Small pockets? Mike we're talking about all of Northern Europe here. Also you're leaving out that their economy is actually significantly less regulated than ours is. Just more heavily taxed.

I guess I follow David but I think I disagree. Doing well or doing badly is a relative term. Are we as humans in these economies doing well? Doing badly? Compared to when? Compared to who?
Maybe I'm being too literal here but I'm seeing comparative flourishing; less people starving; less people dying. Perhaps people say they're unhappy but aren't people always going to find ways to be unhappy in the midst of plenty? Facebook drama makes some people unhappy. Does that mean that facebook makes us flourish less? Or am I looking at this from too much of a macro perspective and we're comparing welfare from say this year to last year?

Well so is the GOP collectively loosing their minds but I'm not predicting the end of the country based on it.

The Weekly Standard publish moronic right wing screeds with little to no basis in reality or law? That's unpossible!!

Hmm so reads as a Dutch Hitchens or something? I guess I'm still missing the point. The Dutch have political arguements over social and economic issues? Are the militiamen proof that the US is on the verge of financial collapse and dangerously close to some absolutist government?

Geert?

Mike, you're lumping the Scandinavians in with the Gauls, Spanish, Greeks and Italians which strikes me as unfair since the Scandinavian European social welfare states appear to be flourishing with neither economic collapse nor tyranny threatening.

That's very interesting and to be honest a couple of your words, eudamoniacally for instance, flew right over my head. That said I believe I can say with confidence that by virtually any metric of social welfare the markets are doing well.

Falling back to Maslow's Hierarchy I'd say that the market societies have more/a higher % of people working on the social acceptance and even self actualization levels of the hierarchy and fewer working on the basic needs levels than in any other organized society of comparable size.

Civility Gentlemen

Okay how about a different metric then? Fewer of our children die early, more of our elderers live longer and more happily, more of our adults live more comfortably and painlessly.

Wow, it's dramatic all right. My brain stopped for a second after I read it.

I assume we'd have somewhere else that the former goods of inheritance would be going? Do you mean like essentially an estate tax of 100% and no minimum estate size?

Certainly that would produce an enormous amount of revenue.

How would we prevent living people from moving their assets out of the country or prevent them from simply giving all their assets to their heirs before they died?

Assuming it worked, what would we be spending all this revenue on?

Or unless we're willing to embrace governments and regulations that are bigger than strictly local?
Iceland, for instance, has strictly and successfully regulated their commons and their fish stocks are being harvested sustainably. In my own youthful home turf the shellfish and lobster fisheries have been strictly regulate by provincial and federal (statist) intervention and are not in danger of extermination.
Meanwhile the fisheries that exist in deep international waters like tuna for instance which cannot be regulated by any one government (essentially a libertarian ideal) teeter on the brink of commercial extinction (with actual extinction powdering her nose in the wings). The response of the unfettered markets; some kinds of tuna flesh are worth an absolute fortune now assuring that even though the amount that can be harvested is decreasing that decreased amount is still worth extracting.

I take no joy in this at all. In economics I hew in the libertarian direction more often than not. But there are some fields where statist intervention seems to be not merely unavoidable but desperately necessary.

Goldberg is smart, and funny. The problem is that he's a rock solid advocate of republican party "conservatism" so he throws out some absolute knee slapper tropes.

But that doesn't mean he can't be smart or funny.

As to the actual meat of your post, yes I agree. I suppose you could say that the Communism vs Capitalism war is over (Communism lost) but the Socialism-Libertarian debate is ongoing.

Well what is it that you propose Freddie? What is the third way? The man(woman) who finds a way to break our economic system out of the prison of the Command Economy-Market Economy spectrum will be a giant, lauded in history and society for all time. What is the third way?

I was thinking more like entire life insurance salesmen but bones can work.

I don't disagree Mike but we have also seen CRA's become captive to large clients with the same result but no government interference. Arthur Anderson for instance.

So Nob you're saying... local governments are the libertarian solution to the commons?

I suppose that's true Freddie, though it does bear noting that if someone invented a new system of distribution, Capitalism, Communism and then something new, Newism lets call it, the world would beat a path to his door. Fame, fortune and acclaim would be theirs for the taking. Why hasn't someone done this yet? What is the third way?

Don't worry Bob. Though I fear I may regret it I have added Voegelin (who I shall from now on refer to affectionately as "The Kraut") to my reading list.

Do you know if The Kraut had anything to say about east Atlantic fisheries? I’d be surprised, he’s a philosopher after all, but then again Germans are a pragmatic bunch.

Freddie, I hesitate to point this out, but there are hungry and impoverished people in the Scandinavian countries.
I will agree, heartily, though that if we were more like the Swedes in government and populace then we'd probably be better off... thing is I don't think we're like them.

So the question is as I'm hearing it: "I acknowledge that libertarians don't have a solution to this example, I also acknowledge that the states involved solved this problem with government power but imagine instead that the states involved were immoral and didn't solve the problem. What would you do then?" In the context of North America if the governments involved were immoral on this issue I personally would vote against them. In the context of a non-democratic state like China I suppose it'd be an issue of either revolution or war? Fortunatly for us China's acid rain falls in the Pacific or on China though I do hear the Chinese are eager to clean the issue up simply because the fix isn't immensly hard.

The sentiment and intentions are 100% noble Freddie and I salute you for them. But we're dealing in economic systems, not sentiment. The road to hell is paved in good intentions, noble sentiment and life insurance salesmen.

It's funny Jay, I'll give you that, but your hand ain't an answer unless there’s meaning on your palm that I’m missing.

How, without invoking either a government or a government like entity, would you deal with say the Atlantic fisheries for one example. In the absence of a government forcing those scrubbers over the smoke stacks what would have been the ideal method of dealing with acid rain?

Only one reason Nob, nowhere near the only one. As to pricing externalities the problem is I have not heard nor read any scheme yet for dealing with the commons that sounds even remotely believable.

I'd be amused if I didn't suspect that the dough for this nonsense came from the feds.