenty of wrong with the State, preferring to do away with it; and even among the statist, many would tell you that the current capitalist states must be done away to bring a real solution.
After all, it was Marx who wrote "The existence of the state is inseparable from the existence of slavery".
You can believe whatever you want, but most systems of justice recognize things like proportionality and imminence.
While a nearby coal power plant is likely to harm your health, it's unlikely to kill you, so killing someone over it would be disproportional.
Also, even if it were going to kill you, it's not going to kill you right now, so shooting on sight instead of exhausting other avenues would be avoidable and hence not self-defense or justifiable.
Most people would sympathize with you as a victim of this coal plant, but find you guilty of a crime.
