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NOTE Business Ethics and the Environment

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Thanks for the kind introduction. I hope I'll be able to live up in some small way to this burden that's been placed on me to put it all in focus.

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My orientation is very similar to the people that have preceded me and that is to reconcile economics and the environment by using economic means to attain environmental ends.

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I believe that all people of good will have as one of their goals environmental protection.

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and Environmental Protection. I think what distinguishes the speakers today from many other commentators is that we believe that the best means, perhaps the only means of attaining that very worthwhile goal is through the mechanisms of markets and property rights and greed and profit and such like activities. What then are the economic means by which we think we can attain environmental protection and environmental

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and Environmental Enhancement.

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The best way I found to illustrate this is through street signs by analogy.

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Imagine, if you will, that you were a person just visiting this great city of Chattanooga or in any other great city

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and you had a map but they took all the street signs off.

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You would be rendered pretty helpless.

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You wouldn't be able to get around the city very easily.

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As a matter of fact, there are case histories on record in medieval times where a besieged city would take down all of its street signs because the invading army was about to attack and they figured that the local inhabitants sort of knew where they were going based on buildings or other familiar McDonald's on the corner or whatever it was, but that the invading army wouldn't be able to find out what they were doing and they would be rendered helpless. So street signs are very important. But not any older

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What will street signs do? If some genie in the middle of the night took all the street signs in Chattanooga and switched them in arbitrary, capricious ways, we'd still have street signs all over Chattanooga, but they wouldn't be telling us much of anything.

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So not only do we need street signs, but we need accurate street signs, street signs that reflect accurately the geographical reality, if I can coin a phrase.

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The reason I'm introducing this with regards to street signs is because we're all familiar with street signs.

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We're not all familiar with prices or at least the function of prices.

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We all pay prices, but we don't see the economic attributes of prices as clearly as we might.

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The point I would ask you to consider is that prices are to the economy as street signs are to the geography.

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And just as we would be rendered helpless without street signs geographically speaking,

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we are rendered helpless economically speaking without prices.

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And again, not any old prices will do. They have to be accurate prices. They have to be prices that reflect all the costs and all the benefits.

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And if they don't reflect all the costs and all the benefits, specifically including non-priced environmental costs, then they're very inaccurate.

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They lead us astray. They're like an invisible hand that chokes us instead of leads to a sensible economy.

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Let me give an illustration of lousy prices from the Soviet Union. Due to the fact that the iron curtain is disappearing,

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Westerners are becoming more familiar with prices, at least as they existed in the Soviet Union.

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Dinner for five with eight course meal with wine and alcohol was $14. A month's rent can cost as little as $3.

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A loaf of bread, three cents. On the other hand, a car can cost $100,000, a TV, $10,000, and a pair of jeans, $1,000.

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That's why when the Soviet athletes come over here, they go back clutching jeans, not because they're jean fetishes or anything like that.

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It's because of the price system. Recently we've learned some Romanian prices, $14 for a ton of steel versus $300 a ton of steel in the West.

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A 250-mile air trip can cost $1.00. You get the idea. It's very heavily subsidized. The price of a bus ride can cost less than the cost of printing the ticket. The mortgage rate is 2% there, and this is an inflation of 100% or more per year.

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Well, just as there is a vast misallocation of economic goods in the Soviet Union, which is responsible in no little effect for their economic debacle,

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so are their environmental misallocations because of lousy environmental prices.

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So in the market analysis, the reason we have environmental problems is because of lousy street signs or lousy prices, inaccurate prices.

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And a move towards solving the environmental problem is a move towards solving the environmental pricing system.

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If we could but make prices reflect the full costs, including environmental costs, we would solve the environmental problem.

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The reason we have the environmental problem is because our prices have been messed up.

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Now, I've said that my goal here is to reconcile us, you know, to bring peace and harmony and benevolence and all that.

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Strictly speaking, this cannot be done with everyone, and I want to sort of say how I feel the ballplayers are in the environmental game so we can see who the reconciliation could possibly consist of.

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And there are four groups that I've distinguished with them in my own mind.

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The first are the innocents, the vast majority of citizens who are either rationally ignorant, as Rick Stroop and others have said, or just not involved, or have views that the reason we have environmental problems is because of greed or profits or something like that.

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These people are willing to listen to reason, hopefully, they're willing to read, they're willing to learn, and certainly a reconciliation can take part that includes them.

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The second group is people that I would include myself as a part of, plus all the other speakers and many other people in the audience today.

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That is people who are trying to apply economic incentives, property rights, defense of property, clarity of definition of property to solve environmental problems and accurate environmental prices.

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The third group I used to call the greeno pinkos. I now call them the watermelons. These are the people that are green on the outside and red on the inside.

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These are the people that are Marxists, communists, Stalinists, what have you, socialists. I don't make such fine distinctions. They're all on the same crew as far as I'm concerned.

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And these are the people that have seen their whole world view crumble. I mean, put yourself in the mind of these people. For years they've been singing the Internationale and this and that and the other.

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and all of a sudden the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has been revealed to be a gigantic debacle.

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But they still have the same old fervor to run other people's lives.

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They can't allow people to be free and to do their own thing. They've got to control.

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So instead of hitching their wagon to the horse of Marxism and socialism and communism,

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they've now got a new one to hitch their horse to and it's called environmentalism.

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And these people are very dangerous. They're not going to listen. There's certainly no possibility of any reconciliation with them because they have a hidden agenda.

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They're not really environmentalists. They're Marxists. If they were convinced that I was right, they would still reject it because remember what I'm trying to say here is that the way to safeguard and enhance the environment is to use free enterprise.

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And these people would say, well, that's the last thing we want. We don't really give a rap about the environment. We're only using it as an excuse to promote socialism.

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So, if the free enterprise system were proven to enhance the environment, so much the worse for the free enterprise system, because it's helping, you know, because we're against it, because it means economic freedom.

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The fourth group, I think also it's very difficult to establish any reconciliation with, and these are the people I call the radical tree lovers, earth first, the nature lovers, the tree huggers, the people that throw blood on people who wear fur coats and all.

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These are the people that say not only that trees have rights, but they have as many rights as people, or even more.

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And you know, they say, how would you like to be cut down? It's sort of anthropomorphism with trees and mosquitoes and stuff.

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And these are the people that say that people are vermin. And there are too many of them. And there aren't enough mosquitoes.

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There are too many people. Now, I'm trying to stretch. I'm trying to be benevolent. I'm a nice guy.

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But I really see that it would be very difficult to have any reconciliation with these people either.

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So I'm going to, I guess, not address myself to people who agree with me, because pretty much whatever I say, there'll be agreement, except for certain marginal issues, and they'll be wrong on those.

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And I'm certainly not going to address myself to the watermelons or the maniacs, because I see no sympathy, no empathy, no possibility of even communicating, because we have very different goals.

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and I'm mainly addressing myself to the innocent sort of the average person or the average person who is intellectual or studying these questions.

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Okay, well, my thesis, not original with me, of course, is that the way to have solutions to the environmental problem is to have more and accurate prices for environmental activities.

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I have on my list a whole host of illustrations to exemplify this thesis.

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On my list is air pollution, hazardous waste, plastic, diapers, nuclear power, love canal, forests, species extinction, oil spills,

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greenhouse effect, ozone layer and overpopulation.

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And that would take me at least two or three hours or a semester if I did it in very great detail each.

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Needless to say, we won't do that.

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But I would like to take a sort of touch briefly on three or four of these cases.

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The first one, let me do a little bit on air pollution.

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Consider the chairs that you're now sitting on.

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The manufacturer of those chairs has to take into account most of the costs of those chairs.

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He has to take in the raw material costs because if he doesn't pay his suppliers,

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What happens to him? He goes to jail. He has to pay his laborers. He has to take into account his labor costs because if he doesn't pay his laborers, he gets into deep dog trouble. He has to take into account all sorts of other costs including insurance, including rent, the purchase of the building and on and on and on. There's only one cost that he really doesn't have to take into account and that is the cost of the byproducts that he implements.

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imposes on other people. Now, the previous two speakers were very eloquent in saying this, and I just want to reaffirm that.

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The reason we are irrational with regard to chairs, that maybe we're producing too many of them, is not because of anything intrinsic to the market,

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but because the government has, in its infinite wisdom, based on the Horowitz story, which you just heard before, decided,

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for irrational reasons, a whole host of them, that the manufacturer doesn't have to take in the full costs of the manufacturer of the chair.

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So, of course, the market isn't perfect in that sense because there is no market.

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The government has interfered with the market.

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The street signs, the price of that chair is not fully reflecting all costs.

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It might be reflecting 90% of the costs, but the other 10%, the environmental costs, are not being reflected.

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So, of course, we have irrationalities.

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I don't want to go into that too much because I think that Professor DeLearns did a great job,

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I just want to mention several options as to what we can do about this air pollution.

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And there are three of them as far as I can discern.

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I think all others are just combinations and permutations of these three.

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One is the present status quo, the command and control system,

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the insistence that certain fuels be used or scrubbers or detailed regulations.

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That's sort of the central planning modality, and I think that can be easily rejected.

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But the second one is much more challenging.

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I think this is the idea of setting up tradable emissions rates. This is much more challenging because it makes a lot of sense and it utilizes certain quasi-market activities.

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The idea here is that there's a certain, we don't want to have zero pollution because strictly speaking if we had zero pollution no one could ever breathe out.

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Carbon dioxide is a pollutant and that's an emission so we'd all have to sort of hold our breaths until we die.

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And that's hardly any way to reconcile anything. We'd all be dead. Well, I guess that's a reconciliation of sorts, but not the one I'm interested in.

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So the idea is that there's a threshold effect, like, say, Chattanooga could stand 100 tons of pollutants per year.

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And then what you do is you have a market and a bidding and a pricing system, and if one person can reduce his pollution at a lesser price,

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he can bid and buy out the pollution rights from another person.

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I want to read you my favorite quote on this, attacking this from a free enterprise point

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of view from Martin Anderson. And he says as quote, as follows, we have tried many remedies

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in the past. We have tried to dissuade polluters with fines, with government programs whereby

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all pay to clean up the garbage produced by the few, with a myriad of detailed regulations

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to control the degree of pollution. Now, some even seriously propose that we should have

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have economic incentives to charge polluters a fee for polluting and the more they pollute

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the more they pay. But that is just like taxing burglars as an economic incentive to deter

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people from stealing your property and just as unconscionable. The only effective way

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to eliminate serious pollution is to treat it exactly for what it is, garbage. Just as

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one does not have the right to drop a bag of garbage on his neighbor's lawn, so does

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one not have the right to place any garbage in the air or in the water or in the earth

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If it in any way violates the property rights of others, what we need are tougher, clearer environmental laws that are enforced, not with economic incentives, but with jail terms. Now this is the view that I take, namely a strictly private property rights view, and I hold second place to no one in my view that environmental pollution is a crime, and it ought to be stopped. Now maybe some left-wing types might say that, but they don't really mean it, I don't think. Certainly they don't mean it as fervently

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as I do. So my solution for this problem is not tradable emissions rights, which I see as sort of a bastardized or quasi-property rights scheme, not worthy of the name of free enterprise, but rather a system that harkens back to the time when Horowitz was talking about in the 1820s and 1830s when people really could sue for pollution trespass. It's just a violation of property rights. Okay, let me give you another example. And this is one that

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It's the issue of the Styrofoam or the paper versus plastic or Styrofoam or what have you.

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The way I'd like to introduce that is as follows.

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When McDonald's opened up in Moscow several years ago, that was a big red banner day or

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red, white and blue banner day for me.

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Because just visualize that here in the bowels of the evil empire, something representative

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The concept of capitalism and wondrousness and the magic of the marketplace and all that was finally opening.

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Now I don't want to say that McDonald's is the best thing we've ever done, but it's very nice.

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There's a certain quality of food. You go anywhere in the world and you're assured of minimum standards of food.

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The poor people can go out to restaurants where they might not otherwise have been able to, but for the fast food industry.

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So it's a very nice emblem of free enterprise.

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And the idea that it was opening in Moscow was just delightful to me.

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And then I learned that there were various communities in the U.S., and in Canada, and in the free world, supposedly,

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where McDonald's is not allowed to open, which is the worst contradiction that I can imagine.

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In the free world, they don't allow McDonald's, and in the Soviet Union, they do.

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Well, why are they putting roadblocks and obstructions in the way of McDonald's opening in the United States?

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The reason is environmentalism, because they're afraid of the plastic and the styrofoam and this and that.

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And this is before McDonald's went green.

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So I'm very interested in the plastic versus the paper, and I would ask you to perform the following mental experiment on yourself.

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Suppose that you are now in a supermarket checking out counter, and they've just rung up your groceries,

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and they say that will be $23 or whatever it is, and then they ask you the $64,000 question.

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Paper bag or plastic bag? And ask yourself, what incentives do you now have to pick the paper on the assumption,

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and this assumption I'll just assume for the sake of argument, that plastic is evil and it's an abomination,

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it's non-recyclable, it's not environmentally friendly, it's the spawn of the devil,

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and that paper is wondrous and marvelous and environmentally friendly and it's great stuff.

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What incentive do you now have to pick the paper, the good paper, and to eschew the bad plastic?

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And the only incentive you now have is benevolence. Feeling for your fellow creatures, feeling for the planet, what have you.

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But we all know what Adam Smith said about benevolence. He said it's not from benevolence that the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker give us the awareness.

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Rather, it's out of a keen analysis of their own self-interest.

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Now notice, I'm not saying that it's benevolence versus self-interest.

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versus self-interest. What I am saying is that if this problem is important, and it is, then it behooves us to marshal all human motivations to the picking of the paper instead of the lousy plastic, and not just some. So why just rest with benevolence? Why not have benevolence and self-interest? And the reason we only have benevolence and the reason we don't have self-interest is, as Lynn very accurately and correctly stated, is because we have socialism in the solid waste management area.

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It's sort of like socialized medicine. This is socialized garbage collection. In socialized medicine, you all pay into the kiddie, the government, and the government gives it to you for free.

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Well, that's exactly the way we run our garbage collection service now.

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The economic calculation that we now make is that it will cost me a penny for the paper bag and a penny for the plastic bag.

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Well, you don't really pay this explicitly, but implicitly they charge you in the price of the groceries for the paper or the plastic bag.

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Therefore, the only distinction between the penny and the penny is benevolence. That's the only incentive you have.

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Now, let me ask you to take the following mental experiment. Suppose that we had a full privatized solid waste management industry,

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and not one where they just contracted out the collection, but the whole thing was privatized.

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And now you're the owner of a big plot of land and you're going to have a landfill.

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You're going to have proper protections and barriers and all sorts of insulation so that the malefacts of the garbage don't seep out onto others' property, God forbid, because that would be a violation of the free enterprise ethic.

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And you ask yourself, well, should I allow plastic or should I insist upon paper?

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And the mental experiment you go through is, well, if I allow plastic, everything will be ruined.

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I'll never be able to grow anything here because of the toxicity, I'll never be able to put houses in, it'll be just one vast toxic spray.

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Well, do I allow plastic? Of course you do, if you're compensated for it, because remember, you're a fat capitalist pig,

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you want to maximize profits, and as long as you can get enough money to compensate you for the damage to the environment,

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you'll accept it. Now, the numerical illustration I use in our book on this is I say,

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Suppose you come to the conclusion that the real costs to the environment are at the rate of $5 per plastic bag. You can't charge any more than that because of the competition from other garbage dumps and you won't take any less than that because that's the true cost.

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Well, you go to the trucker and you say, sure, I'll take all the plastic bags you want at $5 per plastic bag.

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And he goes to the curbside owner, the homeowner, and says, sure, I'll take all the plastic bags you want to give me in your garbage at five dollars per.

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And now you're back in the supermarket checking out counter.

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And now you go through a very, very, very different economic calculation.

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No longer is it a penny versus a penny, but rather it's now for paper, it's a penny to produce it,

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and a penny to dispose of it for a grand total of two cents, versus a penny to buy the plastic bag,

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versus $5 to dispose of the plastic bag for a grand total of $5.01.

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Now, is there anyone here who doubts that the whole problem would evaporate

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if the true prices were revealed to us, namely if the street signs were organized the way they should be?

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Of course the whole problem would evaporate.

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Nobody in his right mind would pick, well I shouldn't say nobody would pick plastic,

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because some people might, people for whom the plastic is worth $5.01 or more,

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or more, maybe certain specialized medical uses or what have you, but this would be infinitesimal.

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Most people would say, well, if it's 501 versus 2 cents, I'll take the paperback, please.

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Well, this is my illustration to show that if we but had accurate signals, accurate prices, accurate street signs,

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the environmental problem would disappear.

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or I've conceded or I've argued from assumption that plastic is indeed evil and an abomination whereas paper is good.

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But just as Lin cited William Rathje, I have to also, and he did some analysis in his role as garbologist,

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and he analyzed mounds of garbage and he finds that the plastic isn't really so harmful, it's rather inert.

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And by weight or by cubic, by cubic area or volume, whatever, it's very, very small.

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The danger is more the paper, especially those telephone book kinds of things, which sort of smolder and molder.

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Well, as an economist, without any stock in any paper company or any plastic company, I don't really care whether it's paper or plastic.

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All I'm doing is trying to show you that if we had market signals that accurately reflected the true cost to the environment,

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then we would have economic incentives, not just benevolence, but also economic incentives that would help us to solve the environmental problem.

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Let me illustrate another one, species extinction, and I think I'll try to sneak in overpopulation and call a halt.

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Species extinction, Daniel Rapp-Moi of Kenya burned $3 million worth of tusks to illustrate the case of the elephants going extinct.

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The reason we have those elephants going extinct is because we don't have private property.

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We don't have prices of elephants and elephant tusks that reflect the true costs to the environment.

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The best way I know of illustrating the tragedy of the commons is to imagine four or five children, age 10,

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sitting around a table, each with a can of soda pop and a straw, and they're drinking at a certain rate.

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Then they're having a conversation and they're acting like adults, and then we monitor how quickly they sip.

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That's the first scenario. The second scenario, what we do is we give them five cans of pop,

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But we pour it into a big bowl and we give each of them a straw, and now we monitor the rate at which they slurp it up.

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And as you can imagine, they would start slurping a lot quicker under the second socialized tragedy of the common scenario,

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because if they paused for breath or, you know, say hello to their buddy, somebody else would slurp what they could have had and they would lose out.

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Well, that's the same kind of a thing that's now operating with the elephants.

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And perhaps another way to illustrate this is to consider and contrast what happened to the cow and what happened to the buffalo.

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Now as far as I'm concerned and ignorant economists, I don't know from this physical reality or chemistry or any of that,

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the cow and the buffalo are the same animal.

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They both moo, they both have horns, they both got tails.

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If either one of them crashes into you, you're in trouble.

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It's the same thing.

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Now why is it that the cow never went within a million miles of extinction and the buffalo was almost driven to extinction?

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The only difference, it's not physical, the only difference, it's not biological,

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the only difference was private property rights.

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People owned the cows, they didn't own the buffalo.

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If they didn't shoot the cow today, they had it tomorrow.

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The only way they could get the buffalo was to shoot it, so they shot it.

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And not just the white people, but the Indians also.

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The same economic incentives work with both.

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Well, that's the way they run the elephants, under socialism.

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Socialism. And in those countries in Africa, which are particularly enamored of socialist methodologies, the elephant herds have been shrinking. But in the countries of Zimbabwe, South Africa, Malawi, Botswana, Zambia and Mozambique, the elephant herds have been increasing because they had some bits of private property, some bits of economic incentive to go along with the Netherlands. And in these other countries, they see these elephants as gigantic rats. What they do is they knock down

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and they can't take advantage of them, so they kill them.

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And the reason you can't catch the poachers is that the poachers are the villagers.

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So they hide them, they're one in the same group.

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Yet the watermelon analysis of this is that the reason that the elephants are going extinct

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is because their tusks are so valuable and it's worth $100 an ounce or something

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and even more so for the rhinoceros, which is worth even more.

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I think it's $100 a pound for ivory and $100 an ounce for rhinoceros tusk. But this is nonsense. Cows are worth money, and yet we protect them. The point is that if these things are worth something and you can keep them, well then you'll protect them, even the more. So the reason that they're going extinct has got nothing to do with their value. If anything, their value is what will keep them alive under a property rights system. No, the animals that really have to worry about extinction are not the elephant and the rhinoceros, which will do some good for us and which

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which if we have the price signals right and the street signs will benefit us, but rather animals like the mosquito, the rat, the roach, the snail daughter, the spotted owl and the worm, to mention the yuckiest animals I can think of.

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And yet even these animals in free enterprise would have some chance as long as they're worth something to people, if not now, but at least possibly in the future.

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We've all seen that Star Trek movie where the futuristic beings got really ticked off at people because there were no whales and they had to go back to the present to get the whales and bring them back into the future.

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Sure, you people are all up on that.

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Well, that's one motivation.

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I'm not seriously putting it forth, but just for interest of exhaustion here and coverage, that's one possible reason to save animals that we know that we do not at present have a need for.

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But there are other motivations for saving species.

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One of them is that maybe one of these species, the rat, will one day solve some illness that occurs in the 23rd century.

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And if we don't have the rat, then we won't be able to solve this disease and the disease will wipe us all out.

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And as Rick said with present discounted value, there might be somebody, maybe a pharmaceutical company,

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who's going to keep a few rats alive just against the possibility that one day we'll really need them

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and he'll make a killing that is an economic killing, not a physical killing.

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And the other group that I can think of that would want to save animals such as this would be biology departments of great universities, hopefully private ones.

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Let me just spend a few minutes on overpopulation, one of my favorites because this has been mentioned here but not really covered.

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I guess one of the problems I've had going last is that every time I heard someone speak they took another part of my speech away.

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I was sort of thinking, well, they're all stealing my speech, and then I realized that my speech originally came from them,

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so it was I who stole it from them first, now they're taking it away from me.

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But let me do overpopulation very quickly.

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First of all, overpopulation has got nothing to do with poverty.

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The reason people are dying like flies, and this is a shame and a tragedy, has got nothing to do with overpopulation.

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They're dying in high-density areas like India and Bangladesh, and they're also dying in low-density areas like the Ethiopian desert.

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As a matter of fact, if you place countries in terms of density and in terms of per capita wealth, there is no correlation.

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There are countries that are high density and very wealthy, West Germany, Belgium, Holland, Japan.

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And there are ones with low density and low income, Ethiopia, Kenya, Congo, Liberia, Guyana, Chile, and the list goes on and on.

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So there is no correlation there.

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Population density is not the cause of environmental problems such as desertification.

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It's rather socialized medicine. That's why they're having problems of encroaching deserts on farmlands because of the socialized farm, the Soviet style farming.

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Now this idea that the earth is full of people and you know we've already got 6 billion and someone is saying well we'll have 12 billion before we, you know, before too long and then 15 billion.

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I don't know about you people but did any of you ever ride in...

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Especially at night when you can see, you know, lights. The bloody country is empty.

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You know, every once in a while you see a couple of lights and I'm talking about at 30,000 feet.

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You know, you see a little clump of lights and it looks so little and forlorn.

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And then you go miles and miles and miles and you see a twinkle here and a twinkle there

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and then you get to another city. The place is bloody empty. There's nobody on this earth.

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And I'm just talking about the land which is one quarter of the earth's surface.

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One of these days we'll be living in the oceans when we privatize them.

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and then we'll have plenty of room for more people.

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Thomas Ohl did this magnificent calculation.

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He said, let's suppose we take the whole six billion people

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on this earth and we put them in the form

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of middle class housing,

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namely 8,200 square feet per family of four.

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That would mean the typical front yard, backyard

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and oh, six or seven room house.

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And I'm talking about upper middle class standards.

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Do you realize that the entire population of the world

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under this scenario can now fit in Texas?

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All six billion could fit in Texas.

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And another way to put some perspective on this is that if you took all six billion people cubic,

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namely you stuff them, you college students are always stuffing yourselves into telephone booths.

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Well, if we stuffed the whole human race, all six billion of us into a big telephone booth,

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it would only have to be a mile cubic.

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A mile by a mile by a mile.

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And we can get everybody in there.

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Be a little uncomfortable on that advocating this, I don't want to be misinterpreted,

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But I just want to give you an idea of how few people there are.

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Now let's take a real long-run view of this environmental stuff.

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The hell with the Earth.

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I don't really want to save the Earth. The Earth's schmurth.

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The Earth, one day, the Sun will go out. It'll take a couple of weeks, but the Sun is going to go out.

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And then what bloody good is the Earth?

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What we've got to do is get some Buck Rogers spaceships going.

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So that when the Sun goes out, we'll have the wherewithal to go to other planets.

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Because I'm a pro-humanist. I like humans. They give me a big thrill. There's Mozart. There's this one. There's that one.

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There are some very nice human beings, and I, for one, would like to see the species survive, long past the Earth.

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So the Earth is only our temporary home. Much more important than the Earth are, I forget who mentioned this before, is human capacity, human brilliance, human creativity.

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That's what's going to save us, not the stupid Earth. The Earth is only temporary for another couple of million years or so, or a couple of weeks, galactically speaking.

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Well, how are we going to get these spaceships? The only way we're going to get these spaceships is we get a couple of Einstein's going.

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They're the ones that will do it for us. But the way to get an Einstein, I know how to do it. You just get another 10, 20, 30 billion people and you get two or three Einstein's.

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That's how you do it. So I'm really pro-people. I love people. Some of my best friends are people. They're not mosquitoes. I love people.

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And let me give you my last argument on this. I once had this debate with my opponent and I was giving my rap on overpopulation and I was going on and on.

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And then in conclusion I said, and there stands my opponent. He's going to come up here to the podium soon and tell you that we have too many people.

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He has it within his power to reduce the size of the population of this earth by one.

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The fact that he's standing there, smiling, ready to come up here, shows that he doesn't even take his own argument seriously.

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Because if he did, he'd off himself.

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The fact that he's still standing there shows he doesn't take this lousy argument, this contradictory, this anti-human argument seriously.

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He's a charlatan.

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And I got randomly booed for it because I was in a very hostile audience, but what the heck.

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I pass it on to you for what it's worth.

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Thanks for your attention.

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That's it, final round of questions or comments? Those of you who aren't in the slot, yeah?

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Yes, sir.

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That was a very good reconciliation.

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The buffalo, by the way, were wiped out because the white men did not want the Indians to have their comments.

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They went out and viciously slaughtered them to take away their livelihood.

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And that was the reason the buffalo disappeared, not because they were owned by the Indians.

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Also, if you speak about corporations, we can go back to the forest again, species extinction, you're just looking at the big animals, the elephants in the buffaloes and things like that.

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You're not looking at the whole system of things from which we have evolved from this, or we were angry along with these creatures.

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I think I get your drift. Let me, instead of trying to answer that, let me ask you a question.

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Could you repeat to me my thesis in two or three sentences?

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Yes.

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Please.

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I'd like to reconcile with everybody that accepted the environmentalist because the free market system is a way to go to save the planet.

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And how will it save the planet?

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By putting the price on everything.

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By putting the price what?

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By putting the price on everything.

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By putting a price on everything.

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By putting a price on pollution, putting a price on profits.

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I don't disagree totally with you, I just disagree with a lot of what you have to say.

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It's very puzzled by why it is that here is a person who can repeat the truth, that is, my views, to be back to my satisfaction, and yet is so anapathetic to it.

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I guess that's one of the mysteries of the human being, that it makes for interesting conversations.

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Well, I don't see any fallacies in it. There are those who do, but I don't agree with them. What I see, if you want to call it a fallacy, the only fallacy I see in the market is that it hasn't been allowed to work.

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I think if it worked, if it were allowed free rein, it would work. It's just not been allowed.