Individual rights must be defined precisely, or, like you said, many individuals will claim to have a right to do something which causes havoc for their neighbors. But this isn’t a problem with individual rights, it is simply confusion about what is a right and what isn’t.

Frequently, these issues arise in the context of property use. For example, an individual may claim to have a right to heat his home by burning wood in his fireplace. But if he is causing wood smoke to drift across his neighbors’ property and into their homes, he has exceeded the limits of his right and begun to infringe on the rights of his neighbors.

Of course, people cannot live in a community without some give-and-take, because they crowd each other with the activities of their daily living. But that doesn’t mean that the individual rights discussion should be discarded. No other philosophy of government has legitimacy. Fascism, socialism, communism, dictatorships, etc. may be efficient and easy to administer, but there are more important values than efficiency and ease.

As for your comment about societal benefits, I have to disagree. Roads, electricity, hospitals, clean water, and an ample food supply are not the property or product of society; they are the product of individuals–sometimes working in collaboration–to produce goods. Society as such does not produce anything. Every act is done by an individual. If a group of men build a road, it is not society that has built it, it is those men, and they have the right to it. If another group has paid for the building of the road, then the have purchased the builders’ rights. The road doesn’t come from or belong to society; it belongs to those who have paid for it. Sadly this easy tracing of property rights becomes all muddled when government taxes the citizens and then pays for things using the tax money.

Don’t get me started on Ayn Rand. She had some good ideas, but her unnecessary and rather misguided hostility toward religion may have damned the libertarian movement to eternal obscurity.

I recognize and accept the point from an efficiency standpoint, but I just can’t get around the need for a principled justification for any and all government infringements of liberty.

Ayn Rand from Atlas Shrugged, illustrating the opposite end of the spectrum.

I’m uncomfortable with the litigation solution for all other ills. I suspect that forcing everyone to court for all non-irreparable harm damages is good in theory, but a lousy solution in reality. The costs of court – not just attorney fees, but education, time & opportunity costs – are significant and create a fairly high threshold for getting into court by default.

The left doesn’t like this solution because the poor are much less likely & able to use courts (or “have access”). The right doesn’t like this solution because the costs often make it cheaper for defendants to fold on a nonmeritoroius claim than fight it. And nobody likes that this solution funnels vast amounts of money through attorneys to resolve situations that could be resolve more cheaply by statute or prevention.

If the costs & requirements of going to court as a plaintiff or defendant were negligible, and courts could reliably get damages right, I’d agree with you. But disproportionately large damage awards, filing fees, defense fees, discovery costs, etc – all those things suggest to me that courts should be used only in “big” instances of harm, not in all non-irreparable instances.

This is why I think some regulation ought to go past preventing non-irreparable harm. The question of whether regulation should focus on prevention or reparation hinges on the nature & extent of the damages. I know that erases any nice bright line – the type of lines that libertarians love to draw – but I don’t think life has easy bright lines.