WEBVTT NOTE 13. Conservation, Ecology, and Growth 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.000 Chapter 13 Conservation, Ecology and Growth 2 00:00:06.000 --> 00:00:09.000 Liberal Complaints 3 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:14.000 Left liberal intellectuals are often a wondrous group to behold. 4 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:19.000 In the last three or four decades, not a very long time in human history, 5 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:26.000 they have, like whirling dervishes, let loose a series of angry complaints against free market capitalism. 6 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:56.000 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. 7 00:00:56.000 --> 00:00:59.000 Let us consider the record of recent decades. 8 00:00:59.000 --> 00:01:00.400 1. 9 00:01:00.400 --> 00:01:05.800 In the late 1930s and early 1940s, the liberal intellectuals came to the conclusion that 10 00:01:05.800 --> 00:01:12.980 capitalism was suffering from inevitable secular stagnation, a stagnation imposed by the slowing 11 00:01:12.980 --> 00:01:18.580 down of population growth, the end of the old Western frontier, and by the supposed 12 00:01:18.580 --> 00:01:22.440 fact that no further inventions were possible. 13 00:01:22.440 --> 00:01:28.640 All this spelled eternal stagnation, permanent mass unemployment, and therefore the need 14 00:01:28.640 --> 00:01:35.200 for socialism or thoroughgoing state planning to replace free market capitalism. 15 00:01:35.200 --> 00:01:40.200 This on the threshold of the greatest boom in American history. 16 00:01:40.200 --> 00:01:47.440 Two, during the 1950s, despite the great boom in post-war America, the liberal intellectuals 17 00:01:47.440 --> 00:01:49.680 kept raising their sights. 18 00:01:49.680 --> 00:01:53.720 The cult of economic growth now entered the scene. 19 00:01:53.720 --> 00:01:58.640 To be sure, capitalism was growing, but it was not growing fast enough. 20 00:01:58.640 --> 00:02:04.400 Therefore, free market capitalism must be abandoned, and socialism or government intervention 21 00:02:04.400 --> 00:02:11.120 must step in and force feed the economy, must build investments and compel greater saving 22 00:02:11.120 --> 00:02:17.360 in order to maximize the rate of growth, even if we don't want to grow that fast. 23 00:02:17.360 --> 00:02:24.160 Conservative economists such as Colin Clark attacked this liberal program as growthmanship. 24 00:02:24.160 --> 00:02:31.000 3. Suddenly John Kenneth Galbraith entered the liberal scene with his best-selling The 25 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:40.000 Affluent Society in 1958. And just as suddenly, the liberal intellectuals reversed their indictments. 26 00:02:40.000 --> 00:02:45.520 The trouble with capitalism, it now appeared, was that it had grown too much. We were no 27 00:02:45.520 --> 00:02:52.560 No longer stagnant, but too well off, and man had lost his spirituality amidst supermarkets 28 00:02:52.560 --> 00:02:55.280 and automobile tail-fins. 29 00:02:55.280 --> 00:03:00.640 What was necessary, then, was for government to step in, either in massive intervention 30 00:03:00.640 --> 00:03:08.320 or as socialism, and tax the consumers heavily in order to reduce their bloated affluence. 31 00:03:08.320 --> 00:03:10.340 4. 32 00:03:10.340 --> 00:03:15.540 The cult of excess affluence had its day, to be superseded by a contradictory worry 33 00:03:15.540 --> 00:03:22.820 about poverty, stimulated by Michael Harrington's The Other America in 1962. 34 00:03:22.820 --> 00:03:28.580 Suddenly the problem with America was not excessive affluence, but increasing and grinding 35 00:03:28.580 --> 00:03:29.580 poverty. 36 00:03:29.580 --> 00:03:35.660 And once again, the solution was for the government to step in, plan mightily, and tax the wealthy 37 00:03:35.660 --> 00:03:38.240 in order to lift up the poor. 38 00:03:38.240 --> 00:03:42.640 And so we had the War on Poverty for several years. 39 00:03:42.640 --> 00:03:44.160 5. 40 00:03:44.160 --> 00:03:46.880 Stagnation Deficient growth 41 00:03:46.880 --> 00:03:49.440 Over-affluence Over-poverty 42 00:03:49.440 --> 00:03:53.280 The intellectual fashions changed like ladies' hemlines. 43 00:03:53.280 --> 00:04:00.360 Then, in 1964, the happily short-lived Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution issued 44 00:04:00.360 --> 00:04:07.000 its then-famous manifesto, which brought us and the liberal intellectuals full circle. 45 00:04:07.000 --> 00:04:12.360 For two or three frenetic years, we were regaled with the idea that America's problem was 46 00:04:12.360 --> 00:04:15.980 not stagnation, but the exact reverse. 47 00:04:15.980 --> 00:04:22.960 In a few short years, all of America's production facilities would be automated and cybernated. 48 00:04:22.960 --> 00:04:28.580 Incomes and production would be enormous and superabundant, but everyone would be automated 49 00:04:28.580 --> 00:04:30.640 out of a job. 50 00:04:30.640 --> 00:04:35.880 Once again, free market capitalism would lead to permanent mass unemployment, which could 51 00:04:35.880 --> 00:04:41.960 would only be remedied, you guessed it, by massive state intervention or by outright 52 00:04:41.960 --> 00:04:43.240 socialism. 53 00:04:43.240 --> 00:04:49.220 For several years in the mid-1960s, we thus suffered from what was justly named the automation 54 00:04:49.220 --> 00:04:51.280 hysteria. 55 00:04:51.280 --> 00:04:53.360 6. 56 00:04:53.360 --> 00:04:58.640 By the late 1960s, it was clear to everyone that the automation hysteria had been dead 57 00:04:58.640 --> 00:05:05.440 wrong, that automation was proceeding at no faster a pace than old-fashioned mechanization, 58 00:05:05.440 --> 00:05:13.440 and indeed that the 1969 recession was causing a falling off in the rate of increase of productivity. 59 00:05:13.440 --> 00:05:17.160 One hears no more about automation danger nowadays. 60 00:05:17.160 --> 00:05:22.840 We are now in the seventh phase of liberal economic flip-flops. 61 00:05:22.840 --> 00:05:24.640 7. 62 00:05:24.640 --> 00:05:29.920 Affluence is again excessive, and in the name of conservation, ecology and the increasing 63 00:05:29.920 --> 00:05:59.920 We are now back to a super-Galbraithian position, to which has been added scientific jargon about effluence, ecology, and spaceship Earth. 64 00:05:59.920 --> 00:06:17.920 Capitalism has brought about technology, growth, including population growth, industry and pollution, and government is supposed to step in and eradicate these evils. 65 00:06:17.920 --> 00:06:25.160 It is not at all unusual, in fact, to find the same people now holding a contradictory 66 00:06:25.160 --> 00:06:33.240 blend of positions five and seven, and maintaining at one and the same time that a. we are living 67 00:06:33.240 --> 00:06:39.280 in a post-scarcity age where we no longer need private property, capitalism or material 68 00:06:39.280 --> 00:06:46.880 incentives to production, and b. that capitalist greed is depleting our resources and bringing 69 00:06:46.880 --> 00:06:56.880 The Great Economist Joseph Schumpeter put the whole shoddy performance of liberal intellectuals into a nutshell a generation ago. 70 00:06:56.880 --> 00:07:02.880 Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. 71 00:07:02.880 --> 00:07:08.880 Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. 72 00:07:08.880 --> 00:07:17.560 Capitalism stands its trial before judges who have the sentence of death in their pockets. 73 00:07:17.560 --> 00:07:21.660 They are going to pass it, whatever the defense they may hear. 74 00:07:21.660 --> 00:07:28.480 The only success victorious defense can possibly produce is a change in the indictment. 75 00:07:28.480 --> 00:07:35.280 And so, the charges, the indictments may change and contradict previous charges, but the answer 76 00:07:35.280 --> 00:07:40.260 is always and wearily the same. 77 00:07:40.260 --> 00:07:44.440 The Attack on Technology and Growth. 78 00:07:44.440 --> 00:07:51.040 The fashionable attack on growth and affluence is palpably an attack by comfortable, contented, 79 00:07:51.040 --> 00:07:53.440 upper-class liberals. 80 00:07:53.440 --> 00:07:58.600 Enjoying a material contentment and a living standard undreamt of by even the wealthiest 81 00:07:58.600 --> 00:08:04.840 men of the past, it is easy for upper-class liberals to sneer at materialism and to call 82 00:08:04.840 --> 00:08:08.840 All for a freeze on all further economic advance. 83 00:08:08.840 --> 00:08:14.360 For the mass of the world's population still living in squalor, such a cry for the cessation 84 00:08:14.360 --> 00:08:17.360 of growth is truly obscene. 85 00:08:17.360 --> 00:08:22.780 But even in the United States, there is little evidence of satiety and superabundance. 86 00:08:22.780 --> 00:08:27.600 Even the upper-class liberals themselves have not been conspicuous for making a bonfire 87 00:08:27.600 --> 00:08:34.340 of their salary checks as a contribution to their war on materialism and affluence. 88 00:08:34.340 --> 00:08:39.000 The widespread attack on technology is even more irresponsible. 89 00:08:39.000 --> 00:08:44.900 If technology were to be rolled back to the tribe and to the pre-industrial era, the result 90 00:08:44.900 --> 00:08:49.740 would be mass starvation and death on a universal scale. 91 00:08:49.740 --> 00:08:54.860 The vast majority of the world's population is dependent for its very survival on modern 92 00:08:54.860 --> 00:08:57.340 technology and industry. 93 00:08:57.340 --> 00:09:02.980 The North American continent was able to accommodate approximately one million Indians in the days 94 00:09:02.980 --> 00:09:07.740 is before Columbus, all living on a subsistence level. 95 00:09:07.740 --> 00:09:13.500 It is now able to accommodate several hundred million people, all living at an infinitely 96 00:09:13.500 --> 00:09:15.760 higher living standard. 97 00:09:15.760 --> 00:09:20.120 And the reason is modern technology and industry. 98 00:09:20.120 --> 00:09:24.340 Abolish the latter and we will abolish the people as well. 99 00:09:24.340 --> 00:09:30.640 For all one knows to our fanatical anti-populationists, this solution to the population question 100 00:09:30.640 --> 00:09:32.560 may be a good thing. 101 00:09:32.560 --> 00:09:39.000 But for the great majority of us, this would be a draconian final solution indeed. 102 00:09:39.000 --> 00:09:43.680 The irresponsible attack on technology is another liberal flip-flop. 103 00:09:43.680 --> 00:09:48.760 It comes from the same liberal intellectuals who, thirty-odd years ago, were denouncing 104 00:09:48.760 --> 00:09:55.480 capitalism for not putting modern technology to full use in the service of state planning, 105 00:09:55.480 --> 00:10:01.300 and were calling for absolute rule by a modern technocratic elite. 106 00:10:01.300 --> 00:10:06.860 Yet now the very same intellectuals who not so long ago were yearning for a technocratic 107 00:10:06.860 --> 00:10:12.540 dictatorship over all of our lives are now trying to deprive us of the vital fruits of 108 00:10:12.540 --> 00:10:15.460 technology itself. 109 00:10:15.460 --> 00:10:21.500 Yet the various contradictory phases of liberal thought never completely die, and many of 110 00:10:21.500 --> 00:10:28.780 the same anti-technologists in a 180-degree reversal of the automation hysteria are also 111 00:10:28.780 --> 00:10:33.780 Confidently Forecasting Technological Stagnation from Now On 112 00:10:33.780 --> 00:10:43.780 They cheerily predict a gloomy future for mankind by assuming that technology will stagnate and not continue to improve and accelerate. 113 00:10:43.780 --> 00:10:51.780 This is the technique of pseudo-scientific forecasting of the widely touted Anti-Growth Club of Rome report. 114 00:10:51.780 --> 00:10:56.780 As Passell, Roberts and Ross write in their critique of the report, 115 00:10:56.780 --> 00:11:01.780 if the telephone company were restricted to turn-of-the-century technology, 116 00:11:01.780 --> 00:11:06.780 20 million operators would be needed to handle today's volume of calls. 117 00:11:06.780 --> 00:11:10.780 Or, as British editor Norman MacRae has observed, 118 00:11:10.780 --> 00:11:17.780 an extrapolation of the trends of the 1880s would show today's cities buried under horse manure. 119 00:11:17.780 --> 00:11:34.780 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. 120 00:11:34.780 --> 00:11:41.780 The Reverend Thomas Malthus made a similar point two centuries ago without benefit of computer printouts. 121 00:11:41.780 --> 00:11:50.780 Malthus argued that people tend to multiply exponentially, while the food supply, at best, increases at a constant rate. 122 00:11:50.780 --> 00:11:56.780 He expected that starvation and war would periodically redress the balance. 123 00:11:56.780 --> 00:12:03.780 But there is no particular criterion beyond myopia on which to base that speculation. 124 00:12:03.780 --> 00:12:11.380 Malthus was wrong. Food capacity has kept up with population. While no one knows for certain, 125 00:12:11.380 --> 00:12:17.380 technical progress shows no sign of slowing down. The best econometric estimates suggest 126 00:12:17.380 --> 00:12:25.700 that it is indeed growing exponentially. What we need is more economic growth, not less. 127 00:12:26.500 --> 00:12:33.380 More and better technology, and not the impossible and absurd attempt to scrap technology and return 128 00:12:33.380 --> 00:12:36.260 to the Primitive Tribe. 129 00:12:36.260 --> 00:12:42.060 Improved technology and greater capital investment will lead to higher living standards for all 130 00:12:42.060 --> 00:12:47.720 and provide greater material comforts, as well as the leisure to pursue and enjoy the 131 00:12:47.720 --> 00:12:50.300 spiritual side of life. 132 00:12:50.300 --> 00:12:55.720 There is precious little culture or civilization available for people who must work long hours 133 00:12:55.720 --> 00:12:58.660 to eke out a subsistence living. 134 00:12:58.660 --> 00:13:04.660 The real problem is that productive capital investment is being siphoned off by taxes, 135 00:13:04.660 --> 00:13:10.580 restrictions and government contracts for unproductive and wasteful government expenditures, 136 00:13:10.580 --> 00:13:13.860 including military and space boondoggling. 137 00:13:13.860 --> 00:13:19.960 Furthermore, the precious technical resource of scientists and engineers is being ever 138 00:13:19.960 --> 00:13:26.580 more intensively diverted to government instead of to civilian consumer production. 139 00:13:26.580 --> 00:13:32.580 What we need is for government to get out of the way, remove its incubus of taxation 140 00:13:32.580 --> 00:13:38.660 and expenditures from the economy, and allow productive and technical resources once again 141 00:13:38.660 --> 00:13:44.580 to devote themselves fully to increasing the well-being of the mass of consumers. 142 00:13:44.580 --> 00:13:50.500 We need growth, higher living standards, and a technology and capital equipment that meet 143 00:13:50.500 --> 00:13:53.300 consumer wants and demands. 144 00:13:53.300 --> 00:13:59.140 But we can only achieve these by removing the incubus of statism and allowing the energies 145 00:13:59.140 --> 00:14:04.820 of all of the population to express themselves in the free market economy. 146 00:14:04.820 --> 00:14:11.260 We need an economic and technological growth that emerges freely, as Jane Jacobs has shown, 147 00:14:11.260 --> 00:14:16.780 from the free market economy, and not the distortions and wastes imposed upon the world 148 00:14:16.780 --> 00:14:31.500 Conservation of Resources 149 00:14:31.500 --> 00:14:36.460 As we have mentioned, the self-same liberals who claim that we have entered the post-scarcity 150 00:14:36.460 --> 00:14:42.080 age and are in no further need of economic growth are in the forefront of the complaint 151 00:14:42.080 --> 00:14:47.760 that capitalist greed is destroying our scarce natural resources. 152 00:14:47.760 --> 00:14:53.080 The gloom and doom soothsayers of the Club of Rome, for example, by simply extrapolating 153 00:14:53.080 --> 00:14:59.280 current trends of resource use, confidently predict the exhaustion of vital raw materials 154 00:14:59.280 --> 00:15:01.660 within 40 years. 155 00:15:01.660 --> 00:15:07.520 But confident and completely faulty predictions of exhaustion of raw materials have been made 156 00:15:07.520 --> 00:15:11.040 countless times in recent centuries. 157 00:15:11.040 --> 00:15:16.000 What the soothsayers have overlooked is the vital role that the free-market economic mechanism 158 00:15:16.000 --> 00:15:21.400 plays in conserving and adding to natural resources. 159 00:15:21.400 --> 00:15:25.040 Let us consider, for example, a typical copper mine. 160 00:15:25.040 --> 00:15:30.680 Why has copper ore not been exhausted long before now by the inexorable demands of our 161 00:15:30.680 --> 00:15:33.120 industrial civilization? 162 00:15:33.120 --> 00:15:38.480 Why is it that copper miners, once they have found and opened a vein of ore, do not mine 163 00:15:38.480 --> 00:15:40.880 all the copper immediately? 164 00:15:40.880 --> 00:15:47.300 Why instead do they conserve the copper mine, add to it, and extract the copper gradually 165 00:15:47.300 --> 00:15:49.880 from year to year? 166 00:15:49.880 --> 00:15:55.200 Because the mine owners realize that, for example, if they triple this year's production 167 00:15:55.200 --> 00:16:01.520 of copper, they may indeed triple this year's income, but they will also be depleting the 168 00:16:01.520 --> 00:16:07.140 mine and therefore the future income they will be able to derive from it. 169 00:16:07.140 --> 00:16:12.860 On the market, this loss of future income is immediately reflected in the monetary value, 170 00:16:12.860 --> 00:16:16.060 the price, of the mine as a whole. 171 00:16:16.060 --> 00:16:20.980 This monetary value, reflected in the selling price of the mine, and then of individual 172 00:16:20.980 --> 00:16:27.040 shares of mining stock, is based on the expected future income to be earned from the production 173 00:16:27.040 --> 00:16:28.860 of the copper. 174 00:16:28.860 --> 00:16:34.100 Any depletion of the mine, then, will lower the value of the mine, and hence the price 175 00:16:34.100 --> 00:16:36.580 of the mining stock. 176 00:16:36.580 --> 00:16:42.380 Every mine owner, then, has to weigh the advantages of immediate income from copper production 177 00:16:42.380 --> 00:16:48.220 against the loss in the capital value of the mine as a whole, and hence against the loss 178 00:16:48.220 --> 00:16:51.500 in the value of his shares. 179 00:16:51.500 --> 00:16:56.420 The mine owner's decisions are determined by their expectations of future copper yields 180 00:16:56.420 --> 00:17:02.020 and demands, the existing and expected rates of interest, etc. 181 00:17:02.020 --> 00:17:06.900 Suppose, for example, that copper is expected to be rendered obsolete in a few years by 182 00:17:06.900 --> 00:17:09.340 a new synthetic metal. 183 00:17:09.340 --> 00:17:14.620 In that case, copper mine owners will rush to produce more copper now when it is more 184 00:17:14.620 --> 00:17:20.860 highly valued, and save less for the future when it will have little value, thereby benefiting 185 00:17:20.860 --> 00:17:27.180 the consumers and the economy as a whole by producing copper now when it is more intensely 186 00:17:27.180 --> 00:17:28.660 needed. 187 00:17:28.660 --> 00:17:33.140 But on the other hand, if a copper shortage is expected in the future, mine owners will 188 00:17:33.140 --> 00:17:39.780 produce less now and wait to produce more later when copper prices are higher, thereby 189 00:17:39.780 --> 00:17:46.540 benefiting society by producing more in the future when it will be needed more intensely. 190 00:17:46.540 --> 00:17:52.060 Thus we see that the market economy contains a marvelous built-in mechanism whereby the 191 00:17:52.060 --> 00:17:57.580 decisions of resource owners on present as against future production will benefit not 192 00:17:57.580 --> 00:18:04.780 Not only their own income and wealth but the mass of consumers and the economy as a whole. 193 00:18:04.780 --> 00:18:08.180 But there is much more to this free market mechanism. 194 00:18:08.180 --> 00:18:12.780 Suppose that a growing shortage of copper is now expected in the future. 195 00:18:12.780 --> 00:18:18.860 The result is that more copper will be withheld now and saved for future production. 196 00:18:18.860 --> 00:18:22.220 The price of copper now will rise. 197 00:18:22.220 --> 00:18:27.020 The increase in copper prices will have several conserving effects. 198 00:18:27.020 --> 00:18:31.880 In the first place, the higher price of copper is a signal to the users of copper that it 199 00:18:31.880 --> 00:18:34.840 is scarcer and more expensive. 200 00:18:34.840 --> 00:18:39.900 The copper users will then conserve the use of this more expensive metal. 201 00:18:39.900 --> 00:18:46.240 They will use less copper, substituting cheaper metals or plastics, and copper will be conserved 202 00:18:46.240 --> 00:18:52.420 more fully and saved for those uses for which there is no satisfactory substitute. 203 00:18:52.420 --> 00:19:06.420 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. 204 00:19:06.420 --> 00:19:13.420 Higher prices for copper will also stimulate campaigns for saving and recycling the metal. 205 00:19:13.420 --> 00:19:22.420 This price mechanism of the free market is precisely the reason that copper and other natural resources have not disappeared long ago. 206 00:19:22.420 --> 00:19:27.420 As Pasol, Roberts and Ross say in their critique of the Club of Rome, 207 00:19:27.420 --> 00:19:39.420 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. 208 00:19:39.420 --> 00:19:46.060 In the real world, rising prices act as an economic signal to conserve scarce resources, 209 00:19:46.060 --> 00:19:52.300 providing incentives to use cheaper materials in their place, stimulating research efforts on new 210 00:19:52.300 --> 00:19:58.620 ways to save on resource inputs, and making renewed exploration attempts more profitable. 211 00:19:59.420 --> 00:20:05.980 In fact, in contrast to the gloom and doomers, raw material and natural resource prices have 212 00:20:05.980 --> 00:20:11.800 have remained low and have generally declined relative to other prices. 213 00:20:11.800 --> 00:20:17.700 To liberal and Marxist intellectuals, this is usually a sign of capitalist exploitation 214 00:20:17.700 --> 00:20:22.920 of the underdeveloped countries which are often the producers of the raw materials. 215 00:20:22.920 --> 00:20:28.420 But it is a sign of something completely different, of the fact that natural resources have not 216 00:20:28.420 --> 00:20:34.480 been growing scarcer but more abundant, hence their relatively lower cost. 217 00:20:34.480 --> 00:20:40.220 The development of cheap substitutes, for example plastics, synthetic fibers, has kept 218 00:20:40.220 --> 00:20:43.640 natural resources cheap and abundant. 219 00:20:43.640 --> 00:20:48.500 And in a few decades we can expect that modern technology will develop a remarkably cheap 220 00:20:48.500 --> 00:20:54.740 source of energy, nuclear fusion, a development which will automatically yield a great abundance 221 00:20:54.740 --> 00:20:59.140 of raw materials for the work that will be needed. 222 00:20:59.140 --> 00:21:04.580 The development of synthetic materials and of cheaper energy highlights a vital aspect 223 00:21:04.580 --> 00:21:08.340 of modern technology the doomsayers overlook. 224 00:21:08.340 --> 00:21:14.180 That technology and industrial production create resources, which had never existed 225 00:21:14.180 --> 00:21:16.860 as effective resources. 226 00:21:16.860 --> 00:21:22.380 For example, before the development of the kerosene lamp, and especially the automobile, 227 00:21:22.380 --> 00:21:29.120 petroleum was not a resource but an unwanted waste, a giant liquid black weed. 228 00:21:29.120 --> 00:21:35.920 It was only the development of modern industry that converted petroleum into a useful resource. 229 00:21:35.920 --> 00:21:42.320 Furthermore, modern technology, through improved geological techniques and through the incentives 230 00:21:42.320 --> 00:21:48.800 of the market, has been finding new petroleum reserves at a rapid rate. 231 00:21:48.800 --> 00:21:54.560 Predictions of imminent exhaustion of resources, as we have noted, are nothing new. 232 00:21:54.560 --> 00:22:00.480 In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt, calling a governor's conference on natural resources, 233 00:22:00.480 --> 00:22:03.480 warned of their imminent exhaustion. 234 00:22:03.480 --> 00:22:08.560 At the same conference, steel industrialist Andrew Carnegie predicted the exhaustion of 235 00:22:08.560 --> 00:22:15.720 the Lake Superior Iron Range by 1940, while railroad magnate James J. Hill forecast the 236 00:22:15.720 --> 00:22:20.120 exhaustion of much of our timber resources in ten years. 237 00:22:20.120 --> 00:22:25.120 Not only that, Hill even predicted an imminent shortage of wheat production in the United 238 00:22:25.120 --> 00:22:31.160 States, in a country where we are still grappling with the wheat surpluses generated by our 239 00:22:31.160 --> 00:22:33.920 farm subsidy program. 240 00:22:33.920 --> 00:22:39.120 Current forecasts of doom are made on the same basis, a grievous underweighting of the 241 00:22:39.120 --> 00:22:45.840 prospects of modern technology and an ignorance of the workings of the market economy. 242 00:22:45.840 --> 00:22:51.300 It is true that several particular natural resources have suffered in the past and now 243 00:22:51.300 --> 00:22:52.940 from depletion. 244 00:22:52.940 --> 00:22:57.300 But in each case, the reason has not been capitalist greed. 245 00:22:57.300 --> 00:23:03.320 On the contrary, the reason has been the failure of government to allow private property in 246 00:23:03.320 --> 00:23:04.320 the resource. 247 00:23:04.320 --> 00:23:11.160 In short, a failure to pursue the logic of private property rights far enough. 248 00:23:11.160 --> 00:23:13.800 One example has been timber resources. 249 00:23:13.800 --> 00:23:19.340 In the American West and in Canada, most of the forests are owned not by private owners, 250 00:23:19.340 --> 00:23:22.460 but by the federal or provincial government. 251 00:23:22.460 --> 00:23:27.100 The government then leases their use to private timber companies. 252 00:23:27.100 --> 00:23:32.900 In short, private property is permitted only in the annual use of the resource, but not 253 00:23:32.900 --> 00:23:36.440 in the forest, the resource itself. 254 00:23:36.440 --> 00:23:41.820 In this situation, the private timber company does not own the capital value, and therefore 255 00:23:41.820 --> 00:23:46.120 does not have to worry about depletion of the resource itself. 256 00:23:46.120 --> 00:23:53.220 The timber company has no economic incentive to conserve the resource, replant trees, etc. 257 00:23:53.220 --> 00:23:58.400 Its only incentive is to cut as many trees as quickly as possible, since there is no 258 00:23:58.400 --> 00:24:04.880 economic value to the timber company in maintaining the capital value of the forest. 259 00:24:04.880 --> 00:24:10.180 In Europe, where private ownership of forests is far more common, there is little complaint 260 00:24:10.180 --> 00:24:12.760 of Destruction of Timber Resources. 261 00:24:12.760 --> 00:24:18.300 For wherever private property is allowed in the forest itself, it is to the benefit of 262 00:24:18.300 --> 00:24:24.420 the owner to preserve and restore tree growth while he is cutting timber, so as to avoid 263 00:24:24.420 --> 00:24:27.700 depletion of the forest's capital value. 264 00:24:27.700 --> 00:24:33.680 Thus, in the United States, a major culprit has been the Forest Service of the U.S. Department 265 00:24:33.680 --> 00:24:39.720 of Agriculture, which owns forests and leases annual rights to cut timber, with resulting 266 00:24:39.720 --> 00:24:55.720 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. 267 00:24:55.720 --> 00:25:06.720 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. 268 00:25:06.720 --> 00:25:12.800 Every viewer of western movies is familiar with the mystique of the open range and the 269 00:25:12.800 --> 00:25:19.500 often violent wars among cattlemen, sheepmen and farmers over parcels of ranch land. 270 00:25:19.500 --> 00:25:24.900 The open range was the failure of the federal government to apply the policy of homesteading 271 00:25:24.900 --> 00:25:30.040 to the changed conditions of the drier climate west of the Mississippi. 272 00:25:30.040 --> 00:25:36.900 In the east, the 160 acres granted free to homesteading farmers on government land constituted 273 00:25:36.900 --> 00:25:41.700 a viable technological unit for farming in a wetter climate. 274 00:25:41.700 --> 00:25:47.400 But in the dry climate of the west, no successful cattle or sheep ranch could be organized on 275 00:25:47.400 --> 00:25:50.180 a mere 160 acres. 276 00:25:50.180 --> 00:25:56.220 But the federal government refused to expand the 160-acre unit to allow the homesteading 277 00:25:56.220 --> 00:25:58.320 of larger cattle ranches. 278 00:25:58.320 --> 00:26:04.920 Hence, the open range, on which private cattle and sheep owners were able to roam unchecked 279 00:26:04.920 --> 00:26:07.920 on government-owned pasture land. 280 00:26:07.920 --> 00:26:12.440 But this meant that no one owned the pasture, the land itself. 281 00:26:12.440 --> 00:26:17.480 It was therefore to the economic advantage of every cattle or sheep owner to graze the 282 00:26:17.480 --> 00:26:20.920 land and use up the grass as quickly as possible. 283 00:26:20.920 --> 00:26:26.100 Otherwise, the grass would be grazed by some other sheep or cattle owner. 284 00:26:26.100 --> 00:26:31.380 The result of this tragically short-sighted refusal to allow private property in grazing 285 00:26:31.380 --> 00:26:37.680 land itself was an overgrazing of the land, the ruining of the grassland by grazing too 286 00:26:37.680 --> 00:26:44.380 early in the season, and the failure of anyone to restore or replant the grass. 287 00:26:44.380 --> 00:26:48.860 Anyone who bothered to restore the grass would have had to look on helplessly while someone 288 00:26:48.860 --> 00:26:52.260 else grazed his cattle or sheep. 289 00:26:52.260 --> 00:26:57.420 Hence the overgrazing of the West, and the onset of the Dust Bowl. 290 00:26:57.420 --> 00:27:03.060 Hence also the illegal attempts by numerous cattlemen, farmers and sheepmen to take the 291 00:27:03.060 --> 00:27:08.340 law into their own hands and fence off the land into private property, and the range 292 00:27:08.340 --> 00:27:11.580 wars that often followed. 293 00:27:11.580 --> 00:27:17.620 Professor Samuel P. Hayes, in his authoritative account of the conservation movement in America, 294 00:27:17.620 --> 00:27:29.620 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. 295 00:27:29.620 --> 00:27:37.620 Congress had never provided legislation regulating grazing or permitting stockmen to acquire rangelands. 296 00:27:37.620 --> 00:27:40.620 Cattle and sheepmen roamed the public domain. 297 00:27:40.620 --> 00:27:46.620 Cattlemen fenced range for their exclusive use, but competitors cut the wire. 298 00:27:46.620 --> 00:27:57.620 Resorting to force and violence, sheep herders and cowboys solved their disputes over grazing lands by slaughtering rival livestock and murdering rival stockmen. 299 00:27:57.620 --> 00:28:05.620 Absence of the most elementary institutions of property law created confusion, bitterness and destruction. 300 00:28:05.620 --> 00:28:10.620 Amid this turmoil the public range rapidly deteriorated. 301 00:28:10.620 --> 00:28:16.500 Originally plentiful and lush, the forage supply was subjected to intense pressure by 302 00:28:16.500 --> 00:28:18.660 increasing use. 303 00:28:18.660 --> 00:28:24.360 The public domain became stocked with more animals than the range could support. 304 00:28:24.360 --> 00:28:29.640 Since each stockman feared that others would beat him to the available forage, he grazed 305 00:28:29.640 --> 00:28:35.540 early in the year and did not permit the young grass to mature and re-seed. 306 00:28:35.540 --> 00:28:41.760 Under such conditions, the quality and quantity of available forage rapidly decreased. 307 00:28:41.760 --> 00:28:47.800 Vigorous perennials gave way to annuals, and annuals to weeds. 308 00:28:47.800 --> 00:28:53.460 Hayes concludes that public domain rangelands may have been depleted by over two-thirds 309 00:28:53.460 --> 00:28:58.920 by this process, as compared to their virgin condition. 310 00:28:58.920 --> 00:29:04.200 There is a vitally important area in which the absence of private property in the resource 311 00:29:04.200 --> 00:29:11.400 has been and is causing not only depletion of resources, but also a complete failure to develop 312 00:29:11.400 --> 00:29:18.360 vast potential resources. This is the potentially enormously productive ocean resource. 313 00:29:19.400 --> 00:29:25.640 The oceans are in the international public domain. That is, no person, company or even 314 00:29:25.640 --> 00:29:31.720 national government is allowed property rights in parts of the ocean. As a result, the oceans have 315 00:29:31.720 --> 00:29:36.720 have remained in the same primitive state as was the land in the pre-civilized days 316 00:29:36.720 --> 00:29:39.660 before the development of agriculture. 317 00:29:39.660 --> 00:29:45.320 The way of production for primitive man was hunting and gathering, the hunting of wild 318 00:29:45.320 --> 00:29:52.380 animals and the gathering of fruits, berries, nuts, and wild seeds and vegetables. 319 00:29:52.380 --> 00:29:57.760 Primitive man worked passively within his environment instead of acting to transform 320 00:29:57.760 --> 00:29:58.760 it. 321 00:29:58.760 --> 00:30:03.600 Hence he just lived off the land without attempting to remold it. 322 00:30:03.600 --> 00:30:09.080 As a result, the land was unproductive, and only a relatively few tribesmen could exist 323 00:30:09.080 --> 00:30:11.960 at a bare subsistence level. 324 00:30:11.960 --> 00:30:17.180 It was only with the development of agriculture, the farming of the soil, and the transformation 325 00:30:17.180 --> 00:30:22.720 of the land through farming, that productivity and living standards could take giant leaps 326 00:30:22.720 --> 00:30:23.920 forward. 327 00:30:23.920 --> 00:30:28.320 And it was only with agriculture that civilization could begin. 328 00:30:28.320 --> 00:30:33.760 But to permit the development of agriculture, there had to be private property rights, first 329 00:30:33.760 --> 00:30:39.000 in the fields and crops, and then in the land itself. 330 00:30:39.000 --> 00:30:43.520 With respect to the ocean, however, we are still in the primitive, unproductive hunting 331 00:30:43.520 --> 00:30:45.800 and gathering stage. 332 00:30:45.800 --> 00:30:51.840 Anyone can capture fish in the ocean or extract its resources, but only on the run, only as 333 00:30:51.840 --> 00:30:54.160 hunters and gatherers. 334 00:30:54.160 --> 00:30:56.720 No one can farm the ocean. 335 00:30:56.720 --> 00:30:59.940 No one can engage in aquaculture. 336 00:30:59.940 --> 00:31:04.880 In this way, we are deprived of the use of the immense fish and mineral resources of 337 00:31:04.880 --> 00:31:05.880 the seas. 338 00:31:05.880 --> 00:31:11.960 For example, if anyone tried to farm the sea and to increase the productivity of the fisheries 339 00:31:11.960 --> 00:31:17.520 by fertilizers, he would immediately be deprived of the fruits of his efforts, because he could 340 00:31:17.520 --> 00:31:21.940 not keep other fishermen from rushing in and seizing the fish. 341 00:31:21.940 --> 00:31:27.140 And so, no one tries to fertilize the oceans, as the land is fertilized. 342 00:31:27.140 --> 00:31:30.300 Furthermore, there is no economic incentive. 343 00:31:30.300 --> 00:31:36.520 In fact, there is every disincentive for anyone to engage in technological research in the 344 00:31:36.520 --> 00:31:42.260 ways and means of improving the productivity of the fisheries, or in extracting the mineral 345 00:31:42.260 --> 00:31:44.620 resources of the oceans. 346 00:31:44.620 --> 00:31:49.860 There will only be such incentive when property rights in parts of the ocean are as fully 347 00:31:49.860 --> 00:31:52.860 are only allowed as property rights in the land. 348 00:31:52.860 --> 00:31:59.860 Even now, there is a simple but effective technique that could be used for increasing fish productivity. 349 00:31:59.860 --> 00:32:06.860 Parts of the ocean could be fenced off electronically, and through this readily available electronic fencing, 350 00:32:06.860 --> 00:32:09.860 fish could be segregated by size. 351 00:32:09.860 --> 00:32:15.860 By preventing big fish from eating smaller fish, the production of fish could be increased enormously. 352 00:32:15.860 --> 00:32:28.860 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. 353 00:32:28.860 --> 00:32:42.860 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. 354 00:32:42.860 --> 00:33:01.860 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. 355 00:33:01.860 --> 00:33:08.860 And of course, such governmental restrictions do nothing at all to stimulate the growth of aquaculture. 356 00:33:08.860 --> 00:33:23.860 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. 357 00:33:23.860 --> 00:33:30.860 The consumer pays a much higher price for red salmon than would be necessary if efficient methods were used. 358 00:33:30.860 --> 00:33:39.860 Despite the ever-growing, intertwining bonds of regulations, the preservation of the salmon run is still not assured. 359 00:33:39.860 --> 00:33:44.860 The root of the problem lies in the current non-ownership arrangement. 360 00:33:44.860 --> 00:33:51.860 It is not in the interests of any individual fisherman to concern himself with perpetuation of the salmon run. 361 00:33:51.860 --> 00:33:58.860 Quite the contrary, it is rather in his interests to catch as many fish as he can during the season. 362 00:33:58.860 --> 00:34:15.860 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. 363 00:34:15.860 --> 00:34:25.860 The invention of modern electronic sensing equipment has now made the policing of large bodies of water relatively cheap and easy. 364 00:34:25.860 --> 00:34:35.860 The growing international conflicts over parts of the ocean only further highlight the importance of private property rights in this vital area. 365 00:34:35.860 --> 00:34:41.860 For as the United States and other nations assert their sovereignty 200 miles from their shores, 366 00:34:41.860 --> 00:34:46.860 and as private companies and governments squabble over areas of the ocean, 367 00:34:46.860 --> 00:34:53.860 and as trawlers, fishing nets, oil drillers and mineral diggers war over the same areas of the ocean, 368 00:34:53.860 --> 00:35:00.500 property rights become increasingly and patently more important as Francis Christy writes 369 00:35:01.540 --> 00:35:08.260 coal is mined in shafts below the sea floor oil is drilled from platforms fixed to the bottom 370 00:35:08.260 --> 00:35:14.660 rising above the water minerals can be dredged from the surface of the ocean bed sedentary 371 00:35:14.660 --> 00:35:20.900 animals are scraped from the bed on which telephone cables may lie bottom feeding animals are caught 372 00:35:20.900 --> 00:35:29.900 are not in traps or trawls. Midwater species may be taken by hook and line, or by trawls which occasionally interfere with submarines. 373 00:35:29.900 --> 00:35:40.900 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. 374 00:35:40.900 --> 00:35:46.900 This growing conflict leads Christie to predict that the seas are in a stage of transition. 375 00:35:46.900 --> 00:35:57.900 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. 376 00:35:58.900 --> 00:36:06.900 Eventually, concludes Christie, as the C's resources become more valuable, exclusive rights will be acquired. 377 00:36:09.900 --> 00:36:10.900 Pollution 378 00:36:10.900 --> 00:36:13.660 All right. 379 00:36:13.660 --> 00:36:19.160 Even if we concede that full private property and resources and the free market will conserve 380 00:36:19.160 --> 00:36:25.560 and create resources, and do it far better than government regulation, what of the problem 381 00:36:25.560 --> 00:36:26.560 of pollution? 382 00:36:26.560 --> 00:36:33.480 Wouldn't we be suffering aggravated pollution from unchecked capitalist greed? 383 00:36:33.480 --> 00:36:38.600 There is, first of all, this stark empirical fact. 384 00:36:38.600 --> 00:36:43.600 Government ownership, even socialism, has proved to be no solution to the problem of 385 00:36:43.600 --> 00:36:45.280 pollution. 386 00:36:45.280 --> 00:36:50.460 Even the most starry-eyed proponents of government planning concede that the poisoning of Lake 387 00:36:50.460 --> 00:36:56.560 Baikal in the Soviet Union is a monument to heedless industrial pollution of a valuable 388 00:36:56.560 --> 00:36:58.880 natural resource. 389 00:36:58.880 --> 00:37:02.120 But there is far more to the problem than that. 390 00:37:02.120 --> 00:37:07.920 Note for example the two crucial areas in which pollution has become an important problem. 391 00:37:07.920 --> 00:37:11.880 The air and the waterways, particularly the rivers. 392 00:37:11.880 --> 00:37:17.840 But these are precisely two of the vital areas in society in which private property has not 393 00:37:17.840 --> 00:37:19.920 been permitted to function. 394 00:37:19.920 --> 00:37:22.760 First, the rivers. 395 00:37:22.760 --> 00:37:27.700 The rivers and the oceans, too, are generally owned by the government. 396 00:37:27.700 --> 00:37:34.000 Private property, certainly complete private property, has not been permitted in the water. 397 00:37:34.000 --> 00:37:37.540 In essence, then, government owns the rivers. 398 00:37:37.540 --> 00:37:43.060 But government ownership is not true ownership, because the government officials, while able 399 00:37:43.060 --> 00:37:49.540 to control the resource, cannot themselves reap their capital value on the market. 400 00:37:49.540 --> 00:37:53.460 Government officials cannot sell the rivers or sell stock in them. 401 00:37:53.460 --> 00:37:59.980 Hence they have no economic incentive to preserve the purity and value of the rivers. 402 00:37:59.980 --> 00:38:03.940 Rivers are then, in the economic sense, unowned. 403 00:38:03.940 --> 00:38:09.000 Therefore government officials have permitted their corruption and pollution. 404 00:38:09.000 --> 00:38:13.420 Anyone has been able to dump polluting garbage and wastes in the waters. 405 00:38:13.420 --> 00:38:19.580 But consider what would happen if private firms were able to own the rivers and the lakes. 406 00:38:19.580 --> 00:38:24.780 If a private firm owned Lake Erie, for example, then anyone dumping garbage in the lake would 407 00:38:24.780 --> 00:38:30.000 be promptly sued in the courts for their aggression against private property, and would be forced 408 00:38:30.000 --> 00:38:35.520 by the courts to pay damages and to cease and desist from any further aggression. 409 00:38:35.520 --> 00:38:43.200 Thus, only private property rights will ensure an end to pollution invasion of resources. 410 00:38:43.200 --> 00:38:48.560 Only because the rivers are unowned is there no owner to rise up and defend his precious 411 00:38:48.560 --> 00:38:51.060 resource from attack. 412 00:38:51.060 --> 00:38:56.340 If in contrast, anyone should dump garbage or pollutants into a lake which is privately 413 00:38:56.340 --> 00:39:03.340 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. 414 00:39:26.340 --> 00:39:29.340 and Commercial Fishing. 415 00:39:29.340 --> 00:39:34.340 If government as owner has allowed the pollution of the rivers, government has also been the 416 00:39:34.340 --> 00:39:41.040 single major active polluter, especially in its role as municipal sewage disposer. 417 00:39:41.040 --> 00:39:47.060 There already exist low-cost chemical toilets which can burn off sewage without polluting 418 00:39:47.060 --> 00:39:49.540 air, ground or water. 419 00:39:49.540 --> 00:39:54.180 But who will invest in chemical toilets when local governments will dispose of sewage 420 00:39:54.180 --> 00:39:57.260 Page-free to their customers. 421 00:39:57.260 --> 00:40:02.940 This example points up a problem similar to the case of the stunting of aquaculture technology 422 00:40:02.940 --> 00:40:06.000 by the absence of private property. 423 00:40:06.000 --> 00:40:12.140 If governments as owners of the rivers permit pollution of water, then industrial technology 424 00:40:12.140 --> 00:40:16.820 will and has become a water-polluting technology. 425 00:40:16.820 --> 00:40:21.780 If production processes are allowed to pollute the rivers unchecked by their owners, then 426 00:40:21.780 --> 00:40:26.320 And that is the sort of production technology we will have. 427 00:40:26.320 --> 00:40:31.740 If the problem of water pollution can be cured by private property rights in water, how about 428 00:40:31.740 --> 00:40:33.220 air pollution? 429 00:40:33.220 --> 00:40:38.620 How can libertarians possibly come up with a solution for this grievous problem? 430 00:40:38.620 --> 00:40:42.780 Surely there can't be private property in the air. 431 00:40:42.780 --> 00:40:45.820 But the answer is, yes, there can. 432 00:40:45.820 --> 00:40:51.020 We have already seen how radio and TV frequencies can be privately owned. 433 00:40:51.020 --> 00:40:53.480 So could channels for airlines. 434 00:40:53.480 --> 00:40:57.420 Commercial airline routes, for example, could be privately owned. 435 00:40:57.420 --> 00:41:02.300 There is no need for a civil aeronautics board to parcel out and restrict routes between 436 00:41:02.300 --> 00:41:04.260 various cities. 437 00:41:04.260 --> 00:41:10.020 But in the case of air pollution, we are dealing not so much with private property in the air 438 00:41:10.020 --> 00:41:15.860 as with protecting private property in one's lungs, fields and orchards. 439 00:41:15.860 --> 00:41:21.880 The vital fact about air pollution is that the polluter sends unwanted and unbidden pollutants, 440 00:41:21.880 --> 00:41:28.000 from smoke to nuclear radiation to sulfur oxides, through the air and into the lungs 441 00:41:28.000 --> 00:41:33.480 of innocent victims, as well as onto their material property. 442 00:41:33.480 --> 00:41:38.640 All such emanations which injure person or property constitute aggression against the 443 00:41:38.640 --> 00:41:41.340 private property of the victims. 444 00:41:41.340 --> 00:41:45.720 Air pollution, after all, is just as much aggression as committing arson against another's 445 00:41:45.720 --> 00:42:15.720 A simple time lag between recognizing a new technical 446 00:42:15.720 --> 00:42:19.040 in a logical problem and facing up to it. 447 00:42:19.040 --> 00:42:24.320 For if some of the modern pollutants have only recently become known, factory smoke 448 00:42:24.320 --> 00:42:29.160 and many of its bad effects have been known ever since the Industrial Revolution, known 449 00:42:29.160 --> 00:42:34.640 to the extent that the American courts during the late and as far back as the early nineteenth 450 00:42:34.640 --> 00:42:40.880 century made the deliberate decision to allow property rights to be violated by industrial 451 00:42:40.880 --> 00:42:42.160 smoke. 452 00:42:42.160 --> 00:42:48.740 To do so, the courts had to, and did, systematically change and weaken the defenses of property 453 00:42:48.740 --> 00:42:52.920 right embedded in Anglo-Saxon common law. 454 00:42:52.920 --> 00:42:58.300 Before the mid and late 19th century, any injurious air pollution was considered a tort, 455 00:42:58.300 --> 00:43:03.100 a nuisance against which the victim could sue for damages, and against which he could 456 00:43:03.100 --> 00:43:08.060 take out an injunction to cease and desist from any further invasion of his property 457 00:43:08.060 --> 00:43:09.500 rights. 458 00:43:09.500 --> 00:43:14.520 But during the nineteenth century, the courts systematically altered the law of negligence 459 00:43:14.520 --> 00:43:21.020 and the law of nuisance to permit any air pollution which was not unusually greater 460 00:43:21.020 --> 00:43:26.400 than any similar manufacturing firm, one that was not more extensive than the customary 461 00:43:26.400 --> 00:43:29.860 practice of fellow polluters. 462 00:43:29.860 --> 00:43:35.860 As factories began to arise and emit smoke, blighting the orchards of neighboring farmers, 463 00:43:35.860 --> 00:43:40.660 The farmers would take the manufacturers to court, asking for damages and injunctions 464 00:43:40.660 --> 00:43:43.900 against further invasion of their property. 465 00:43:43.900 --> 00:43:50.220 But the judges said, in effect, sorry, we know that industrial smoke, that is, air pollution, 466 00:43:50.220 --> 00:43:53.260 invades and interferes with your property rights. 467 00:43:53.260 --> 00:43:59.360 But there is something more important than mere property rights, and that is public policy, 468 00:43:59.360 --> 00:44:01.140 the common good. 469 00:44:01.140 --> 00:44:04.960 And the common good decrees that industry is a good thing. 470 00:44:04.960 --> 00:44:09.880 All progress is a good thing, and therefore your mere private property rights must be 471 00:44:09.880 --> 00:44:13.720 overridden on behalf of the general welfare. 472 00:44:13.720 --> 00:44:19.360 And now all of us are paying the bitter price for this overriding of private property in 473 00:44:19.360 --> 00:44:26.220 the form of lung disease and countless other ailments, and all for the common good. 474 00:44:26.220 --> 00:44:30.860 That this principle has guided the courts during the Air Age as well may be seen by 475 00:44:30.860 --> 00:44:37.380 by a decision of the Ohio Courts in Antonic v. Chamberlain, 1947. 476 00:44:37.380 --> 00:44:43.020 The residents of a suburban area near Akron sued to enjoin the defendants from operating 477 00:44:43.020 --> 00:44:45.440 a privately owned airport. 478 00:44:45.440 --> 00:44:50.220 The grounds were invasion of property rights through excessive noise. 479 00:44:50.220 --> 00:44:52.780 Refusing the injunction, the court declared, 480 00:44:52.780 --> 00:45:08.780 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. 481 00:45:08.780 --> 00:45:30.780 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. 482 00:45:30.780 --> 00:45:44.280 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. 483 00:45:44.280 --> 00:45:56.780 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, 484 00:45:56.780 --> 00:46:16.780 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. 485 00:46:16.780 --> 00:46:22.780 But the legislatures systematically outlawed such class action suits in pollution cases. 486 00:46:22.780 --> 00:46:31.780 For this reason, a victim may successfully sue a polluter who injures him individually in a one-to-one private-nuisance suit. 487 00:46:31.780 --> 00:46:39.780 But he is prohibited by law from acting against a mass polluter who is injuring a large number of people in a given area. 488 00:46:39.780 --> 00:46:48.780 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, 489 00:46:48.780 --> 00:46:53.260 but it will not protect you if the thief also steals from everyone else in the neighborhood. 490 00:46:55.100 --> 00:47:02.220 Noise too is a form of air pollution. Noise is the creation of sound waves which go through the air 491 00:47:02.220 --> 00:47:08.780 and then bombard and invade the property and persons of others. Only recently have physicians 492 00:47:08.780 --> 00:47:16.300 begun to investigate the damaging effects of noise on the human physiology. Again, a libertarian legal 493 00:47:16.300 --> 00:47:31.740 The remedy against air pollution is therefore crystal clear, and it has nothing to do with 494 00:47:31.740 --> 00:47:37.260 multi-billion dollar palliative government programs at the expense of the taxpayers, 495 00:47:37.260 --> 00:47:40.140 which do not even meet the real issue. 496 00:47:40.140 --> 00:47:44.860 The remedy is simply for the courts to return to their function of defending person and 497 00:47:44.860 --> 00:47:50.100 and Property Rights Against Invasion, and therefore to enjoin anyone from injecting 498 00:47:50.100 --> 00:47:52.940 pollutants into the air. 499 00:47:52.940 --> 00:47:58.000 But what of the pro-pollution defenders of industrial progress, and what of the increased 500 00:47:58.000 --> 00:48:05.000 costs that would have to be borne by the consumer, and what of our present polluting technology? 501 00:48:05.000 --> 00:48:09.900 The argument that such an injunctive prohibition against pollution would add to the costs of 502 00:48:09.900 --> 00:48:15.580 of Industrial Production is as reprehensible as the pre-Civil War argument that the abolition 503 00:48:15.580 --> 00:48:21.140 of slavery would add to the costs of growing cotton and that therefore abolition, however 504 00:48:21.140 --> 00:48:24.740 morally correct, was impractical. 505 00:48:24.740 --> 00:48:29.820 For this means that the polluters are able to impose all of the high costs of pollution 506 00:48:29.820 --> 00:48:35.900 upon those whose lungs and property rights they have been allowed to invade with impunity. 507 00:48:35.900 --> 00:48:42.360 Furthermore, the cost and technology argument overlooks the vital fact that if air pollution 508 00:48:42.360 --> 00:48:48.700 is allowed to proceed with impunity, there continues to be no economic incentive to develop 509 00:48:48.700 --> 00:48:52.460 a technology that will not pollute. 510 00:48:52.460 --> 00:48:58.060 On the contrary, the incentive would continue to cut, as it has for a century, precisely 511 00:48:58.060 --> 00:49:00.180 the other way. 512 00:49:00.180 --> 00:49:05.000 Suppose for example that in the days when automobiles and trucks were first being used, 513 00:49:05.000 --> 00:49:07.000 The courts had ruled as follows. 514 00:49:07.000 --> 00:49:12.400 Ordinarily, we would be opposed to trucks invading people's lawns as an invasion of 515 00:49:12.400 --> 00:49:17.980 private property, and we would insist that trucks confine themselves to the roads, regardless 516 00:49:17.980 --> 00:49:20.120 of traffic congestion. 517 00:49:20.120 --> 00:49:25.480 But trucks are vitally important to the public welfare, and therefore we decree that trucks 518 00:49:25.480 --> 00:49:30.400 should be allowed to cross any lawns they wish, provided they believe that this would 519 00:49:30.400 --> 00:49:33.460 ease their traffic problems. 520 00:49:33.460 --> 00:49:38.060 If the courts had ruled in this way, then we would now have a transportation system 521 00:49:38.060 --> 00:49:42.580 in which lawns would be systematically desecrated by trucks. 522 00:49:42.580 --> 00:49:48.880 And any attempt to stop this would be decried in the name of modern transportation needs. 523 00:49:48.880 --> 00:49:54.540 The point is that this is precisely the way that the courts ruled on air pollution, pollution 524 00:49:54.540 --> 00:49:59.460 which is far more damaging to all of us than trampling on lawns. 525 00:49:59.460 --> 00:50:05.860 In this way the government gave the green light from the very start to a polluting technology. 526 00:50:05.860 --> 00:50:10.740 It is no wonder then that this is precisely the kind of technology we have. 527 00:50:10.740 --> 00:50:16.140 The only remedy is to force the polluting invaders to stop their invasion and thereby 528 00:50:16.140 --> 00:50:22.820 to redirect technology into non-polluting or even anti-polluting channels. 529 00:50:22.820 --> 00:50:29.420 Already, even at our necessarily primitive stage in anti-pollution technology, techniques 530 00:50:29.420 --> 00:50:35.620 have been developed to combat air and noise pollution. Mufflers can be installed on noisy 531 00:50:35.620 --> 00:50:42.240 machines that emit sound waves precisely contra-cyclical to the waves of the machines, and thereby 532 00:50:42.240 --> 00:50:49.740 can cancel out these racking sounds. Air wastes can even now be recaptured as they leave the 533 00:50:49.740 --> 00:50:54.540 the Chimney and be recycled to yield products useful to industry. 534 00:50:54.540 --> 00:51:01.220 Thus, sulfur dioxide, a major noxious air pollutant, can be captured and recycled to 535 00:51:01.220 --> 00:51:05.500 produce economically valuable sulfuric acid. 536 00:51:05.500 --> 00:51:11.420 The highly polluting spark ignition engine will either have to be cured by new devices 537 00:51:11.420 --> 00:51:18.480 or replaced altogether by such non-polluting engines as diesel, gas turbine or steam or 538 00:51:18.480 --> 00:51:45.480 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. 539 00:51:45.480 --> 00:51:56.480 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. 540 00:51:56.480 --> 00:52:07.480 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. 541 00:52:07.480 --> 00:52:13.480 There are recent signs that the legal system is beginning to change in this direction. 542 00:52:13.480 --> 00:52:18.480 New judicial decisions and repeal of laws disallowing class action suits. 543 00:52:18.480 --> 00:52:21.480 But this is only a beginning. 544 00:52:21.480 --> 00:52:30.480 Among conservatives, in contrast to libertarians, there are two ultimately similar responses to the problem of air pollution. 545 00:52:30.480 --> 00:52:36.480 One response, by Ayn Rand and Robert Moses among others, is to deny that the problem exists 546 00:52:36.480 --> 00:52:42.440 exists, and to attribute the entire agitation to leftists who want to destroy capitalism 547 00:52:42.440 --> 00:52:47.440 and technology on behalf of a tribal form of socialism. 548 00:52:47.440 --> 00:52:52.840 While part of this charge may be correct, denial of the very existence of the problem 549 00:52:52.840 --> 00:52:59.060 is to deny science itself and to give a vital hostage to the leftist charge that defenders 550 00:52:59.060 --> 00:53:03.200 of capitalism place property rights above human rights. 551 00:53:03.200 --> 00:53:09.080 Moreover, a defense of air pollution does not even defend property rights. 552 00:53:09.080 --> 00:53:14.160 On the contrary, it puts these conservatives' stamp of approval on those industrialists 553 00:53:14.160 --> 00:53:19.120 who are trampling upon the property rights of the mass of the citizenry. 554 00:53:19.120 --> 00:53:24.180 A second and more sophisticated conservative response is by such free market economists 555 00:53:24.180 --> 00:53:26.260 as Milton Friedman. 556 00:53:26.260 --> 00:53:31.420 The Friedmanites concede the existence of air pollution but propose to meet it not by 557 00:53:31.420 --> 00:53:37.900 by a defense of property rights, but rather by a supposedly utilitarian cost-benefit calculation 558 00:53:37.900 --> 00:53:44.300 by government, which will then make and enforce a social decision on how much pollution to 559 00:53:44.300 --> 00:53:45.900 allow. 560 00:53:45.900 --> 00:53:50.660 This decision would then be enforced either by licensing a given amount of pollution, 561 00:53:50.660 --> 00:53:57.280 the granting of pollution rights, by a graded scale of taxes against it, or by the taxpayers 562 00:53:57.280 --> 00:54:00.620 paying firms not to pollute. 563 00:54:00.620 --> 00:54:05.780 Not only would these proposals grant an enormous amount of bureaucratic power to government 564 00:54:05.780 --> 00:54:11.380 in the name of safeguarding the free market, they would continue to override property rights 565 00:54:11.380 --> 00:54:15.680 in the name of a collective decision enforced by the state. 566 00:54:15.680 --> 00:54:21.320 This is far from any genuine free market, and reveals that, as in many other economic 567 00:54:21.320 --> 00:54:28.080 areas, it is impossible to really defend freedom and the free market without insisting on defending 568 00:54:28.080 --> 00:54:36.320 Friedman's grotesque dictum that those urban inhabitants who don't wish to contract emphysema 569 00:54:36.320 --> 00:54:41.920 should move to the country is starkly reminiscent of Marie Antoinette's famous Let Them Eat 570 00:54:41.920 --> 00:54:47.320 Cake and reveals a lack of sensitivity to human or property rights. 571 00:54:47.320 --> 00:54:52.360 Friedman's statement, in fact, is of a piece with the typically conservative, if you don't 572 00:54:52.360 --> 00:54:57.900 like it here, leave, a statement that implies that the government rightly owns the entire 573 00:54:57.900 --> 00:55:12.660 Robert Poole's libertarian critique of the Friedmanite proposals offers a refreshing contrast. 574 00:55:12.660 --> 00:55:18.380 Unfortunately it is an example of the most serious failing of the conservative economists. 575 00:55:18.380 --> 00:55:23.100 Nowhere in the proposal is there any mention of rights. 576 00:55:23.100 --> 00:55:28.980 This is the same failing that has undercut advocates of capitalism for 200 years. 577 00:55:28.980 --> 00:55:34.620 Even today, the term laissez-faire is apt to bring forth images of 18th century English 578 00:55:34.620 --> 00:55:39.540 factory towns engulfed in smoke and grimy with soot. 579 00:55:39.540 --> 00:55:44.560 The early capitalists agreed with the courts that smoke and soot were the price that must 580 00:55:44.560 --> 00:55:47.900 be paid for the benefits of industry. 581 00:55:47.900 --> 00:55:52.100 Yet laissez-faire without rights is a contradiction in terms. 582 00:55:52.100 --> 00:55:58.220 The laissez-faire position is based on and derived from man's rights, and can endure 583 00:55:58.220 --> 00:56:00.980 only when rights are held inviolable. 584 00:56:00.980 --> 00:56:06.460 Now, in an age of increasing awareness of the environment, this old contradiction is 585 00:56:06.460 --> 00:56:09.780 coming back to haunt capitalism. 586 00:56:09.780 --> 00:56:15.280 It is true that air is a scarce resource, as the Friedmannites say, but one must then 587 00:56:15.280 --> 00:56:18.260 ask why it is scarce. 588 00:56:18.260 --> 00:56:23.480 If it is scarce because of a systematic violation of rights, then the solution is not to raise 589 00:56:23.480 --> 00:56:30.060 the price of the status quo, thereby sanctioning the rights violations, but to assert the rights 590 00:56:30.060 --> 00:56:32.980 and demand that they be protected. 591 00:56:32.980 --> 00:56:38.220 When a factory discharges a great quantity of sulfur dioxide molecules that enter someone's 592 00:56:38.220 --> 00:56:44.340 lungs and cause pulmonary edema, the factory owners have aggressed against him as much 593 00:56:44.340 --> 00:56:46.940 as if they had broken his leg. 594 00:56:46.940 --> 00:56:52.460 The point must be emphasized, because it is vital to the libertarian laissez-faire position. 595 00:56:52.460 --> 00:56:59.020 A laissez-faire polluter is a contradiction in terms, and must be identified as such. 596 00:56:59.020 --> 00:57:05.980 A libertarian society would be a full liability society, where everyone is fully responsible 597 00:57:05.980 --> 00:57:12.300 for his actions and any harmful consequences they might cause. 598 00:57:12.300 --> 00:57:17.640 In addition to betraying its presumed function of defending private property, government 599 00:57:17.640 --> 00:57:21.840 has contributed to air pollution in a more positive sense. 600 00:57:21.840 --> 00:57:26.460 It was not so long ago that the Department of Agriculture conducted mass sprayings of 601 00:57:26.460 --> 00:57:34.460 DDT by helicopter over large areas, overriding the wishes of individual objecting farmers. 602 00:57:34.460 --> 00:57:40.280 It still continues to pour tons of poisonous and carcinogenic insecticides all over the 603 00:57:40.280 --> 00:57:46.000 of the South, in an expensive and vain attempt to eradicate the fire ant. 604 00:57:46.000 --> 00:57:51.160 And the Atomic Energy Commission has poured radioactive wastes into the air and into the 605 00:57:51.160 --> 00:57:57.100 ground by means of its nuclear power plants and through atomic testing. 606 00:57:57.100 --> 00:58:02.720 Municipal power and water plants and the plants of licensed monopoly utility companies mightily 607 00:58:02.720 --> 00:58:05.100 pollute the atmosphere. 608 00:58:05.100 --> 00:58:11.040 One of the major tasks of the state in this area is therefore to stop its own poisoning 609 00:58:11.040 --> 00:58:12.740 of the atmosphere. 610 00:58:12.740 --> 00:58:19.420 Thus, when we peel away the confusions and the unsound philosophy of the modern ecologists, 611 00:58:19.420 --> 00:58:24.180 we find an important bedrock case against the existing system. 612 00:58:24.180 --> 00:58:30.660 But the case turns out to be not against capitalism, private property, growth or technology per 613 00:58:30.660 --> 00:58:31.840 se. 614 00:58:31.840 --> 00:58:37.200 It is a case against the failure of government to allow and to defend the rights of private 615 00:58:37.200 --> 00:58:40.200 property against invasion. 616 00:58:40.200 --> 00:58:45.280 If property rights were to be defended fully against private and governmental invasion 617 00:58:45.280 --> 00:58:52.500 alike, we would find here, as in other areas of our economy and society, that private enterprise 618 00:58:52.500 --> 00:58:58.500 and Modern Technology would come to mankind not as a curse, but as its salvation.