Chapter 13 Conservation, Ecology and Growth
Liberal Complaints
Left liberal intellectuals are often a wondrous group to behold.
In the last three or four decades, not a very long time in human history,
they have, like whirling dervishes, let loose a series of angry complaints against free market capitalism.
The curious thing is that each of these complaints has been contradictory to one or more of their predecessors, but contradictory complaints by liberal intellectuals do not seem to phase them or serve to abate their petulance, even though it is often the very same intellectuals who are reversing themselves so rapidly, and these reversals seem to make no dent whatever in their self-righteousness or in the self-confidence of their position.
Let us consider the record of recent decades.
1.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the liberal intellectuals came to the conclusion that
capitalism was suffering from inevitable secular stagnation, a stagnation imposed by the slowing
down of population growth, the end of the old Western frontier, and by the supposed
fact that no further inventions were possible.
All this spelled eternal stagnation, permanent mass unemployment, and therefore the need
for socialism or thoroughgoing state planning to replace free market capitalism.
This on the threshold of the greatest boom in American history.
Two, during the 1950s, despite the great boom in post-war America, the liberal intellectuals
kept raising their sights.
The cult of economic growth now entered the scene.
To be sure, capitalism was growing, but it was not growing fast enough.
Therefore, free market capitalism must be abandoned, and socialism or government intervention
must step in and force feed the economy, must build investments and compel greater saving
in order to maximize the rate of growth, even if we don't want to grow that fast.
Conservative economists such as Colin Clark attacked this liberal program as growthmanship.
3. Suddenly John Kenneth Galbraith entered the liberal scene with his best-selling The
Affluent Society in 1958. And just as suddenly, the liberal intellectuals reversed their indictments.
The trouble with capitalism, it now appeared, was that it had grown too much. We were no
No longer stagnant, but too well off, and man had lost his spirituality amidst supermarkets
and automobile tail-fins.
What was necessary, then, was for government to step in, either in massive intervention
or as socialism, and tax the consumers heavily in order to reduce their bloated affluence.
4.
The cult of excess affluence had its day, to be superseded by a contradictory worry
about poverty, stimulated by Michael Harrington's The Other America in 1962.
Suddenly the problem with America was not excessive affluence, but increasing and grinding
poverty.
And once again, the solution was for the government to step in, plan mightily, and tax the wealthy
in order to lift up the poor.
And so we had the War on Poverty for several years.
5.
Stagnation Deficient growth
Over-affluence Over-poverty
The intellectual fashions changed like ladies' hemlines.
Then, in 1964, the happily short-lived Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution issued
its then-famous manifesto, which brought us and the liberal intellectuals full circle.
For two or three frenetic years, we were regaled with the idea that America's problem was
not stagnation, but the exact reverse.
In a few short years, all of America's production facilities would be automated and cybernated.
Incomes and production would be enormous and superabundant, but everyone would be automated
out of a job.
Once again, free market capitalism would lead to permanent mass unemployment, which could
would only be remedied, you guessed it, by massive state intervention or by outright
socialism.
For several years in the mid-1960s, we thus suffered from what was justly named the automation
hysteria.
6.
By the late 1960s, it was clear to everyone that the automation hysteria had been dead
wrong, that automation was proceeding at no faster a pace than old-fashioned mechanization,
and indeed that the 1969 recession was causing a falling off in the rate of increase of productivity.
One hears no more about automation danger nowadays.
We are now in the seventh phase of liberal economic flip-flops.
7.
Affluence is again excessive, and in the name of conservation, ecology and the increasing
We are now back to a super-Galbraithian position, to which has been added scientific jargon about effluence, ecology, and spaceship Earth.
Capitalism has brought about technology, growth, including population growth, industry and pollution, and government is supposed to step in and eradicate these evils.
It is not at all unusual, in fact, to find the same people now holding a contradictory
blend of positions five and seven, and maintaining at one and the same time that a. we are living
in a post-scarcity age where we no longer need private property, capitalism or material
incentives to production, and b. that capitalist greed is depleting our resources and bringing
The Great Economist Joseph Schumpeter put the whole shoddy performance of liberal intellectuals into a nutshell a generation ago.
Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets.
They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear.
The only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment.
And so, the charges, the indictments may change and contradict previous charges, but the answer
is always and wearily the same.
The Attack on Technology and Growth.
The fashionable attack on growth and affluence is palpably an attack by comfortable, contented,
upper-class liberals.
Enjoying a material contentment and a living standard undreamt of by even the wealthiest
men of the past, it is easy for upper-class liberals to sneer at materialism and to call
All for a freeze on all further economic advance.
For the mass of the world's population still living in squalor, such a cry for the cessation
of growth is truly obscene.
But even in the United States, there is little evidence of satiety and superabundance.
Even the upper-class liberals themselves have not been conspicuous for making a bonfire
of their salary checks as a contribution to their war on materialism and affluence.
The widespread attack on technology is even more irresponsible.
If technology were to be rolled back to the tribe and to the pre-industrial era, the result
would be mass starvation and death on a universal scale.
The vast majority of the world's population is dependent for its very survival on modern
technology and industry.
The North American continent was able to accommodate approximately one million Indians in the days
is before Columbus, all living on a subsistence level.
It is now able to accommodate several hundred million people, all living at an infinitely
higher living standard.
And the reason is modern technology and industry.
Abolish the latter and we will abolish the people as well.
For all one knows to our fanatical anti-populationists, this solution to the population question
may be a good thing.
But for the great majority of us, this would be a draconian final solution indeed.
The irresponsible attack on technology is another liberal flip-flop.
It comes from the same liberal intellectuals who, thirty-odd years ago, were denouncing
capitalism for not putting modern technology to full use in the service of state planning,
and were calling for absolute rule by a modern technocratic elite.
Yet now the very same intellectuals who not so long ago were yearning for a technocratic
dictatorship over all of our lives are now trying to deprive us of the vital fruits of
technology itself.
Yet the various contradictory phases of liberal thought never completely die, and many of
the same anti-technologists in a 180-degree reversal of the automation hysteria are also
Confidently Forecasting Technological Stagnation from Now On
They cheerily predict a gloomy future for mankind by assuming that technology will stagnate and not continue to improve and accelerate.
This is the technique of pseudo-scientific forecasting of the widely touted Anti-Growth Club of Rome report.
As Passell, Roberts and Ross write in their critique of the report,
if the telephone company were restricted to turn-of-the-century technology,
20 million operators would be needed to handle today's volume of calls.
Or, as British editor Norman MacRae has observed,
an extrapolation of the trends of the 1880s would show today's cities buried under horse manure.
Or, further, while the Club of Rome's model hypothesizes exponential growth for industrial and agricultural needs, it places arbitrary, non-exponential limits on the technical progress that might accommodate these needs.
The Reverend Thomas Malthus made a similar point two centuries ago without benefit of computer printouts.
Malthus argued that people tend to multiply exponentially, while the food supply, at best, increases at a constant rate.
He expected that starvation and war would periodically redress the balance.
But there is no particular criterion beyond myopia on which to base that speculation.
Malthus was wrong. Food capacity has kept up with population. While no one knows for certain,
technical progress shows no sign of slowing down. The best econometric estimates suggest
that it is indeed growing exponentially. What we need is more economic growth, not less.
More and better technology, and not the impossible and absurd attempt to scrap technology and return
to the Primitive Tribe.
Improved technology and greater capital investment will lead to higher living standards for all
and provide greater material comforts, as well as the leisure to pursue and enjoy the
spiritual side of life.
There is precious little culture or civilization available for people who must work long hours
to eke out a subsistence living.
The real problem is that productive capital investment is being siphoned off by taxes,
restrictions and government contracts for unproductive and wasteful government expenditures,
including military and space boondoggling.
Furthermore, the precious technical resource of scientists and engineers is being ever
more intensively diverted to government instead of to civilian consumer production.
What we need is for government to get out of the way, remove its incubus of taxation
and expenditures from the economy, and allow productive and technical resources once again
to devote themselves fully to increasing the well-being of the mass of consumers.
We need growth, higher living standards, and a technology and capital equipment that meet
consumer wants and demands.
But we can only achieve these by removing the incubus of statism and allowing the energies
of all of the population to express themselves in the free market economy.
We need an economic and technological growth that emerges freely, as Jane Jacobs has shown,
from the free market economy, and not the distortions and wastes imposed upon the world
Conservation of Resources
As we have mentioned, the self-same liberals who claim that we have entered the post-scarcity
age and are in no further need of economic growth are in the forefront of the complaint
that capitalist greed is destroying our scarce natural resources.
The gloom and doom soothsayers of the Club of Rome, for example, by simply extrapolating
current trends of resource use, confidently predict the exhaustion of vital raw materials
within 40 years.
But confident and completely faulty predictions of exhaustion of raw materials have been made
countless times in recent centuries.
What the soothsayers have overlooked is the vital role that the free-market economic mechanism
plays in conserving and adding to natural resources.
Let us consider, for example, a typical copper mine.
Why has copper ore not been exhausted long before now by the inexorable demands of our
industrial civilization?
Why is it that copper miners, once they have found and opened a vein of ore, do not mine
all the copper immediately?
Why instead do they conserve the copper mine, add to it, and extract the copper gradually
from year to year?
Because the mine owners realize that, for example, if they triple this year's production
of copper, they may indeed triple this year's income, but they will also be depleting the
mine and therefore the future income they will be able to derive from it.
On the market, this loss of future income is immediately reflected in the monetary value,
the price, of the mine as a whole.
This monetary value, reflected in the selling price of the mine, and then of individual
shares of mining stock, is based on the expected future income to be earned from the production
of the copper.
Any depletion of the mine, then, will lower the value of the mine, and hence the price
of the mining stock.
Every mine owner, then, has to weigh the advantages of immediate income from copper production
against the loss in the capital value of the mine as a whole, and hence against the loss
in the value of his shares.
The mine owner's decisions are determined by their expectations of future copper yields
and demands, the existing and expected rates of interest, etc.
Suppose, for example, that copper is expected to be rendered obsolete in a few years by
a new synthetic metal.
In that case, copper mine owners will rush to produce more copper now when it is more
highly valued, and save less for the future when it will have little value, thereby benefiting
the consumers and the economy as a whole by producing copper now when it is more intensely
needed.
But on the other hand, if a copper shortage is expected in the future, mine owners will
produce less now and wait to produce more later when copper prices are higher, thereby
benefiting society by producing more in the future when it will be needed more intensely.
Thus we see that the market economy contains a marvelous built-in mechanism whereby the
decisions of resource owners on present as against future production will benefit not
Not only their own income and wealth but the mass of consumers and the economy as a whole.
But there is much more to this free market mechanism.
Suppose that a growing shortage of copper is now expected in the future.
The result is that more copper will be withheld now and saved for future production.
The price of copper now will rise.
The increase in copper prices will have several conserving effects.
In the first place, the higher price of copper is a signal to the users of copper that it
is scarcer and more expensive.
The copper users will then conserve the use of this more expensive metal.
They will use less copper, substituting cheaper metals or plastics, and copper will be conserved
more fully and saved for those uses for which there is no satisfactory substitute.
Moreover, the greater cost of copper will stimulate a. a rush to find new copper ores, and b. a search for less expensive substitutes, perhaps by new technological discoveries.
Higher prices for copper will also stimulate campaigns for saving and recycling the metal.
This price mechanism of the free market is precisely the reason that copper and other natural resources have not disappeared long ago.
As Pasol, Roberts and Ross say in their critique of the Club of Rome,
natural resource reserves and needs in the model are calculated in the absence of prices as a variable in the limits projection of how resources will be used.
In the real world, rising prices act as an economic signal to conserve scarce resources,
providing incentives to use cheaper materials in their place, stimulating research efforts on new
ways to save on resource inputs, and making renewed exploration attempts more profitable.
In fact, in contrast to the gloom and doomers, raw material and natural resource prices have
have remained low and have generally declined relative to other prices.
To liberal and Marxist intellectuals, this is usually a sign of capitalist exploitation
of the underdeveloped countries which are often the producers of the raw materials.
But it is a sign of something completely different, of the fact that natural resources have not
been growing scarcer but more abundant, hence their relatively lower cost.
The development of cheap substitutes, for example plastics, synthetic fibers, has kept
natural resources cheap and abundant.
And in a few decades we can expect that modern technology will develop a remarkably cheap
source of energy, nuclear fusion, a development which will automatically yield a great abundance
of raw materials for the work that will be needed.
The development of synthetic materials and of cheaper energy highlights a vital aspect
of modern technology the doomsayers overlook.
That technology and industrial production create resources, which had never existed
as effective resources.
For example, before the development of the kerosene lamp, and especially the automobile,
petroleum was not a resource but an unwanted waste, a giant liquid black weed.
It was only the development of modern industry that converted petroleum into a useful resource.
Furthermore, modern technology, through improved geological techniques and through the incentives
of the market, has been finding new petroleum reserves at a rapid rate.
Predictions of imminent exhaustion of resources, as we have noted, are nothing new.
In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt, calling a governor's conference on natural resources,
warned of their imminent exhaustion.
At the same conference, steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie predicted the exhaustion of
the Lake Superior Iron Range by 1940, while railroad magnate James J. Hill forecast the
exhaustion of much of our timber resources in ten years.
Not only that, Hill even predicted an imminent shortage of wheat production in the United
States, in a country where we are still grappling with the wheat surpluses generated by our
farm subsidy program.
Current forecasts of doom are made on the same basis, a grievous underweighting of the
prospects of modern technology and an ignorance of the workings of the market economy.
It is true that several particular natural resources have suffered in the past and now
from depletion.
But in each case, the reason has not been capitalist greed.
On the contrary, the reason has been the failure of government to allow private property in
the resource.
In short, a failure to pursue the logic of private property rights far enough.
One example has been timber resources.
In the American West and in Canada, most of the forests are owned not by private owners,
but by the federal or provincial government.
The government then leases their use to private timber companies.
In short, private property is permitted only in the annual use of the resource, but not
in the forest, the resource itself.
In this situation, the private timber company does not own the capital value, and therefore
does not have to worry about depletion of the resource itself.
The timber company has no economic incentive to conserve the resource, replant trees, etc.
Its only incentive is to cut as many trees as quickly as possible, since there is no
economic value to the timber company in maintaining the capital value of the forest.
In Europe, where private ownership of forests is far more common, there is little complaint
of Destruction of Timber Resources.
For wherever private property is allowed in the forest itself, it is to the benefit of
the owner to preserve and restore tree growth while he is cutting timber, so as to avoid
depletion of the forest's capital value.
Thus, in the United States, a major culprit has been the Forest Service of the U.S. Department
of Agriculture, which owns forests and leases annual rights to cut timber, with resulting
In contrast, private forests, such as those owned by large lumber firms like Georgia Pacific and U.S. plywood, scientifically cut and reforest their trees in order to maintain their future supply.
Another unhappy consequence of the American government's failure to allow private property in a resource was the destruction of the western grasslands in the late 19th century.
Every viewer of western movies is familiar with the mystique of the open range and the
often violent wars among cattlemen, sheepmen and farmers over parcels of ranch land.
The open range was the failure of the federal government to apply the policy of homesteading
to the changed conditions of the drier climate west of the Mississippi.
In the east, the 160 acres granted free to homesteading farmers on government land constituted
a viable technological unit for farming in a wetter climate.
But in the dry climate of the west, no successful cattle or sheep ranch could be organized on
a mere 160 acres.
But the federal government refused to expand the 160-acre unit to allow the homesteading
of larger cattle ranches.
Hence, the open range, on which private cattle and sheep owners were able to roam unchecked
on government-owned pasture land.
But this meant that no one owned the pasture, the land itself.
It was therefore to the economic advantage of every cattle or sheep owner to graze the
land and use up the grass as quickly as possible.
Otherwise, the grass would be grazed by some other sheep or cattle owner.
The result of this tragically short-sighted refusal to allow private property in grazing
land itself was an overgrazing of the land, the ruining of the grassland by grazing too
early in the season, and the failure of anyone to restore or replant the grass.
Anyone who bothered to restore the grass would have had to look on helplessly while someone
else grazed his cattle or sheep.
Hence the overgrazing of the West, and the onset of the Dust Bowl.
Hence also the illegal attempts by numerous cattlemen, farmers and sheepmen to take the
law into their own hands and fence off the land into private property, and the range
wars that often followed.
Professor Samuel P. Hayes, in his authoritative account of the conservation movement in America,
Much of the Western livestock industry depended for its forage upon the open range owned by the Federal Government, but free for anyone to use.
Congress had never provided legislation regulating grazing or permitting stockmen to acquire rangelands.
Cattle and sheepmen roamed the public domain.
Cattlemen fenced range for their exclusive use, but competitors cut the wire.
Resorting to force and violence, sheep herders and cowboys solved their disputes over grazing lands by slaughtering rival livestock and murdering rival stockmen.
Absence of the most elementary institutions of property law created confusion, bitterness and destruction.
Amid this turmoil the public range rapidly deteriorated.
Originally plentiful and lush, the forage supply was subjected to intense pressure by
increasing use.
The public domain became stocked with more animals than the range could support.
Since each stockman feared that others would beat him to the available forage, he grazed
early in the year and did not permit the young grass to mature and re-seed.
Under such conditions, the quality and quantity of available forage rapidly decreased.
Vigorous perennials gave way to annuals, and annuals to weeds.
Hayes concludes that public domain rangelands may have been depleted by over two-thirds
by this process, as compared to their virgin condition.
There is a vitally important area in which the absence of private property in the resource
has been and is causing not only depletion of resources, but also a complete failure to develop
vast potential resources. This is the potentially enormously productive ocean resource.
The oceans are in the international public domain. That is, no person, company or even
national government is allowed property rights in parts of the ocean. As a result, the oceans have
have remained in the same primitive state as was the land in the pre-civilized days
before the development of agriculture.
The way of production for primitive man was hunting and gathering, the hunting of wild
animals and the gathering of fruits, berries, nuts, and wild seeds and vegetables.
Primitive man worked passively within his environment instead of acting to transform
it.
Hence he just lived off the land without attempting to remold it.
As a result, the land was unproductive, and only a relatively few tribesmen could exist
at a bare subsistence level.
It was only with the development of agriculture, the farming of the soil, and the transformation
of the land through farming, that productivity and living standards could take giant leaps
forward.
And it was only with agriculture that civilization could begin.
But to permit the development of agriculture, there had to be private property rights, first
in the fields and crops, and then in the land itself.
With respect to the ocean, however, we are still in the primitive, unproductive hunting
and gathering stage.
Anyone can capture fish in the ocean or extract its resources, but only on the run, only as
hunters and gatherers.
No one can farm the ocean.
No one can engage in aquaculture.
In this way, we are deprived of the use of the immense fish and mineral resources of
the seas.
For example, if anyone tried to farm the sea and to increase the productivity of the fisheries
by fertilizers, he would immediately be deprived of the fruits of his efforts, because he could
not keep other fishermen from rushing in and seizing the fish.
And so, no one tries to fertilize the oceans, as the land is fertilized.
Furthermore, there is no economic incentive.
In fact, there is every disincentive for anyone to engage in technological research in the
ways and means of improving the productivity of the fisheries, or in extracting the mineral
resources of the oceans.
There will only be such incentive when property rights in parts of the ocean are as fully
are only allowed as property rights in the land.
Even now, there is a simple but effective technique that could be used for increasing fish productivity.
Parts of the ocean could be fenced off electronically, and through this readily available electronic fencing,
fish could be segregated by size.
By preventing big fish from eating smaller fish, the production of fish could be increased enormously.
And if private property in parts of the ocean were permitted, a vast flowering of aquaculture would create and multiply ocean resources in numerous ways we cannot now even foresee.
National governments have tried vainly to cope with the problem of fish depletion by placing irrational and uneconomic restrictions on the total size of the catch or on the length of the allowable season.
In the cases of salmon, tuna and halibut, technological methods of fishing have thereby been kept primitive and unproductive by unduly shortening the season and injuring the quality of the catch, and by stimulating overproduction and underuse during the year of the fishing fleets.
And of course, such governmental restrictions do nothing at all to stimulate the growth of aquaculture.
As Professors North and Miller write, fishermen are poor because they are forced to use inefficient equipment and to fish only a small fraction of the time by the governmental regulations, and of course there are far too many of them.
The consumer pays a much higher price for red salmon than would be necessary if efficient methods were used.
Despite the ever-growing, intertwining bonds of regulations, the preservation of the salmon run is still not assured.
The root of the problem lies in the current non-ownership arrangement.
It is not in the interests of any individual fisherman to concern himself with perpetuation of the salmon run.
Quite the contrary, it is rather in his interests to catch as many fish as he can during the season.
In contrast, North and Miller point out that private property rights in the ocean, under which the owner would use the least costly and most efficient technology, and preserve and make productive the resource itself, is now more feasible than ever.
The invention of modern electronic sensing equipment has now made the policing of large bodies of water relatively cheap and easy.
The growing international conflicts over parts of the ocean only further highlight the importance of private property rights in this vital area.
For as the United States and other nations assert their sovereignty 200 miles from their shores,
and as private companies and governments squabble over areas of the ocean,
and as trawlers, fishing nets, oil drillers and mineral diggers war over the same areas of the ocean,
property rights become increasingly and patently more important as Francis Christy writes
coal is mined in shafts below the sea floor oil is drilled from platforms fixed to the bottom
rising above the water minerals can be dredged from the surface of the ocean bed sedentary
animals are scraped from the bed on which telephone cables may lie bottom feeding animals are caught
are not in traps or trawls. Midwater species may be taken by hook and line, or by trawls which occasionally interfere with submarines.
Surface species are taken by net and harpoon, and the surface itself is used for shipping, as well as the vessels engaged in extracting resources.
This growing conflict leads Christie to predict that the seas are in a stage of transition.
They are moving from a condition in which property rights are almost non-existent to a condition in which property rights of some form will become appropriated or made available.
Eventually, concludes Christie, as the C's resources become more valuable, exclusive rights will be acquired.
Pollution
All right.
Even if we concede that full private property and resources and the free market will conserve
and create resources, and do it far better than government regulation, what of the problem
of pollution?
Wouldn't we be suffering aggravated pollution from unchecked capitalist greed?
There is, first of all, this stark empirical fact.
Government ownership, even socialism, has proved to be no solution to the problem of
pollution.
Even the most starry-eyed proponents of government planning concede that the poisoning of Lake
Baikal in the Soviet Union is a monument to heedless industrial pollution of a valuable
natural resource.
But there is far more to the problem than that.
Note for example the two crucial areas in which pollution has become an important problem.
The air and the waterways, particularly the rivers.
But these are precisely two of the vital areas in society in which private property has not
been permitted to function.
First, the rivers.
The rivers and the oceans, too, are generally owned by the government.
Private property, certainly complete private property, has not been permitted in the water.
In essence, then, government owns the rivers.
But government ownership is not true ownership, because the government officials, while able
to control the resource, cannot themselves reap their capital value on the market.
Government officials cannot sell the rivers or sell stock in them.
Hence they have no economic incentive to preserve the purity and value of the rivers.
Rivers are then, in the economic sense, unowned.
Therefore government officials have permitted their corruption and pollution.
Anyone has been able to dump polluting garbage and wastes in the waters.
But consider what would happen if private firms were able to own the rivers and the lakes.
If a private firm owned Lake Erie, for example, then anyone dumping garbage in the lake would
be promptly sued in the courts for their aggression against private property, and would be forced
by the courts to pay damages and to cease and desist from any further aggression.
Thus, only private property rights will ensure an end to pollution invasion of resources.
Only because the rivers are unowned is there no owner to rise up and defend his precious
resource from attack.
If in contrast, anyone should dump garbage or pollutants into a lake which is privately
As Professor Dolan writes, with the General Motors owning the Mississippi River, you can be sure that stiff effluent charges would be assessed on industries and municipalities along its banks, and that the water would be kept clean enough to maximize revenues from leases granted to firms seeking rights to drinking water, recreation, and so on.
and Commercial Fishing.
If government as owner has allowed the pollution of the rivers, government has also been the
single major active polluter, especially in its role as municipal sewage disposer.
There already exist low-cost chemical toilets which can burn off sewage without polluting
air, ground or water.
But who will invest in chemical toilets when local governments will dispose of sewage
Page-free to their customers.
This example points up a problem similar to the case of the stunting of aquaculture technology
by the absence of private property.
If governments as owners of the rivers permit pollution of water, then industrial technology
will and has become a water-polluting technology.
If production processes are allowed to pollute the rivers unchecked by their owners, then
And that is the sort of production technology we will have.
If the problem of water pollution can be cured by private property rights in water, how about
air pollution?
How can libertarians possibly come up with a solution for this grievous problem?
Surely there can't be private property in the air.
But the answer is, yes, there can.
We have already seen how radio and TV frequencies can be privately owned.
So could channels for airlines.
Commercial airline routes, for example, could be privately owned.
There is no need for a civil aeronautics board to parcel out and restrict routes between
various cities.
But in the case of air pollution, we are dealing not so much with private property in the air
as with protecting private property in one's lungs, fields and orchards.
The vital fact about air pollution is that the polluter sends unwanted and unbidden pollutants,
from smoke to nuclear radiation to sulfur oxides, through the air and into the lungs
of innocent victims, as well as onto their material property.
All such emanations which injure person or property constitute aggression against the
private property of the victims.
Air pollution, after all, is just as much aggression as committing arson against another's
A simple time lag between recognizing a new technical
in a logical problem and facing up to it.
For if some of the modern pollutants have only recently become known, factory smoke
and many of its bad effects have been known ever since the Industrial Revolution, known
to the extent that the American courts during the late and as far back as the early nineteenth
century made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial
smoke.
To do so, the courts had to, and did, systematically change and weaken the defenses of property
right embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law.
Before the mid and late 19th century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort,
a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages, and against which he could
take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property
rights.
But during the nineteenth century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence
and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater
than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary
practice of fellow polluters.
As factories began to arise and emit smoke, blighting the orchards of neighboring farmers,
The farmers would take the manufacturers to court, asking for damages and injunctions
against further invasion of their property.
But the judges said, in effect, sorry, we know that industrial smoke, that is, air pollution,
invades and interferes with your property rights.
But there is something more important than mere property rights, and that is public policy,
the common good.
And the common good decrees that industry is a good thing.
All progress is a good thing, and therefore your mere private property rights must be
overridden on behalf of the general welfare.
And now all of us are paying the bitter price for this overriding of private property in
the form of lung disease and countless other ailments, and all for the common good.
That this principle has guided the courts during the Air Age as well may be seen by
by a decision of the Ohio Courts in Antonic v. Chamberlain, 1947.
The residents of a suburban area near Akron sued to enjoin the defendants from operating
a privately owned airport.
The grounds were invasion of property rights through excessive noise.
Refusing the injunction, the court declared,
In our business of judging in this case, while sitting as a court of equity, we must not only weigh the conflicts of interests between the airport owner and the nearby landowners, but we must further recognize the public policy of the generation in which we live.
We must recognize that the establishment of an airport is of great concern to the public, and if such an airport is abated or its establishment prevented, the consequences will be not only a serious injury to the owner of the port property, but may be a serious loss of a valuable asset to the entire community.
To cap the crimes of the judges, legislatures, federal and state, moved in to cement the aggression by prohibiting victims of air pollution from engaging in class action suits against polluters.
Obviously, if a factory pollutes the atmosphere of a city where there are tens of thousands of victims, it is impractical for each victim to sue to collect his particular damages from the polluter,
The common law, therefore, recognizes the validity of class action suits, in which one or a few victims can sue the aggressor not only on their own behalf, but on behalf of the entire class of similar victims.
But the legislatures systematically outlawed such class action suits in pollution cases.
For this reason, a victim may successfully sue a polluter who injures him individually in a one-to-one private-nuisance suit.
But he is prohibited by law from acting against a mass polluter who is injuring a large number of people in a given area.
As Frank Bubb writes, it is as if the government were to tell you that it will attempt to protect you from a thief who steals only from you,
but it will not protect you if the thief also steals from everyone else in the neighborhood.
Noise too is a form of air pollution. Noise is the creation of sound waves which go through the air
and then bombard and invade the property and persons of others. Only recently have physicians
begun to investigate the damaging effects of noise on the human physiology. Again, a libertarian legal
The remedy against air pollution is therefore crystal clear, and it has nothing to do with
multi-billion dollar palliative government programs at the expense of the taxpayers,
which do not even meet the real issue.
The remedy is simply for the courts to return to their function of defending person and
and Property Rights Against Invasion, and therefore to enjoin anyone from injecting
pollutants into the air.
But what of the pro-pollution defenders of industrial progress, and what of the increased
costs that would have to be borne by the consumer, and what of our present polluting technology?
The argument that such an injunctive prohibition against pollution would add to the costs of
of Industrial Production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil War argument that the abolition
of slavery would add to the costs of growing cotton and that therefore abolition, however
morally correct, was impractical.
For this means that the polluters are able to impose all of the high costs of pollution
upon those whose lungs and property rights they have been allowed to invade with impunity.
Furthermore, the cost and technology argument overlooks the vital fact that if air pollution
is allowed to proceed with impunity, there continues to be no economic incentive to develop
a technology that will not pollute.
On the contrary, the incentive would continue to cut, as it has for a century, precisely
the other way.
Suppose for example that in the days when automobiles and trucks were first being used,
The courts had ruled as follows.
Ordinarily, we would be opposed to trucks invading people's lawns as an invasion of
private property, and we would insist that trucks confine themselves to the roads, regardless
of traffic congestion.
But trucks are vitally important to the public welfare, and therefore we decree that trucks
should be allowed to cross any lawns they wish, provided they believe that this would
ease their traffic problems.
If the courts had ruled in this way, then we would now have a transportation system
in which lawns would be systematically desecrated by trucks.
And any attempt to stop this would be decried in the name of modern transportation needs.
The point is that this is precisely the way that the courts ruled on air pollution, pollution
which is far more damaging to all of us than trampling on lawns.
In this way the government gave the green light from the very start to a polluting technology.
It is no wonder then that this is precisely the kind of technology we have.
The only remedy is to force the polluting invaders to stop their invasion and thereby
to redirect technology into non-polluting or even anti-polluting channels.
Already, even at our necessarily primitive stage in anti-pollution technology, techniques
have been developed to combat air and noise pollution. Mufflers can be installed on noisy
machines that emit sound waves precisely contra-cyclical to the waves of the machines, and thereby
can cancel out these racking sounds. Air wastes can even now be recaptured as they leave the
the Chimney and be recycled to yield products useful to industry.
Thus, sulfur dioxide, a major noxious air pollutant, can be captured and recycled to
produce economically valuable sulfuric acid.
The highly polluting spark ignition engine will either have to be cured by new devices
or replaced altogether by such non-polluting engines as diesel, gas turbine or steam or
and as libertarian systems engineer Robert Poole Jr. points out, the costs of installing the non- or anti-polluting technology would then ultimately be borne by the consumers of the firm's products, that is, by those who choose to associate with the firm, rather than being passed on to innocent third parties in the form of pollution, or as taxes.
Robert Poole cogently defines pollution as the transfer of harmful matter or energy to the person or property of another without the latter's consent.
The libertarian and the only complete solution to the problem of air pollution is to use the courts and the legal structure to combat and prevent such invasion.
There are recent signs that the legal system is beginning to change in this direction.
New judicial decisions and repeal of laws disallowing class action suits.
But this is only a beginning.
Among conservatives, in contrast to libertarians, there are two ultimately similar responses to the problem of air pollution.
One response, by Ayn Rand and Robert Moses among others, is to deny that the problem exists
exists, and to attribute the entire agitation to leftists who want to destroy capitalism
and technology on behalf of a tribal form of socialism.
While part of this charge may be correct, denial of the very existence of the problem
is to deny science itself and to give a vital hostage to the leftist charge that defenders
of capitalism place property rights above human rights.
Moreover, a defense of air pollution does not even defend property rights.
On the contrary, it puts these conservatives' stamp of approval on those industrialists
who are trampling upon the property rights of the mass of the citizenry.
A second and more sophisticated conservative response is by such free market economists
as Milton Friedman.
The Friedmanites concede the existence of air pollution but propose to meet it not by
by a defense of property rights, but rather by a supposedly utilitarian cost-benefit calculation
by government, which will then make and enforce a social decision on how much pollution to
allow.
This decision would then be enforced either by licensing a given amount of pollution,
the granting of pollution rights, by a graded scale of taxes against it, or by the taxpayers
paying firms not to pollute.
Not only would these proposals grant an enormous amount of bureaucratic power to government
in the name of safeguarding the free market, they would continue to override property rights
in the name of a collective decision enforced by the state.
This is far from any genuine free market, and reveals that, as in many other economic
areas, it is impossible to really defend freedom and the free market without insisting on defending
Friedman's grotesque dictum that those urban inhabitants who don't wish to contract emphysema
should move to the country is starkly reminiscent of Marie Antoinette's famous Let Them Eat
Cake and reveals a lack of sensitivity to human or property rights.
Friedman's statement, in fact, is of a piece with the typically conservative, if you don't
like it here, leave, a statement that implies that the government rightly owns the entire
Robert Poole's libertarian critique of the Friedmanite proposals offers a refreshing contrast.
Unfortunately it is an example of the most serious failing of the conservative economists.
Nowhere in the proposal is there any mention of rights.
This is the same failing that has undercut advocates of capitalism for 200 years.
Even today, the term laissez-faire is apt to bring forth images of 18th century English
factory towns engulfed in smoke and grimy with soot.
The early capitalists agreed with the courts that smoke and soot were the price that must
be paid for the benefits of industry.
Yet laissez-faire without rights is a contradiction in terms.
The laissez-faire position is based on and derived from man's rights, and can endure
only when rights are held inviolable.
Now, in an age of increasing awareness of the environment, this old contradiction is
coming back to haunt capitalism.
It is true that air is a scarce resource, as the Friedmannites say, but one must then
ask why it is scarce.
If it is scarce because of a systematic violation of rights, then the solution is not to raise
the price of the status quo, thereby sanctioning the rights violations, but to assert the rights
and demand that they be protected.
When a factory discharges a great quantity of sulfur dioxide molecules that enter someone's
lungs and cause pulmonary edema, the factory owners have aggressed against him as much
as if they had broken his leg.
The point must be emphasized, because it is vital to the libertarian laissez-faire position.
A laissez-faire polluter is a contradiction in terms, and must be identified as such.
A libertarian society would be a full liability society, where everyone is fully responsible
for his actions and any harmful consequences they might cause.
In addition to betraying its presumed function of defending private property, government
has contributed to air pollution in a more positive sense.
It was not so long ago that the Department of Agriculture conducted mass sprayings of
DDT by helicopter over large areas, overriding the wishes of individual objecting farmers.
It still continues to pour tons of poisonous and carcinogenic insecticides all over the
of the South, in an expensive and vain attempt to eradicate the fire ant.
And the Atomic Energy Commission has poured radioactive wastes into the air and into the
ground by means of its nuclear power plants and through atomic testing.
Municipal power and water plants and the plants of licensed monopoly utility companies mightily
pollute the atmosphere.
One of the major tasks of the state in this area is therefore to stop its own poisoning
of the atmosphere.
Thus, when we peel away the confusions and the unsound philosophy of the modern ecologists,
we find an important bedrock case against the existing system.
But the case turns out to be not against capitalism, private property, growth or technology per
se.
It is a case against the failure of government to allow and to defend the rights of private
property against invasion.
If property rights were to be defended fully against private and governmental invasion
alike, we would find here, as in other areas of our economy and society, that private enterprise
and Modern Technology would come to mankind not as a curse, but as its salvation.