Home > Uncategorized > As Callahan and Richman laud consumer/moral pressure on polluters, others tell us a BP boycott is stupid

As Callahan and Richman laud consumer/moral pressure on polluters, others tell us a BP boycott is stupid

Another BP post!

I noted in a post yesterday that Sheldon Richman has recently suggested that the best, nonstatist way to deal with climate change is “through a voluntary social movement that promoted an ethic [of] encouraging and pressuring people and firms to cease their destructive activities.”

 Likewise, Gene Callahan has argued that “One way negative externalities can be addressed without turning to state coercion is public censure of individuals or groups widely perceived to be flouting core moral principles or trampling the common good, even if their actions are not technically illegal. Large, private companies and prominent, wealthy individuals are generally quite sensitive to public pressure campaigns.”

Leaving aside Gene’s own troubles in dealing with his telephone company, it strikes me as a bit ironic to see libertarians over at the LvMI blog throwing cold water on the idea of channelling citizen outrage over the BP oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico into a boycott of BP. J. Grayson Lilburne has a post up to the effect that, because BP has soooo much cleaning up to do, those who clamor for a boycott of BP products, gasoline franchises etc. are acting against their own best interests.

And one commenter even suggested it was “irrational” to ever boycott a corporation –  because corporations are not people, and never learn! Right, because we face a corporate world, it is our duty as citizens to blunt our silly “emotional” responses. Thank good those enviro-fascists are just people and not corporations, otherwise we wouldn’t be able to hate them!

Guard June 15, 2010 at 12:59 am

Boycott BP, which is a corporation. The CEOs will have to retire early with their golden parachutes and the oilfield workers will have to get jobs elsewhere. That’ll teach BP a lesson!
Is it just me or does anyone else see anything irrational about anthropomorphizing a legal fantasy?

 I left various comments on the thread; I copy portoins here:

TokyoTom June 16, 2010 at 7:25 am

Grayson, while there’s a logic to your argument, it ignores several things – the least of which being BP’s ability to pay damages and cleanup by selling assets, the limited likelihood that BP will be held fully legally to account for this still unfolding (and masked) disaster, and the disaster fund government has already amassed from taxes.

The chief point, of course, that it is entirely understandable that many people – being humans and not corporations – are enraged by the “behavior” of the legal fiction we call “BP”. Any effective libertarian approach to this mess will expressly recognize the validity of peoples’ anger and find ways to productively channel it.

The kind of dissing that we see in some comments here of such emotions or the motivations of those injured is something that will certainly warm the cockles of a statist’s heart, but is counterproductive and has no part in Austrian thinking.

Quite to the contrary, to avoid further statism, Austrians are calling for a chanelling of moral outrage. See Gene Callahan and Sheldon Richman here: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/06/16/sheldon-richman-joins-gene-callahan-in-naively-arguing-that-if-man-39-s-activities-are-responsible-for-climate-change-we-need-not-government-but-simply-louder-and-more-obnoxious-enviros.aspx

Of course, Austrians with their thinking caps on can also come up with ways to undo the damage that the current system does, and improve freedom and resource management. See, e.g., http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/06/09/more-by-useful-discussion-by-carson-both-on-bp-s-fate-in-a-free-market-and-on-the-inept-feckless-and-captured-regulatory-state.aspx

Sincerely,

TT

 

TokyoTom June 16, 2010 at 6:59 am

Michael, again well said, if a bit overstated.

Except for dunderheads, Austrians recognize that there ARE real “ecosystems” and physical and other (communities and informal institutions) commons in which we all are raised and live. And all understand that we must all contribute actively in maintaining the vitality of those communities.

It’s just that many prefer culture wars against evil enviro-fascists than honest engagement on the ways that government ownership and management of the commons favors statist corporations and leads to fights over the wheel.

More at my BP-related and other posts: http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/search.aspx?q=bp

TT

TokyoTom June 16, 2010 at 7:09 am

Walt, I agree about “punishment”, but the fact of the matter is that there is no way in hell that those injured will ever be fully compensated. The whole Gulf population risks becoming oil serfs.

While I sympathize with shareholders, it should not go unnoticed how the use of the state shields shareholders from possible legal liability and certainly severs them from moral culpability. But what are corporations for, anyway?

http://mises.org/Community/blogs/tokyotom/archive/2010/05/17/persons-r-us-here-39-s-someone-39-s-interesting-thought-experiment-quot-what-if-bp-were-a-human-being-quot.aspx

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:
  1. No comments yet.
  1. No trackbacks yet.