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Comment by cecilpl | Hacker News Reader

Leaded gasoline. Using it allows you to increase the compression of your engine, which improves fuel economy.

The total cost of lead in the environment by far outweighs the economic benefits, which is why it's banned, yet for each individual person it makes economic sense to use leaded gasoline if you can.

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The libertarian argument here would be "burning leaded gas is a tort against everyone else breathing the air", right? You clearly have to special case it because the harm is so diffuse; you could presumably either have a government ban it, or have some objective standard where non-compliance is itself taken as a tort, and then something like class-action. There's the California option -- Prop 65 has this weird way for private people to find violations and be paid for them, although the enforcement action is taken by the state.

I can't see "someone with a $0.0001 harm files suit against the aggressor" x 7b being a scalable solution without some kind of optimization. Maybe you could imagine some kind of little automated lawyer-agent which sues behind on your behalf, with everything happening at a micro-transaction level, but that seems kind of silly.

Regulation must exist for valid reasons (clear evidence of environmental harm exists for lead emissions) and be applied equally. Neither of those is true here.

We aren't actually discussing taxi regulations in this subthread, just regulations in general, and why you can't judge their merit by letting them compete in a free market.

Nice one! This is a much better example than my more generalized one of car emissions in general.

> The total cost of lead in the environment by far outweighs the economic benefits

Evidence?

Putting extra lead in the environment increases the risk of people coming into contact with larger amounts of lead. Lead has been shown to cause health problems and birth defects.

Literally 3 seconds on Google for "lead cost benefit analysis" yields this 1985 study by the EPA: http://yosemite.epa.gov/ee/epa/eerm.nsf/vwAN/EE-0034-1.pdf/$...

It's even worse than that, I think. I may have missed it since I just skimmed that document, but I don't think it covered violent crime.

It has been shown rather conclusively that overexposure to lead in childhood leads to an increase in violent crime in adulthood. Banning leaded gasoline was the single most significant cause of the large decrease in violent crime in the US in the latter part of the 20th century. Here's one story on this [1]. Cites to peer reviewed journals are available from Wikipedia [2].

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/ban-on...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraethyllead#Toxicity

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