Re: The Problem of Social Cost, Part 2

Upon the establishment of the moral foundation for the assessment of the situational economics, should we cease our pursuit of the incidental justice by downplaying those minorities of harms?

It is the role of the government; to be specific, the legislative branch is the one who should undertake the responsibility of handling the harmonization of all of the implications of the proper operation of the facilities that would initially be able to cause a nuisance via the use of the statutory provisions. Moreover, it is not the subject of judicial interpretation but rather the question of maximizing public welfare given the circumstances and the necessary trade-offs in the economic realm, in addition to the inconvenience born by the public or adjoining residents. It is the conclusion that I can come up with after the article covers the case of the airports.

The more the state can be described as the so-called Welfare State, the more rights of encroachment on individual freedoms can be present in that state. We can assert that under the notion of welfare, we may justify so many (sometimes even outlandish) disturbances that are, from the outset, socially beneficial, marginally. Furthermore, depending on public opinion and partially because the powers are granted mainly by the elective legislators who change over time, the powers can be construed differently.

The whole article hinges on the unresolved conundrum, sometimes regurgitates – yet with different examples, to make the discussion more compelling and the answers, if there are such at all, more grounded– the gain from preventing the harm is greater than the loss which would be incurred elsewhere as a result of stopping the action which produces the harm.

When considering whether someone can create a nuisance and not be punished, we should look into the statutory authority that sometimes might grant such exceptions and allow specific amounts of harm. However, it does not mean that the harms are and should be without the limitation of their scale. The example of the sparks that come out of the railway gives us even more details on how to handle such cases. To be specific, a proper notification of the railway within a reasonable period is required, and in addition to that, a description of the particulars of the harm is also necessary.

Interestingly enough, upon concluding, the article emphasizes that the question being discussed is whether and to what extent compensation should be allowed. I can not trace any valid reason why there is so much criticism of Pigou's reasoning; it chastises him in different ways, accusing him of having faulty standpoints that do not apply to the legal analysis. However flawed his arguments might look at the outset, Pigou is solid enough to be accounted for when coming up with the revelations of the interrelatedness of economics and the law. Still, while not necessarily hatred, slight animosity is incorporated into many sentences and propositions Coase raises. There is a much more fascinating story of their relationship when, whether academic or otherwise.

Social products equal private products minus the fall in the value of production elsewhere, for which the business pays no compensation the business pays no compensation. This statement might serve as a general outlook on the article. While being a substantive conclusion by itself, it does aggregate the main idea of the social cost.

Another problem of the social cost that is even more nuanced and sensitive for society to discuss is the right of people to be secure, to be defended by their state and by all of the men who are part of such a defense, even if it is by nature involuntary. It is hard to choose the best, the most human stance on this issue, considering all of the complexities of the concept of the draft and conscription, which are human rights violations from the perspectives of many libertarian thinkers. However, providing for the common defense is the social cost that should be considered when trying to balance social arrangements, which are at the crux of the article and have been discussed at length. There are other even more obscure social arrangements that we as a society hold tight onto, and trying to devise what it is the most appropriate way to address the trade-offs, such as marriage, child-bearing (in terms of the state's thinking on how to reproduce population, that is the issue that is currently being integrated into contemporary political discussions at the highest level).

Whether it is the consumer protection regulations that companies adhere to o to or the court's decision on who is the better custodian for the children in divorce cases, the cost of negative consequences of the decision sought to resolve the dispute should be taken into account; it is totally up to par to the judicial process to neglect minor details or even not to take into account some of the economic consequences. Yet, when the implications exceed the specific threshold of the economic value, the approach to the estimate of the social value adjusts itself.

The conclusion might come from the baseline reasoning of every lawyer and economist who is about to advise the decision-maker or make the decision themselves. Even with this, we have ample cases where such reasoning is not just not followed but outright neglected, sometimes to the detriment of the many goals of social justice that we as humans are in relentless pursuit of morality. How can we arrange for more stringent adherence to such a pursuit? There are no clear-cut solutions in social science; all we can do is draw parallels and maximize the system's effectiveness after the broad approach to its optimization that would inevitably include the audit of the preexisting models.

Had we started to pay more attention to the issues of social imbalance, the world would have been different, but we don't, partially because we can't.