Give me liberty, or give me strangling regulation!
The self-contradictions in economic libertarianism are acknowledged even by libertarians. Ron Paul himself has accepted that some constraints on pollution are necessary, to prevent polluters in one geographical area from inflicting harm on people in other geographical areas—acid rain, where smokestack emissions in one place inflict damage downwind, being a simple case in point. Water pollution operates under a similar principle. Unregulated, uncontained pollution represents an “externalized cost”—there’s a cost paid not by the polluter but by the victims. In general the victims—people, plants, animals—are indirectly injured, and each individual only by a tiny amount at any one time in any one place. The damage is cumulative—little noticed in the moment, but with large consequences over long spans of time.
You’d think that externalized costs of many kinds would present difficulties in principle for most libertarians—coal plants release mercury into the atmosphere, causing damage to health outside the coal plant, for which coal plants should be held responsible.* It’s part of libertarianism that everyone should be free to do what they want, as long as it doesn’t hurt others. Ergo, to be consistent, individuals (to include corporations, whom the Supreme Court has deemed to have the rights of individual citizens), should be no freer to spew toxic contaminants at the public, than to rob them at gunpoint.