What Would Libertarians Do About The Gulf?

Edward Glaeser wants to know:

Consider the purely hypothetical case of a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The traditional libertarian would argue that regulation is unnecessary because the tort system will hold the driller liable for any damage. But what if the leak is so vast that the driller doesn’t have the resources to pay? The libertarian would respond that the driller should have been forced to post a bond or pay for sufficient insurance to cover any conceivable spill. Perhaps, but then the government needs to regulate the insurance contract and the resources of the insurer.

Even more problematically, the libertarian’s solution requires us to place great trust in part of the public sector: the court system. At times, judges have been bribed; any courtroom can be influenced by the best lawyers that money can buy.

This strikes me as a critique of extreme libertarianism (which, alas, tends to crowd out other variants). I believe in strong and aggressive government regulation of this kind of thing. So that companies like BP do not walk into disasters like this one.

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