Oh, agreed -- I'd like to see the notion of "private property" well protected moving forward. I just think the way its strongest advocates operate is going to do much more harm than good (in, eg, the same way the Republicans slagging every last Democratic policy proposal with "that's socialism" is doing plenty to make socialism look harmless and appealing in the modern era).

But, you have to be realistic:

- if you accept a libertarian notion of self-ownership, then it follows that, eg, I ought nought to have you blow smoke in my face unless i consent to it (b/c you're tampering with my property, no)?

- now, as a practical matter people agree to overlook certain things (eg: your campfire is infinitesimally smokifying my air here back in town, but it's so negligible that I ought not to care about it; very literally the stress of worrying about it is worse for me than your smoke is)

- it'd be nice if you can adopt a universal standard for when your (infinitesimal) actions are something I have to ignore

- but unless you already have that agreement you're back into coercing people; it does seem useful to you, I'm sure, to think that "since I've scientifically shown that my blowing smoke in your face doesn't actually harm you, so I'm going to keep doing it", but now you're not that far removed intellectually from eg eminent domain "I've demonstrated that demolishing your home in order to finish this expressway is manifestly for the economic benefit of the entire city -- including you -- so even though normally I'd like to respect your property rights in this patch of land today I say 'tough luck!'"

- this is why the boundaries of private property are always ultimately a political problem: usually people are looking out for their own interest, as they choose to define it; to get someone to deliberately sacrifice their own perceived self-interest requires either force or politics; force works but is undesirable and doesn't scale, either, so you're left with politics

This is where the folk libertarianism (along with any naive or simplistic approach to being pro-property-rights) is going to flounder in the new century, if present trends continue:

- you can't pretend your actions "don't effect other people until they do"; the reality is that "your actions effect everyone else, but sometimes (usually, even) everyone else agrees to pretend as if they don't"

- you look like a hypocrite if you on the one hand want to maintain absolute say over how you use your own resources but on the other hand want to force other people to accept your decisions about which uses of their property (their bodies, their air, etc.) they need to just man up and take; you also look stupid if you can't see this point

- you also look politically and rhetorically dumb when you speak casually about what risk-of-harm to others you're comfortable ignoring (and would expect other people to ignore); it's rather obvious that, eg, DanielBMarkham is fine with, say, some action of his having a .001% odds of giving his neighor's kid asthma (picking at random) -- DanielBMarkham is not his neighbor's kid, after all -- but step outside the space of just "thinking in words" and you'll see why that's not a winning pose (it's made worse by the way that risk-of-harm is low-and-diffuse but harm is typically severe-and-concentrated).

What I'm trying to drive home is that everything you've said is valid, but you're not going to change minds with that argument (at most you'll make people aware of a particular danger if you carry something to its logical extreme).

I think the best long-term approach is to focus more on design and infrastructure (eg: intelligent garbage processing, products designed from start-to-finish to neatly decompose into recyclable components -- this is called "reverse logistics", fyi) rather than trying to directly win the political war over where the lines ought to be drawn.

If you can get to where people can continue doing what they do now but with far less externality production, then you will easily be able to keep the lines drawn mostly where you'd want them to be (at least for most actors).

The issue here is that to get to where it's safe to be mindless again is not going to happen promptly (if at all) without some kind of directed regulatory push; that is not only nontrivial -- and dangerous -- but also unlikely barring some other political shifts.