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SilasBarta comments on Typical Mind and Politics - Less Wrong
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As a libertarian with Yvain's hatred of noise, I may have some insight on why this is a dissatisfying answer.
But people can't quite anticipate all the ways that others can be jerks[1] and will therefore assume certain rights which other people, by will or accident, can find holes in: the relevant rights weren't defined like one might think.
So, as I've ranted on my blog, imagine that it just so happens that your neighborhood doesn't prohibit the level of motorcycle noise that is just enough to drive you batty. Then, I come by and rev my motorcycle near enough to your window to annoy you, but not violate your rights.
No problem, right? You "just" pay me to go away. Problem solved.
Er, until the next biker, who hasn't sold his right to you, comes by and extorts -- that is the right word for it -- from you the same way. What next? Do you buy out everyone in the world? Do you sell your home? Well, who's going to buy the house with the Harley extortionists?
At some point, Coasean bargaining breaks down and becomes extortion. I have a neat graphic for this too. Go here, scroll down, and replace "pollution" with "loud noise". (And maybe "Bob Murphy" with "Robin_Hanson"...)
[1] Okay, okay, people with different psychological impressions of stimuli.
If you have the right to make noise and someone else wants to pay you to be quiet, you might pretend to like noise more than you do to get them to pay you more. But if you have the right to keep things quiet and someone else wants to pay you so they can make noise, you might pretend to like quiet more than you do to get them to pay you more. The fact that people can pretend to want things more than they do makes deals harder regardless of which is the efficient outcome.
The problem isn't that people might pretend to like noise. Their liking of noise is irrelevant. The problem is that
a) Annoying people is a path to wealth, and b) Even paying them off doesn't make the problem go away, but draws in more people to try the same trick.
The motorcycle revver could actually hate noise, but simply love extortion payments drawn from the wealth that society has -- or at least, has until people like him become too common and too tolerated.
It's all about incentives. Rewarding people for threatening to do, but refraining from, some action, will lead to people capable of threatening convincingly making a great deal of wealth, up to some equilibrium point where either the action is sufficiently tolerated by society or the people who don't like the action have become sufficiently poor that the public threats to do it are no longer rewarding enough.
Yes, exactly right, but ... did you mean that as a reply to RobinHanson?
Er, perhaps. I was generalizing a bit from what you said, so I wanted the context of your post. It was more directed at uninvolved readers, I think.
But I haven't had much coffee yet today so I'm not sure.
Oh, okay. That works too. You have enough coffee; I'm just too combative today ;-)
If there's no public regulation of noise, and I feel like being noisy, why would I offer to pay a quiet-liker? I'll just be noisy and stop if someone pays me to. The situation isn't symmetric, because the quiet-liker wants the noise-maker to change their default behavior, but the noise-maker doesn't care about the quiet-liker's default behavior.
Regulation is different from property rights. People could have a property right to make noise, or to prevent noise, or there could be regulation to set a given level of noise or quiet.