This our biggest problem in the US, externalities are never priced in. Always easier to pay fines for pennies or to declare bankruptcy and start again.
You can make really good conservative arguments for say fighting climate change as it could upend traditional social order, but partisan polarization has made it an issue of "the other side" so mainstream conservatives aren't making those arguments IMHO.
They also know that when there are negative externalities, government action to try to counter them is often a cure worse than the disease.
Also "my proposal will be costly, but the positive externalities will outweigh them" is often stated, but rarely proven.
The OP indicates that the incentives of corporations driven by a profit motive is not to price in externalities. If not the government, what other mechanisms do you suggest?
It makes total sense to have debates over what things rise to the level of problem and what the best fix is but, at least in my state politics, Republican's seem to just abandon their principles for pragmatism (which is good) but I can't seem to figure how this doesn't cause an identity crisis. Having a "how a conservative evaluates market interventions" seems less taxing than getting pushed to a breaking point and then begrudgingly doing things not in line with your ideals.
It's important to recognize that both markets and government action sometimes fail, and why, to have a grownup conversation about options.
Because IME markets in general are so short-sighted they literally plow ahead with profit over all until the river is burning (pollution in Cleveland) or thousands are poisoned for decades (Flint water crisis). And often don't stop or self correct even in such extremes.
Some governments have certainly overreacted to market failures, but I don't think that means every conversation has to qualify that.
A good government solution to this has been emissions trading¹. The government sets up a maximum allowed emission rate, and producers can trade those rights between them. By making it costly to pollute, producers have incentives to lower pollution, and the allowed rate can be lowered over time, improving the air for everyone.
If markets are so stupid and short sighted, it's hard to understand how they've generated 250 years of huge and sustained increases of material wealth all over the planet. 10x as many people now live far richer and healthier lives than 250 years ago.
True, a river burned in Ohio 50 years ago, but that's very, very small potatoes in the big picture as I see it.
Now, you admit collective action is needed. Great. Because unbridled markets gave us slavery, child labor, 12h-7d work schedules, company towns, the food pyramid, greenwashing, and robber barons.
So the solution to externalities is largely collective action. Because obviously the market alone didn't make emissions trading happen. Markets were backed into a corner. And it feels like a half assed solution considering we don't need to burn coal any more. The market just values profit more than quality of life of those near the site of production.
If we look solely to markets and careless regulation then the biggest companies will capture regulators. Then we're on the path to modern day feudalism. Seeing Amazon hollow out local competition only makes this feel more and more real here in the Midwestern US.
"A basic principle of modern state is that costs and risks are socialized to the extent possible, while profit is privatized." (Noam Chomsky)
Look at the housing market. People take risky loans make a ton of money, they keep it.
Housing market goes to crap, immediately they get bailed out.
And voters vote for it!
unless the choice is to not biy their product how or why woukd these get factored in? how would you do so and retain a nominally free society?
How would you justify this being our biggest problem?
> how would you do so and retain a nominally free society?
Nominally free doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want. Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, as the saying goes. If you want to take actions that affect everyone negatively then you should be paying for that. Inversely there are also positive externalities and we should probably subsidize/pay groups who produce those
Google "pricing in externalities"
"An external cost is a cost not included in the market price of the goods and services being produced, i.e. a cost not borne by those who create it".
The less real costs are factored into a product, the less the market able to efficiently price it. Many of our greatest modern problems could be ameliorated if we handled external costs better: pricing industrial runoff, CO2 emissions, antibiotic resistance, etc.
We mostly choose not to price in those costs, because the consequences of such are generally delayed, and it allows us greater standard of living for the moment. When given the options "meat will be cheaper but infections harder to cure in 20 years", or "energy will be cheaper but large scale climate disasters will be common in 50 years", we've chosen cheap meat and energy.
I'll add to this that in many cases this also eliminates a lot of the subjective/contextless moralizing around spending of energy/mass surplus that goes on, resulting in more individual freedom. It's common in environmental discussions for example for someone to complain about <xyz> form of transportation, often cars or aircraft but I've also seen it come up in rockets. This can lead down all sorts of rabbit holes in terms of cost/benefit etc. But the entire discussion could be avoided as far as AGW if we'd simply make all hydrocarbon fuels CO2 net neutral (either via producing them directly from atmospheric CO2 with renewable energy or scrubbing an equal tonnage of emissions from the atmosphere for every ton CO2 released). Then whatever price the fuel was would fully reflect the CO2 cost, which would naturally filter out to all users, and everyone would be free to spend on that or not as they wished. All sides would optimize to the pricing, producers would search for ways to make the net neutral hydrocarbons cheaper, users would seek ways to use them more efficiently, and those buying services would do the same. That's a Free Market at work, the emergent result of lots of decentralized individual decisions is a much more efficient allocation of resources, and without any central judgement around "oh, that's not a worthy usage" needed.