Ray Dillinger wrote: [...snip...]
Now, let's assume we've a neighbor making bombs and his garage is 15 ft. from your childs bedroom? Let's ask the same sorts of questions?
If it's a residential neighborhood, then it was probably developed by a commercial real estate developer. In order to improve his bottom line, he will probably retain ownership of certain property rights...
Only an American could write this! You guys live in new houses, most of you. Whoever the property developer was in my neighbourhood in London, they probably died well before the first world war. And the company I bought my flat from went into liquidation some years ago, with the owners ending up in jail... Anyway in practice, right now, even in America, most people don't live in houses owned by property developers, and don't have the extensive set of complex legal conditions imposed on them that your idea would require. How does your "market-controlled anarchy" handle, say, building development on flood plains? A big political hot potato here at the moment, after our little brushes with real weather in October, & I should think a bigger one for anyone within 100 miles of the Mississippi and 40 feet of river level. I have no problem with the idea that someone who builds or buys in a flood-risk area should bear the risk of flood damage to their own property, which they probably got cheap because of the risk. (In the October floods in England there was some prat on the TV going on about how unlucky it was that the SAME PEOPLE got flooded out in Gloucester this time round as did last time. I couldn't help humming that old Sunday School song "The Wise Man built his house upon the rock... the rain came down and the floods came up, the rain came down and the floods came up...") But, by building on floodplains, and even more by "improving" farmland with drainage and dykes & bunds and various barriers to water flooding the land - in other words by defending your own property against floods - you make the floods more dangerous for others when they come. One of the reasons that some of the floods were worse than expected this year is that the water which used to spill onto seasonally flooded farmland now is constrained to stay in the river and breaks its banks somewhere else. So what do you do when the flood wipes out your house because some farmer 20 miles away drained his own land, as he has every right to do? Sue him? And if he can't afford it? (which he can't of course if the flood has just wiped out 3 streets of posh shops in a small city). [...snip...]
As we've discussed before on the list, in the cases of commen services like fire fighting which are converted to profit making enterprises, how is intentional fire starting to be prevented?
It's very hard. Probably the best route would be again through property developers; the property developer could retain the exclusive right to sell fire insurance on these buildings, and then license the right *only* to insurance companies who contributed a set percentage of premiums to a local firefighters company. Getting all these services straightened out is just good business from the property development POV.
That's how things were run in London in the 18th century. It didn't work very well. Which is whey they started paying for the fire brigade out of tax. The problem is you don't want your *neighbour's* house to burn down.Even if you really hate the neighbour, it is dangerous for you.