The obvious answer to your question is "Life entails risk." Sometimes, that means bad things happen to you and you have to deal with the fallout. Objectivism is not a philosophy for people who want to be taken care of--it's a philosophy for people willing to stand on their own. And that means accepting that sometimes, something bad happens and there's no way to repay you the damages.
That is indeed the obvious answer. I wanted to see you state it outright, though, because it's an unbelievably poor answer.
Of course risk (like pollution and resource depletion) is an inevitable aspect of life. But also like those things, it is not a constant in terms of degree. Without regulation, other people's profitable activities can force you to share excessive amounts of the risk they generate, without sharing in the profits. In other words, risk is yet another externality that no Objectivist social order that's ever been described to me has any effective way to deal with. The person causing the risk might (or might not) also be sharing it themselves, but others (the other businesses on the block that gets burned down, in my previous example; or the people living in the town downstream from a crappy dam inadequately maintained by a private wealthy club on its own land) are forced to share it without their consent.
So, I appreciate this clarification of the compensation you'd offer the families of the people downstream who, when the dam breaks, end up trapped and injured in a gigantic pile of wood wreckage that piles up against a bridge with no means of rescue, and then slowly and inevitably burn to death when the pile catches fire. "Stand on your own. Sometimes, bad things happen." (See: Johnstown Flood, 1889, right around the heyday of laissez-faire capitalism.) At least as they mourned, they could be comforted that the rights of the elite to operate their country club as they saw fit, without the burden of government regulation or oversight, had been held properly sacred. Not like today, where red tape has made building an unreliable dam that can decimate a city nearly impossible, even on your own land! Such slaves we've become.
What nonsense. When I alter my original question it's to show that the answer given is inadequate to cover the actual scope of the question.
"What do we do if the ship catches fire?"
"If it's raining heavily, that might put it out."
"What if it's not raining?"
"Hey! No fair! That's a post hoc alteration of your original question!"
The ultimate reason why follow-up questions to insufficient answers introduce elements like unfortunate circumstances, uncooperative people, crimes, wars, shortages, exploiters, accidents, and disasters is this: if you don't need to account for those things, then just about any social system will work. I'm tired of hearing from Objectivists how wonderfully their system could work in ideal situations where the only risk to life and limb is deliberate physical assault by criminals or the government. Big deal. That's not hard. It's being able to resolve the problems introduced by market manipulators, exploiters, polluters, bigots, sociopaths, and every flawed human right down to ordinary distracted drivers that makes a social system necessary and useful.
No wonder you're sick of questions on those areas.
"Come marvel at how well this concept car performs, on straight smooth roads downhill in daylight with no traffic."
"How do you make it turn?"
"See, that's the kind of aggression that makes it impossible to talk to you people!"
Excessive risk as an externality is not a difficult concept. Any time an unregulated poorly-maintained dam looms upstream from a town, that represents an embarrassing failure of the social order in which it occurred. If it occurred under state communism, we'd blame poor coordination between central planners. If it occurred under a present-day Western government, we'd blame legal loopholes or corrupt zoning officials. If it occurred in a feudal system, we'd blame the foolishness of the baron who granted the dam builder permission to use the baron's land (it's all the baron's land) that way.
But in an Objectivist system, we'd blame no one, because there's no problem! Let the townspeople stand on their own and take some risk (for no benefit to themselves). Until the thing actually breaks, they have no cause for complaint. After all, the country club is taking a risk too. They might get sued later.
Or, if they don't like it, maybe the townspeople can get together and voluntarily raise funds to pay the country club to drain and remove the dam.
Just don't dare to ask, "what if maybe they can't?" Objectivists are so tired of hearing that!
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