Political Memes

individuals and groups can still seek restitution from polluters who contaminate or damage their land or resources.

Ridiculous. So what, every time a company releases CO2, there's a class-action lawsuit by every single human on earth?

They can also organize boycotts, leverage grassroots reputation networks, employ social pressure, and engage in direct negotiations to compel cleaner production methods.

Libertarians love boycotts as this magical solution for keeping companies in line. In reality, they very rarely work. And of course, to the extent that the do work, boycotts are just as effective at enforcing bad things as they are at good things. Before the Civil Rights act, decentralization allowed racist communities in the US South to withhold service based on race. If a business owner chose to tolerate black customers, they risked losing racist white ones. If you released certain areas from centralization, they would return to such practices, as well as discrimination along other factors such as sexual orientation.

But you don't support that, so it wouldn't happen. All the prejudices of these rural communities would simply disappear, because you don't like confronting their existence, and again, the idea is confined to your mind where you can simply choose not to think about them.

What it comes back to is that boycotts are simply another form of power, and power can be leveraged to do both good or bad things. Because it is a less effective form of power, you're able to romanticize it as harmless, but to the degree that it's harmless, it doesn't work to do good things either. Any power capable of doing good things like punishing polluting companies is also just as capable of punishing people for being queer. It comes back to what I said at the beginning, there is one physical reality and what happens in it is simply a question of who holds what power and what they do with it.

All you're doing is romanticizing decentralization without actually examining the world and how it works.