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NOTE Ecology and Economics

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What I want to speak about today is ecology and economics, but before I do, in the spirit

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of capitalism that we all adhere to here, I want to put in a commercial message.

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That is for the Fraser Institute.

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These blue cards are around somewhere.

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I think they're over there.

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If you fill one of these out, we will make you a gift of a free subscription to the Fraser

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Forum, which is a monthly publication of the Fraser Institute.

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and you'll get a full month's free subscription so please fill it out and if we run out of

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these cards just give me your business card or put your name and address on a napkin or

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something and we'll do it that way.

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We are coming out with a book in a few weeks called Ecology or Economics and the Environment,

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a Reconciliation and I'll also send you some information about that book.

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I think it's no exaggeration to say that environmental problems are among the most important to Canadians nowadays.

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Certainly there are newspapers waxing eloquent about this problem, they talk about oil spills and elephant extinction, greenhouse, ozone layer problems.

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Public opinion polls have indicated that the environment is one of the most pressing issues on the minds of Canadians today.

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One instance of this is that in the last year, CDC did 250-plus stories on the environment,

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whereas last year's Hot Topic only got 121 stories, namely the Free Trade Agreement.

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We happen to know these with this exactitude because the Fraser Institute has a media center

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which monitors CDC to see if they're balanced in their news coverage, and I'll give you

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Many people see ecology as polar opposites. They see on the one hand economic growth and

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on the other hand preservation of the planet, and many people feel reasonably rich enough

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so that we can now afford to take care of the planet. My goal, however, is to reconcile

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This attempted reconciliation is impossible for some environmentalists.

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They just use ecology as a stick with which to beat the free enterprise system.

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One simple reply to them is that no matter how bad capitalism is with regard to the environment,

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socialism is worse.

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True, we've had Three Mile Island where no one died, and we've had Chernobyl where many

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people died.

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And as bad as the environment is here, and I understand there are cases of lakes and

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rivers catching fire, it's much worse on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

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So if you're just using it as a political stick, then I think the cases with the free

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and the enterprise system, so-called that we have here, however imperfect it is.

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But this week, reconciliation is also impossible for some right-wing people, some economists,

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some libertarians, certainly for objectivists.

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They're concerned only with the immediate bottom line.

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Some of them joke about, well, we've got to pave over all greenery, you know, let not

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a tree live after we get through with it.

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One example of this, of course, is Ayn Rand, who said we should kiss the smokestacks.

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And that's what she said, we should kiss the smokestacks and, you know, the tip of the

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cigarette is sort of like a man's life or A is A or something like that.

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I never could catch that, but she would say things, ah, that's it, okay, the spark in

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his mind.

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Well, you know, these are, as I see it, invasive activities.

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The reconciliation that I'll be proposing, and that is proposed in this book, is that

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economic means or means consistent with private property systems can be used to attain environmental

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ends.

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And not only can economics be used for this purpose, but I will argue that economics is

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a better means toward the goal of saving the environment, or the use of economics and private

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property is a better way of achieving environmental safety than are the means put forth by the

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and the Green Party, which is mainly greater government involvement and more regulation.

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I'm reminded in this regard of Roger Douglas. Roger Douglas is the head of the Labour government

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in New Zealand. This would be the equivalent, roughly, of our NDP or maybe the left wing

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of the Liberal Party. And yet, things were so bad that when he got in, campaigning on

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on a Social Democratic Policy, that what he did in New Zealand was he out-privatized Margaret

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Thatcher.

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It's really amazing, not many people know this, but it would be as if Dave Barrett got

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in here and started selling off Petrocan and privatizing the post office.

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I mean, it's a little hard to believe, but that's what happened in New Zealand.

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And then he was asked, well, how can you, an avowed socialist, adopt such a program?

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And his answer deserves to be, I don't know, maybe put in the next year's calendar or something

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like that.

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Maybe not.

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Later you hear it, you have to decide for yourself.

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He says, well, I haven't given up on socialist ends, which are peace, prosperity, full employment,

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you know, all those good things.

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It's just that we're pursuing these ends with capitalist means.

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Well, I mean, I'm a socialist too, I suppose. We're all socialists now, you know, because

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the hell with the ends or the goals or the purposes. We want to know what you're doing.

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And if what you're doing is dismantling the state, well, okay. I mean, if that's what

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socialism is, you know, where do we sign up? So it is in this spirit that I offer my reconciliation.

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I am a green-o, or a greenie, or whatever. If by green-o I mean having green goals, then

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I'm going to use capitalist means toward attaining these goals.

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Many people will question this. They'll say it seems like a paradox. Aren't economic growth

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and ecological soundness supposed to be enemies? Aren't they incompatible? All I can say at

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the outset is that there's no more of a contradiction in trying to use economic or profit property

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How can we explain the supposed enmity between economics and the environment between capitalism

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and ecologists?

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Well, there are several groups that I would put forth for our consideration.

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First, they're just innocent.

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You know, innocent people, they're told that there's a contradiction, they're told long

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I have a 12-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl who are in school, and this is all they

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hear when they do social studies.

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They write letters about saving trees and loving trees, sort of perverted, hug a tree.

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They're just little children, and that's what they tell them.

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They write letters to their MLAs about how we shouldn't allow housing to be built because

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And I think that there are lots of people like that.

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They really don't know any better, and my wife tells me to shut up and not tell my kids

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the truth because I'll get them in trouble, and you know, the teachers won't like them,

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the fellow students won't like them, they'll be the only one taking this view, so it's

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personally difficult for me to accept this, but that's the difficulty of parenthood.

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And then there are the, what I call the pinko greenos.

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These are the people that, I guess to borrow Ayn Rand's thinking, sort of have this death

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wish.

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They really want to commit suicide, but they don't want to go alone.

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They want to bring us all with them.

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And this sort of motivates their every political insight.

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And you know, previously it was central planning or indicative planning or whatever it was,

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planned obsolescence.

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So they've got all sorts of great reasons why capitalism is no good and we have to have socialism.

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But somehow they're sort of in disarray.

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I mean, look what's happening with the Soviet Union in Perestroika and even China for a while.

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It looked as if it was going that route.

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And certainly Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, East Germany.

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You know, they celebrated their 40th anniversary and people are trying to leave like rats from a sinking ship.

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So they've got to come up with a new schema.

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You know, the old lemonade stand stuff just ain't working, Marxism. I mean, the only Marxists nowadays, there are no Marxists behind the iron curtain anymore.

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They're all in universities in Canada, it seems, or maybe behind the pulpit in Canada and the United States and in Western Europe. That's where the Marxists are.

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So, this too is going by the board, and you know, if you have this death wish and it animates your every thought, you say, well, you know, we can't push the Marxism crap.

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And then there's a third category, and these are called the radical tree lovers, the nature

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lovers, the human haters, you know, trees have rights.

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Many rights as people, more rights than people. You know, who do you think you are cutting

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down a tree? How would you like to be cut down? You know, that's the sort of, that's

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the sort of, these are like not political ideological markers, but who are just adopting

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the environmental stuff as a facade, as a veneer. These are the true, you know, tree

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The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit

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I hope even within the environmental group people have just as good environmental credentials

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as he. For example, Ducks Unlimited, Environmental Probe, and Nature Conservancy. What they

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do is they say, yes, we've got to save the ducks, we've got to save the geese, we've

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got to save these animals, the worms, whatever it is. So instead of asking the space to do

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something, they say, well, we'll collect money privately, we'll go out and buy some

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The Head of Environment Probe, Louis Solomon, wrote this magnificent article in the Wall Street Journal.

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He said, what was it? I forget the title. Save the trees, privatize them.

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That was in London newspaper, too.

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London newspaper, too. Well, I mean, any of us could have written that.

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That's a great title, and it's just a magnificent insight, and he's the head of environment probe.

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My hypothesis is that the reason people blame capitalism for environmental depredations

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is because they think that what we now have is capitalism.

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And yet, as we all know, if we know anything in this room, is that what we now have is

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It's not exactly capitalism. It's not even 99% of it. It's a mixed economy. In some ways, it's pretty free. I mean, the paperclip industry is okay, and rubber band industry is alright, but there are many industries that are regulated or crown corporations or what have you, and they're not free at all.

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and there are many cases where government refuses to uphold its legitimate functions,

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if you're a limited government libertarian, of protecting property against transgressors.

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And I think this is the main cause of the problem, not the fact, of course, that there's

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any intrinsic contradiction between the market and sound environmental situation.

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There are two basic principles before I get into a consideration of a whole bunch of environmental

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difficulties that I want to put forth for our consideration.

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First is the absolute crucial importance of private property rights.

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I mean, you cannot possibly overemphasize how important private property rights are to

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the protection of the environment.

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If we don't have private property rights that are well defined and, even more important,

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fully protected, we will not have a sound environment.

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And indeed, most of the problems that we have can be traced to the fact that either the

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government refuses to allow private property rights or, in some cases, that it's a little

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hard to see how we can apply the private property rights way of looking at things.

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Certainly, with the case of owning oceans and owning air rights, it's a little hard

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and a lot of research has to be done and I think it only can be done by people such as

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in this room who have an appreciation of the importance of it.

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I mean, if you hate the very idea, you're not going to be able to do much sound research

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in this.

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And the second one is the tragedy of the commons.

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A typical example of the tragedy of the commons is we've all got our sheep grazing on the

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And, you know, some public-spirited person, Gordon, over here, sees that the sheep are

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nipping too close to the grass, so he takes his sheep miles away at his own cost in order

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to preserve the grass comments, and he notices that everybody else grazes their sheep on

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the places that his sheep used to be on.

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And he says, hey, you know, what's the benefit of acting responsibly and public-spiritedly

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when everyone else just takes advantage, so he stops.

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Another way to illustrate the tragedy of the commons is to imagine five children aged ten

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to twelve, and in one scenario they've each got some soda pop and they're drinking it

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in whatever rate it is, a normal, optimal rate for drinking soda pop.

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And in the next scenario you pour all the soda pop into one big bowl and you give five

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straws out one to each and then you say, go get it, kids, and you practically watch as

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and they bust the guts to get in as much as they possibly can because they realize that

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if they slack off, someone else will grab it. Well, that's the tragedy of the commons,

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that it reduces the natural intent that people have to cooperate with each other. You see,

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we libertarians or we private enterprises know that there is explicit cooperation where

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you specifically get together and say, well, let's have a chess game and, you know, you

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have to sit there, I'll sit here, there are certain rules and we'll enjoy ourselves that

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But we know that in addition to that is implicit cooperation, where we cooperate through prices

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and profit rates and private property.

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And it's in this sense that the tragedy of the commons just brings into disarray, because

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we don't have private property, we have common ownership and the whole thing falls apart.

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Well, this will be more clear when we consider the specifics, and the specifics that I've

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I've got here are pollution and acid rain, species extinction, oil spills, garbage recycling,

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hazardous waste, greenhouse, ozone layer, zero population growth, and maybe if we have

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time, cigarette smoking.

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I think that ought to cover most of the issues that are considered environmental difficulties

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and if I've missed one, maybe we'll get to it in the question and answer period and

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next time I give this speech I'll add that one to it because I'm trying to be as exhaustive

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First, let's start with pollution and acid rain.

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Up until the 1830s and 1840s, anytime there was a trespass, and in what we would now consider

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an environmental trespass or a pollution, it was taken care of under the law of nuisance.

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They reason quite adequately, quite logically, that if I take my garbage and I dump it on

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Daniel's lawn and they catch me in the act, it's very clear what will happen.

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The forces of law and order will grab me and say, you know, that's a violation of Daniel's

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property rights and you just can't do that.

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We're going to grant Daniel an injunction so that you don't do it again.

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We're going to make you pay the damages and we'll put you in jail if you keep going.

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But, if I were to burn it up first, pulverize it, burn it up, and instead of dumping eggshells

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and orange peels and box tops on his lawn, I first burn them, and then I set the soot

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and the ashes onto his lawn, they would see no difference.

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They were quite sensible.

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And they'd say, well, come on, you can't fool us, you're doing the same thing as in

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the first place, and you're still a nuisance, and we're going to still do what we would

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have done to you in the other case, in the present case.

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But around 1830 or 1840, a more sophisticated knowledge of the law came to being. The judges

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still said, yes, yes, this is a violation of property rights. We admit that, they would

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say to the plaintiffs. But there's something more important in your stinking, sniveling,

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greedy private property rights. And what is that? Well, we get a drum roll and, you know,

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something flashing in neon. I guess they didn't have neon in those days. But what it was was

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and the Public Good. The Public Good has to take precedence over greed and selfishness

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and individualism, right? Right. So what we're going to do is we're not going to grant you

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an injunction to stop the perpetrator. He can send smoke-walking onto your property,

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he can ruin your laundry, he can set off sparks on your haystacks, and we're not going to

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We're going to stop him. We're going to give him, in effect, carte blanche to do as he will with your property, not only with his property, but with your property.

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And there are other reasons besides the public interest. There was this idea that there was the public good.

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In other words, what we're going to do is we're going to give a license to the railroad to do it.

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And since the railroad is running and it sets all sparks, well, that's just too bad.

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We, the legislature, have given this railroad our imprimatur, and whatever they do is legitimate.

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and there was another reason that if the smoke only went from person A to person B, that

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would have a private remedy. But if the smoke went from person A to 50 other people, it

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was now considered a public nuisance and you couldn't sue as an individual because, you

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know, you're just one of many. So the proper place to go is the legislature and not the

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court and they have to pass a law and needless to say they passed no such law because they

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They were in effect bribed more fully by the perpetrators of this than by the defendants

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or by the victims.

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Well, that's the old story.

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So what were the results of this?

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The results of allowing manufacturers to get away with polluting other people's properties

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were that they now had no incentive not to.

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Suppose that you were public spirited and you were a free enterprise person and you

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You were dedicated to the philosophy of liberty and freedom, and you said that it's wrong

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to violate other people's property.

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And what you're going to do is you're going to engage in research and development in smoke

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prevention devices, you're going to install scrubbers in your smokestacks, you're going

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to burn high-grade coal, which doesn't have much pollution, although it's more expensive,

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Free enterprise works, but only if it's embedded in a legal system that upholds private property

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rights.

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Free enterprise doesn't work if we don't have private property rights, right?

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It's too much to claim for the market system that it can work adequately, that people can

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act responsibly if the incentives are all perverted.

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And they were all perverted by the fact that the rights of the victims were not upheld.

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so much for kissing smokestacks. Now, some people describe what I just called as an intolerable

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situation as one of externality. And they call this a market failure. They really do.

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They say this is a market failure because while the company takes into account all of

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its sales, it gets the money for its product, it doesn't take into account all its costs.

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And there are people who say this that are reputable, supposed advocates of the free

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enterprise system, such as based at the University of Chicago.

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If you read most economics textbooks and you look under the category called market failure,

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you'll see externalities as a market failure.

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I'm not kidding you.

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People who you might think are real free enterprise advocates are saying things like this, that

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this is a market failure.

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But it's no such thing.

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But it's no such thing. It's a failure of government or law to uphold property rights.

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They see it as a fault of capitalism that the businessman can keep all of his revenues,

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but is allowed to impose some of his costs, such as smoke, particle and removal, on other people.

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This is absolute nonsense.

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Acid rain, by the way, is just a special case of the more general pollution problem.

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And then there are these Chicago-type economists, these supposed free enterprises, who say that

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the solution to the problem is not to uphold property rights, but rather to have the government

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set up an optimal level of pollution and then to sell, I'm not kidding you, I'm not making

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this up, it sounds like I am, but I'm not. And what we have to do is say, well, in Toronto

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we can have a hundred tons of pollution, and I don't know if it's a hundred or a thousand

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or a million, whatever they decide, and there is no rationale behind any decision, it's

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all arbitra. You know, we'll pick X, and X is the right amount of pollution, then what

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What we'll do is we'll sell or auction off the rights to pollute.

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Well I want to read a magnificent quote.

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I wish I had written it and I suppose I could take credit for it so it would be a lie, but

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I really meant to write this and he's beaten me to it.

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He stole my ideas actually.

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He's a thief.

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I'll have to sue him.

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It's Martin Anderson who is just utterly magnificent and this is in my introduction

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If you took a bag of garbage and dropped it on your neighbor's lawn, we all know what

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would happen.

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Your neighbor would call the police and you would soon find out that the disposal of your

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garbage is your responsibility and that it must be done in a way that does not violate

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anyone else's property rights.

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But if you took that same bag of garbage and burned it in the backyard incinerator, letting

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the city ash drift over the neighborhood, the problem gets more complicated.

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The violation of property rights is clear, but protecting them is more difficult. And

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when the garbage is invisible to the naked eye as much air and water pollution is, the

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problem often seems insurmountable. We have tried many remedies in the past. We have tried

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to dissuade polluters with fines, with government programs whereby all pay to clean up the garbage

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produced by the few, with a myriad of detailed regulations to control the degree of pollution.

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Now, some even seriously propose that we should have economic incentives to charge polluters

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a fee for polluting, and the more they pollute, the more they pay. But this is just like taxing

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burglars as an economic incentive to deter people from stealing your property, and just

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as unconscionable. I mean, man is really good. The only effective way to eliminate serious

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pollution is to treat it exactly for what it is, garbage. Just as one does not have

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

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the right to place any garbage in the air or in the water or in the earth if it in any

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way violates the property rights of others. What we need are tougher, clearer environmental

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laws that are enforced, not with economic incentives but with jail terms. What the strict

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application of the idea of private property rights will do is to increase the cost of

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garbage disposal. That increased cost will be reflected in a higher cost for the products

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and the methods of production. But they didn't have to engage in those, they only did because

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that was the way the economic incentives were set up. Had law and order prevailed from the

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very beginning, the industry would have been led as if by an invisible hand, says Adam

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Smith, toward those production techniques that do not specialize in heavy fallout and

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pollutants.

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So, for 150 years, or maybe for 130 years, we went merrily on polluting ourselves.

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Then all of a sudden, certain people said, hey, look, things are getting pretty desperate.

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One of the cartoons that I saw illustrates this very much.

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It was a mother and a daughter in there eating in an outside restaurant.

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Now, usually, you'd expect the mother to say to the little girl, hurry up, dear, eat your

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They used to have pretty low smoke stacks and, you know, it would be clear where the smoke

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is going.

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So guess what these geniuses came up with?

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Big smoke stacks, you know, 150 feet high so that, you know, the problem doesn't exist

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anymore, right?

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Who can see it?

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It's like pushing it under the rug.

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Well, I think that the best way is to get back to a regime of private property rights.

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Now, you might conceivably have to make some compromises.

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Maybe.

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This is where we need some research.

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You know, just how do you go back 150 years? How do you turn back the clock 150 years toward

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a more just regime? Do you just say that no one can pollute any more and pretty much the

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whole society gets wiped out? Do you grandfather it in? These are difficult problems. Or do

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you compromise with this crazy selling of pollution rights temporarily? My own predilection

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In a free society, you wouldn't have a situation where you had no pollution. Economists are

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always enamored with the idea of optimizing things. Even in a free society, we wouldn't

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aim for zero crime, because zero crime might take the entire GNP to solve. We want only

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The optimal crime, which means that we devote only a certain amount to stopping criminals.

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Well, it's the same here. We want optimal amounts of pollution. Now, in the free society,

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the way the optimal amount of pollution would be determined is through voluntary contracts.

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Namely, in the 1830s, I set up a steel mill in Cleveland somewhere, and I'd buy, you

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know, ten square miles of property, and I'd keep a low smokestack, and we'd decide that

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The buffalo was on the verge of extinction, not distinction, extinction, and the cow never

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was.

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I mean, if you look at it biologically, you can't find an answer, because these two animals

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are indistinguishable.

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I mean, they're both big and fat, they both smell, they both have horns, they both have

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a tail, they both moo, they both give milk.

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If you crash into one, you're in trouble.

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So, if you just look at these two animals standing side by side, you'd find no inkling

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of why one almost was on the verge of extinction and the other never was.

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I mean, the idea that the cow is extinct is ludicrous.

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Well, the reason for the explanation of it is the tragedy of the commons.

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The cow is always owned privately.

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The buffalo is always unowned.

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We had all these communist songs like Home, Home on the Range and Don't Fence Me In.

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When I was a kid I used to watch these western movies and you could always tell the good

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guys because they had the white hat and the white horse and they wore two guns and the

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bad guys had black horses, black hats and a mustache and only one gun.

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So you know things were simple, only it was the wrong way around because the bad guys

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and the Truth of Delicacies. And as a result, you'd see, you'd go out in the rain, you know, you'd take your helicopter and you'd look down in the 1850s or something, and you'd see just buffalo, thousands of buffalo just sort of lying there dead, similar to the way the elephants are now in Africa.

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Whereas the cow, I mean, who goes into their lower 40 pasture with a machine gun and, you know, rap that cat and, you know, killing all their cows? No, it's ludicrous.

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Because if you own the cow and you don't want to use the cow today, it'll be there tomorrow.

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But the only way to get the buffalo is to kill it.

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So obviously, what we have to do is to privatize the range.

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And once we privatize the range, then there's no problem.

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And now buffalo aren't extinct, they're a buffalo farm.

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Anyone shoots those buffalo, they call the cop and they stop you from doing it.

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There are no economic incentives to act in a nonsensical way.

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Now, it's the same with hippopotamuses and elephants. Ignorant people, like the editors

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of Time, Ms. Wigg, The Economist, you know, economic illiterates say that the reason for

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the extinction of these animals is because of their tusks or their horns. You know, the

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ivory is worth 100 pounds, and the elephant tusk, I think, 16 pounds of it, it's $400

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There was this Daniel Arap Moore from Kenya or somewhere, Mozambique, who burned $3.6

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million worth of ivory in order to publicize the danger of the ivory, or the danger to

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the elephants.

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And I was saying, well, you know, it's just a waste of $3.6 million, although with good

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publicity, but still, the point is to privatize them.

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And I made statements like, you know, elephants are just cows with big ears, and, you know,

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I was seen as, you know, biologically illiterate or something, but I wasn't making a biological

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point, I was making an economic point, that if they were just privatized, there would

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be no problem.

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You see, the reason the poachers are doing so well is because the villagers are the poachers.

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The villagers hide them, protect them, because the way they consider them is just rats with

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big ears.

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Because, you know, here they've got some crops and all of a sudden the elephant comes slumping

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and the law and you know that's the end of your crop now if they own the elephants and they own the crops and they could keep one from the other with big senses then they would see the elephant as a resource and they would protect the elephant but now they're not allowed to keep that ivory legally or the meat or the the elephant skin it's the same as with crocodiles I always say crocodiles and alligators confused they seem very similar to me but

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The crocodiles, too, were on the verge of extinction, and nowadays we have in Florida

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and Louisiana crocodile farms.

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The leather there is worth about $20 for a four-foot long farm-fed alligator, and the

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leather is worth $39 a linear foot and the meat is worth $20.

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Now, I'm not into this, but some people like alligator meat, and what they eat is nutria,

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which is ground-up swamp grass and croaker, which is a cheap fish, and then vitamin-fortified

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dry food, and they have alligator farms. And while the alligator, or the clack-a-dall,

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I forget which it is, was on the verge of extinction, now there are 75,000 alligators

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in 89. This is triple what there was in 87. I guess the buggers breed pretty well. When

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under the tender mercy care of farmers who have an economic incentive to make sure that

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they breed and that they're not slaughtered.

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Unfortunately, the people, many of the consumers, still think that the alligator or the crocodile

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or whatever it is, is on the verge of extinction, so they're not buying handbags as quickly

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as they might.

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But you see, the alligator's skin, let's not talk about the meat, it's sort of yucky,

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And at least the alligator skins the handbags and shoes was a curse for this animal when

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it was unowned. And now that it's owned, it's not a curse. It's the reason that farmers

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preserve them. I mean, the reason we preserve cows is because they need economic value.

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You took the economic value away, then they'd be in trouble. Which leads me to the next

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breed of animal. See, I guess I would divide animals into three kinds. There are, first,

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And the animals that have some value for us. Well, if they're privatized, we have no problem.

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Second are the animals that we really don't like too much, like anopheles, mosquitoes,

387
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and, you know, causes of death and stuff. It'd be very hard to see how free enterprise

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could keep them alive, but even in those, in the case of those species, we would, because

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they might conceivably have some value for us in the future. Now, who would be so forward-looking

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and the way forward looking is to keep alive mnemonic play grass and stuff like that.

391
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Well, there are two groups that I can think of.

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One is pharmaceutical companies, who might in 50 years or 100 years find some use for

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them.

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And the other is private university, biology departments and chemistry departments, who

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would also have an economic advantage in having these breeds not be extinct so that their

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students could learn from them.

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Remember that Star Trek movie where the whales, there were no whales in our century, Star

398
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Trek 4, there's a Trekkie there, and there were these super powerful beings, the Martians

399
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or whoever, they were friends of whales and they discovered that there were no whales

400
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so they were going to just kill the earth, the entire earth, and our Trekkies had to

401
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go to a different century, namely back to the present to get them and bring them back

402
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to the future.

403
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You ought to be there to appreciate this. Well, this leads to the question of whales and seals and other sea life mammals that are now on the verge of extinction. How would the market handle them?

404
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Well, the answer to me seems to be to privatize the ocean. You know, if it moves, privatize it. If it doesn't move, privatize it. Privatize everything. That's our motto here.

405
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And, you know, when I address this to most audiences, they're sort of, they're draws,

406
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not their draws, their jaws drop.

407
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Maybe their jaws drop too, I don't know.

408
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They say, well, you know, that's imbecilic, how can you privatize the oceans?

409
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You know, it's watery, it moves, you know, you can't privatize it.

410
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Well, I don't know, I mean, a species that can get up to the moon, that can do polio,

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that can do all these other great things, can surely make sure that a bunch of fish

412
00:42:21.740 --> 00:42:26.380
stay put where we tell them to, and, you know, don't, you know, swim around where they're

413
00:42:26.380 --> 00:42:27.820
not supposed to.

414
00:42:27.820 --> 00:42:32.580
We probably have the technology even now, and if we don't, surely in 50 or 100 years,

415
00:42:32.580 --> 00:42:38.020
we'd have the electronic devices to, you know, make invisible electronic walls in the ocean

416
00:42:38.020 --> 00:42:42.340
so that the whales stay where we tell them to, you know.

417
00:42:42.340 --> 00:42:49.340
The Theory of Money and Credit The Theory of Money and Credit

418
00:43:12.340 --> 00:43:21.140
I happen to be a human being-phobe. I like human beings. I wish them well. I'm prejudiced.

419
00:43:21.140 --> 00:43:27.740
I happen to be one. And my hope is that eventually, and I'm sort of anticipating some of the zero

420
00:43:27.740 --> 00:43:33.940
population growth stuff, my hope is that eventually, instead of six billion people, we'll have

421
00:43:33.940 --> 00:43:40.020
60 trillion people on this earth, and I think we've got plenty of room for them. But if

422
00:44:10.020 --> 00:44:33.220
The third group of animals with regard to extinction is groups like snail daughters and other animals

423
00:44:33.220 --> 00:44:37.220
that are neither very good nor very bad, but sort of were indifferent to them.

424
00:44:37.220 --> 00:44:52.220
And again, the same principles would apply. There are people that would have economic incentives to keep them alive, as well, even if there are species that are disappearing, there are also species that are continually coming into existence.

425
00:44:52.220 --> 00:44:59.220
And we have to make a distinction. You know, the answer to this or that is not both, always, because both has cost.

426
00:44:59.220 --> 00:45:05.300
Somebody has got to make a decision, a private decision, whether the monkey or the worm or

427
00:45:05.300 --> 00:45:10.940
whatever it is, is worth preserving if it's extinct and it has no obvious value to people

428
00:45:10.940 --> 00:45:11.940
right now.

429
00:45:11.940 --> 00:45:17.100
Okay, that's it for extinct species.

430
00:45:17.100 --> 00:45:20.900
We move right now onto oilfields.

431
00:45:20.900 --> 00:45:26.220
The Exxon Valdez dropped 10 million gallons into the Alaska harbor.

432
00:45:26.220 --> 00:45:32.620
This was a big deal in B.C. because we were closer, but I imagine that the greenos around

433
00:45:32.620 --> 00:45:35.860
here, the pinko greenos, were very unhappy about that.

434
00:45:35.860 --> 00:45:38.660
It's the third biggest oil spill in the history of the world.

435
00:45:38.660 --> 00:45:45.940
The second biggest was the Amoco Cadiz off the coast of France, which dropped 68 million

436
00:45:45.940 --> 00:45:51.780
gallons, and the biggest one was an offshore oil drilling rig off the coast of Yucatan

437
00:45:51.780 --> 00:45:58.740
in 1979, which spewed forth 155 million gallons. And it's really pretty yucky. I mean, the

438
00:45:58.740 --> 00:46:05.300
oil has the consistency of sort of black mayonnaise, and it just gets on everything. And I'm not

439
00:46:05.300 --> 00:46:09.420
one of these right-wingers that say, well, you know, what's a little oil between friends?

440
00:46:09.420 --> 00:46:16.900
Or they come up with these analogies that say, well, if you take the 10 million gallons

441
00:46:46.900 --> 00:46:53.060
and all of these shores are being polluted. They won't be able to fish or swim or use

442
00:46:53.060 --> 00:46:58.380
any recreation for quite a number of years, and it's just a violation of property rights.

443
00:46:58.380 --> 00:47:03.900
So I don't think we have to welcome this and be indifferent to it and say it's a great

444
00:47:03.900 --> 00:47:09.380
thing or anything. Now, let's get into the causes of this. The causes, as you can imagine,

445
00:47:09.380 --> 00:47:14.340
were not capitalism, were not free enterprise, were not markets. The causes were government

446
00:47:14.340 --> 00:47:44.340
government intervention, choir government intervention, no, not a drunken skipper, it's not the fault of the drunken skipper, some people say it was Exxon's fault because they didn't fire the drunken skipper, the point is that drunkenness has been made a handicap in the U.S., they were not allowed to fire him, they had no incentive to keep a drunken skipper or one airline has an economic incentive to keep a drunken pilot, it's because of these laws that require, you know, minorities have

447
00:47:44.340 --> 00:47:49.100
have rights. Drunks have rights. They have a right to be behind the cocktail. Well, now

448
00:47:49.100 --> 00:47:56.540
that's lunacy. And that's the proximate cause. But there's more to the story than just that,

449
00:47:56.540 --> 00:48:02.900
that proximate cause. Other problems are that the law, the Admiralty law, as I understand

450
00:48:02.900 --> 00:48:08.780
it right now, limits the... So even if we didn't have a drunken skipper, accidents occur. I

451
00:48:08.780 --> 00:48:12.700
mean, we're human beings. There's got to be accidents. Human beings are the mistakes making

452
00:48:12.700 --> 00:48:26.700
The Law of the Adultery Law is that the limitation of liability of the company is the value of

453
00:48:26.700 --> 00:48:28.700
the boat and the cargo.

454
00:48:28.700 --> 00:48:31.460
What kind of nonsense is that?

455
00:48:31.460 --> 00:48:36.620
Surely the responsibility of the person that does that is not limited to the value of the

456
00:48:36.620 --> 00:48:40.940
thinking boat and the cargo, but rather to the damage he does.

457
00:48:40.940 --> 00:48:46.180
That would be a much more rational way of dealing with it.

458
00:48:46.180 --> 00:48:50.420
Fishermen have no right to sue because we don't recognize, we, that is, our government,

459
00:48:50.420 --> 00:48:55.860
shouldn't make that equation, our government, our blessed, you know, all-powerful, all-benevolent

460
00:48:55.860 --> 00:49:00.500
government does not recognize fishermen's right to anything in the ocean because they

461
00:49:00.500 --> 00:49:02.660
don't own it, so they can't sue.

462
00:49:02.660 --> 00:49:04.960
So that's another problem with it.

463
00:49:04.960 --> 00:49:11.640
But I think the ultimate cause of the problem is that the oceans are only common, they're

464
00:49:11.640 --> 00:49:12.640
owned by no one.

465
00:49:12.640 --> 00:49:17.960
There's this UN law of the sea treaty that's being brooded about, and I think Canada signed,

466
00:49:17.960 --> 00:49:23.240
but happily the U.S. didn't, and the U.S. counts for more than Canada on this one and

467
00:49:23.240 --> 00:49:29.080
on many other things, and they're saying that everybody, you know, some guy in a jungle

468
00:49:29.080 --> 00:49:33.720
should have the run over end of the rights to the ocean as everyone else, even though

469
00:49:33.720 --> 00:50:03.720
The Theory of Money and Credit

470
00:51:03.720 --> 00:51:07.720
I'm supposed to speak for an hour and I've been speaking for 50 minutes and I've got

471
00:51:07.720 --> 00:51:12.360
three or four topics more, so I'm not going to be able to cover everything with the thoroughness

472
00:51:12.360 --> 00:51:17.720
that I'd like to, but I'd like to at least touch upon a few of these other topics.

473
00:51:17.720 --> 00:51:22.200
So let me run through a few of them and maybe I won't reach them all and we can discuss

474
00:51:22.200 --> 00:51:26.120
some of them in the after period, question and answer period.

475
00:51:26.120 --> 00:51:28.120
The next one is recycling.

476
00:51:28.120 --> 00:51:35.200
Now, this is another fetish. You know, everybody is saying, you know, you've got a Styrofoam

477
00:51:35.200 --> 00:51:40.640
cup, you're evil, you know, you're, I don't know, you're an environmental pervert or something,

478
00:51:40.640 --> 00:51:45.760
and you're using a plastic bag, and you're no good, you're not ecologically friendly

479
00:51:45.760 --> 00:51:51.720
or something, and, you know, people are having campaigns about this, and again, guess who's

480
00:51:51.720 --> 00:51:58.920
It's the capitalist, the greedy capitalist, who makes these plastic bags and these styrofoam

481
00:51:58.920 --> 00:52:03.240
cups without any consideration of what will happen to them afterwards.

482
00:52:03.240 --> 00:52:07.360
And not only is it the greedy capitalist, but there's an unholy alliance of the greedy

483
00:52:07.360 --> 00:52:12.920
capitalist and the uncaring consumer, who buys these things, who goes to the shopping

484
00:52:12.920 --> 00:52:16.600
mall and, you know, just puts the stuff in a plastic bag and, you know, doesn't think

485
00:52:16.600 --> 00:52:17.600
about it.

486
00:52:17.600 --> 00:52:27.200
This is the way the Greenos see the problem, and I agree with them. This is a problem, and people

487
00:52:27.200 --> 00:52:35.920
are acting irresponsibly. I mean, granted that when you try to recycle this stuff or you try to put it

488
00:52:35.920 --> 00:52:42.240
in the earth, it ruins the earth, I think we do have over optimal amount of money in styrofoam

489
00:52:42.240 --> 00:52:46.800
and in plastics, but my explanation for this problem is not because of greedy capitalism and

490
00:53:46.800 --> 00:53:53.300
Let's forget about the cost of disposing it. We'll do it. Not for free with your tax money, but we'll do it.

491
00:53:53.300 --> 00:53:57.300
So you don't have to be concerned about disposing of it.

492
00:53:57.300 --> 00:54:01.300
Now suppose that the economic situation were as follows.

493
00:54:01.300 --> 00:54:06.300
It costs a penny to make a paper bag. It costs a penny to make a plastic bag.

494
00:54:06.300 --> 00:54:10.300
It costs a penny to dispose of a paper bag.

495
00:54:10.300 --> 00:54:13.300
And it costs five bucks to dispose of a plastic bag.

496
00:54:13.300 --> 00:54:24.620
The consumer says to himself, well, if I take this paper bag, it will cost me a penny to

497
00:54:24.620 --> 00:54:29.460
produce it, a penny to dispose of it for a grand total of two cents.

498
00:54:29.460 --> 00:54:34.180
If I take the plastic bag, it will cost me a penny to buy it and five bucks to dispose

499
00:54:34.180 --> 00:54:36.700
of it for a grand total of five-oh-one.

500
00:54:36.700 --> 00:54:43.180
Now do I really value this plastic bag at 250 times as much as the paper bag?

501
00:54:43.180 --> 00:54:47.900
You know, I'm not really that hopped up about having plastic, and the answer is no.

502
00:54:47.900 --> 00:54:53.320
They would spin the plastic bag, they would take the paper bag, and the recycling problem

503
00:54:53.320 --> 00:54:54.320
would be solved.

504
00:54:54.320 --> 00:54:59.700
Because the only people that would be using plastic bags would be people for whom it really

505
00:54:59.700 --> 00:55:07.100
is worth 250 times as much as the paper, namely hospitals or certain technical processes of

506
00:55:07.100 --> 00:55:08.100
production.

507
00:55:08.100 --> 00:55:09.100
I don't know who.

508
00:55:09.100 --> 00:55:10.100
I'm an economist.

509
00:55:10.100 --> 00:55:11.100
I'm not a manufacturer.

510
00:55:11.100 --> 00:55:15.300
and I presume that there are certain people for whom the plastic is very important and

511
00:55:15.300 --> 00:55:19.860
they would use it and they would be very softy with it than they are now.

512
00:55:19.860 --> 00:55:26.700
So this whole problem is a sum total of the fact that the government not only monopolizes

513
00:55:26.700 --> 00:55:29.380
garbage collection but dumping.

514
00:55:29.380 --> 00:55:32.780
Land sales and garbage collection should be privatized.

515
00:55:32.780 --> 00:55:35.940
Not only for the reason that it will save us bundles of money because they will do it

516
00:55:35.940 --> 00:55:40.820
more efficiently, that goes without saying, but also because it will solve the ecological

517
00:55:40.820 --> 00:55:46.420
and the Federal Crisis. When people say, well, McDonald's is evil, and I had this picture

518
00:55:46.420 --> 00:55:51.260
of McDonald's with the styrofoam here and styrofoam there, and people won't eat there,

519
00:55:51.260 --> 00:55:55.940
and they say that the market is irresponsible, it's because there is no market. It's because

520
00:55:55.940 --> 00:56:02.940
of the mixed part of the mixed economy. It's not because of the laissez-faire part. Okay,

521
00:56:02.940 --> 00:56:10.740
enough for recycling. Now we move on to hazardous waste. The most famous case of hazardous waste

522
00:56:10.740 --> 00:56:16.580
This was the Love Canal situation. And again, this was really yucky. You know, people were

523
00:56:16.580 --> 00:56:20.660
noticing that their worlds were green and, you know, sort of gooey, and then their arms

524
00:56:20.660 --> 00:56:24.620
were falling off at the elbow. And, you know, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it was

525
00:56:24.620 --> 00:56:29.660
a real... I mean, if you were living in Love Canal and you thought it was due to capitalism,

526
00:56:29.660 --> 00:56:34.700
it would turn you on to socialism forever. But the reality of the situation is that the

527
00:56:34.700 --> 00:56:37.700
Hooker Chemical Company at one...

528
00:56:37.700 --> 00:56:52.100
Oh, well. It's just a coincidence, I'm sure. Reminds me of this joke that there were three

529
00:56:52.100 --> 00:56:56.980
people, you know, shooting up on the corner, heroin, and they were sharing needles, and

530
00:56:56.980 --> 00:57:01.860
somebody came by and said, well, you can catch AIDS if you share needles? I said, no, no,

531
00:57:01.860 --> 00:57:12.860
Well, don't worry about it, we're all using condoms. Well, I had to put in my quick dirty joke in there.

532
00:57:12.860 --> 00:57:29.860
Now, the Hooker chemical company was involved in certain toxic waste, I forget what, and what it did is it buried it very carefully in concrete and barrels and, you know, 10 foot thick concrete and that was it.

533
00:57:29.860 --> 00:57:36.820
And then the Hooker Company got expropriated. That property got expropriated by guess who?

534
00:57:36.820 --> 00:57:43.380
It begins with a G. The government expropriated the Hooker chemical companies. By the way,

535
00:57:43.380 --> 00:57:47.340
this article was in Reason, a magnificent article in Reason, where they discuss that.

536
00:57:47.340 --> 00:57:54.740
Oh, okay. Well, it makes the rounds. And what happened is they expropriated this and gave

537
00:57:54.740 --> 00:57:58.740
it over to a public school. And Hooker said, well, you know, in their bill of sale, be

538
00:57:58.740 --> 00:58:02.940
Be careful, whatever you do, don't mess around. It's sort of like, you know, these horror

539
00:58:02.940 --> 00:58:06.860
movies where somebody sells you something on the condition that you don't open the

540
00:58:06.860 --> 00:58:12.340
third drawer ever. And, you know, you're opening the first drawer and the second and the fourth,

541
00:58:12.340 --> 00:58:15.460
and, you know, one day you say, well, I wonder what, and then, you know, something springs

542
00:58:15.460 --> 00:58:22.340
out. Well, they tell them, don't do it. So to make a long story short, guess what they

543
00:58:22.340 --> 00:58:26.980
did? They did it. A public school was put in there and they, you know, they went, they

544
00:58:26.980 --> 00:58:30.620
and the drill, they opened the chemicals and the chemicals got into the love canal and

545
00:58:30.620 --> 00:58:36.380
started seeping around. And this again is a failure of capitalism. Well, I mean the

546
00:58:36.380 --> 00:58:41.140
obvious answer is that we shouldn't be expropriating property and if we're going to expropriate

547
00:58:41.140 --> 00:58:46.300
property and they tell us not to open the third drawer, then don't open the third drawer.

548
00:58:46.300 --> 00:58:53.940
So I don't think too much of the hazardous waste case against the market. What about

549
00:58:53.940 --> 00:58:56.540
The Greenhouse Effect Case Against the Market

550
00:58:56.540 --> 00:59:03.900
Well, what is the greenhouse effect? The greenhouse effect, very briefly, from a non-scientific,

551
00:59:03.900 --> 00:59:10.700
layman point of view, is that there are certain chemicals, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide,

552
00:59:10.700 --> 00:59:17.700
carbon something-ide, gets into the air and what it does is it keeps the sun in, it keeps

553
00:59:17.700 --> 00:59:47.700
The problem with this, and the problem is that if the earth gets warmer, it'll melt the

554
00:59:47.700 --> 01:00:00.540
The only problem with this is that there is no evidence for it.

555
01:00:00.540 --> 01:00:05.700
Or at least the scientific community, the majority of opinion does not support the fact

556
01:00:05.700 --> 01:00:08.160
that we have the greenhouse effect.

557
01:00:08.160 --> 01:00:12.660
They look back on temperatures for the last hundred years and they see some ups and some

558
01:01:12.660 --> 01:01:22.020
The Greenhouse Effect is complicated by the whole forestry situation, and the forestry

559
01:01:22.020 --> 01:01:27.100
situation is a lot clearer than the greenhouse effect situation.

560
01:01:27.100 --> 01:01:32.220
It is maintained by scientists, and I'm not competent to know whether this is true or not,

561
01:01:32.220 --> 01:01:36.340
that the greenery, the trees, serve as the lungs of the earth.

562
01:01:36.340 --> 01:01:39.180
They take in the carbon dioxide and they come out with oxygen.

563
01:01:39.180 --> 01:01:46.260
Well, we'll stipulate that that's true. You know that joke about there was the economist,

564
01:01:46.260 --> 01:01:50.820
the chemist, the physicist, and the engineer, and they were stuck on this desert island,

565
01:01:50.820 --> 01:01:56.620
and they had a whole bunch of canned goods and no can opener. So all the physicists and

566
01:01:56.620 --> 01:02:00.420
the chemists and the engineer, they're huddling and saying, well, you know, blah, blah, blah,

567
01:02:00.420 --> 01:02:04.340
blah, equations and, you know, pulleys and, you know, should we throw the can against

568
01:02:04.340 --> 01:02:08.100
the rock and all sorts of things. And then they turn to the economist and they say, well,

569
01:02:08.100 --> 01:02:10.860
How can you contribute to our deliberation?

570
01:02:10.860 --> 01:02:14.620
And the economist says, well, assume we have a can opener.

571
01:02:14.620 --> 01:02:21.140
Well, let's assume that we have a greenhouse effect.

572
01:02:21.140 --> 01:02:27.340
One of the saving graces of the forest is that they will help solve the greenhouse effect.

573
01:02:27.340 --> 01:02:30.460
The only problem is that the forests are disappearing.

574
01:02:30.460 --> 01:02:34.140
And there's a little story as to why the forests are disappearing, and I'll give you one guess

575
01:02:34.140 --> 01:02:37.380
as to whose fault that is.

576
01:02:37.380 --> 01:02:41.380
The reason, again, is the tragedy of the common.

577
01:02:41.380 --> 01:02:44.380
See, what happens is that these costs are not privately owned.

578
01:02:44.380 --> 01:02:49.380
The U.S. is a little better than Canada in the sense that the government only owns about

579
01:02:49.380 --> 01:02:51.380
60% of the land in the U.S.

580
01:02:51.380 --> 01:02:55.380
In Canada, the government owns about 90% or 89%.

581
01:02:55.380 --> 01:03:02.380
And if you forget about the Northwest Territory and the Yukon, it's about 85%.

582
01:03:02.380 --> 01:03:04.380
I've got these statistics in the book.

583
01:03:04.380 --> 01:03:20.380
The problem is that what they do is they don't allow the private companies to own the forest where they would treat it as if they owned it and they would protect it and if they clear cut they would replant because if they didn't replant after clear cutting the value of the land would dissipate.

584
01:03:20.380 --> 01:03:30.380
But rather what they do is they say, look, we'll give you a lease. Six months. Do what you will with this land for six months and that's your time horizon.

585
01:03:30.380 --> 01:03:45.380
So what they do is they level it and they don't replant and the government tries to get them to replant and they're unsuccessful and when the governments run out of money the first thing that they stop is replanting because, you know, welfare rights are more important than replanting.

586
01:03:45.380 --> 01:03:55.380
So we've got a lot of dissipation of the farm. In addition, what the government does in the few cases of private ownership in the U.S. is they build logging roads.

587
01:03:55.380 --> 01:04:00.180
Thus making accessible to cutting trees that would never be accessible to cutting without

588
01:04:00.180 --> 01:04:04.460
their subsidization of the cutting through these logging roads.

589
01:04:04.460 --> 01:04:09.620
And in Brazil what they do is they subsidize private farmers to go in and cut down the

590
01:04:09.620 --> 01:04:14.940
trees and start cattle farming, because they've got this perverted idea that they can't import

591
01:04:14.940 --> 01:04:19.380
beef from Argentina, God forbid, because, you know, the Brazilian cultural nationalism

592
01:04:19.380 --> 01:04:22.300
will be ruined by beef from some other country.

593
01:04:22.300 --> 01:04:23.300
Does that sound familiar?

594
01:04:23.300 --> 01:04:30.560
So, these are the reasons that the forests are now being dissipated, and then the governments

595
01:04:30.560 --> 01:04:35.080
in the northern hemisphere are saying that the Brazilians are stupid and evil for not

596
01:04:35.080 --> 01:04:40.460
preserving their forests, but this is hypocritical. If they're so worried about the forests, let

597
01:04:40.460 --> 01:04:46.020
them, you know, preserve their own, let them privatize. And we get back to this environmental

598
01:04:46.020 --> 01:04:56.540
and I think that really is a very important case in point.

599
01:04:56.540 --> 01:05:03.060
Now I think I only have two more points, I'm running a little past my time, but I've got

600
01:05:03.060 --> 01:05:08.020
the ozone layer, zero population growth and cigarette smoking, but I'm out of time, so

601
01:05:08.020 --> 01:05:11.180
shall I just give another few minutes and then...

602
01:05:11.180 --> 01:05:27.180
Okay. Okay. The natives aren't left with yet. Just the cigarette smokers. We'll get to them in a minute. We'll deal with those people.

603
01:05:27.180 --> 01:05:36.180
Now, the ozone layer, it is alleged that chlorofluorocarbons, I want a little applause for being able to pronounce that.

604
01:05:36.180 --> 01:05:45.180
I've been working on it. My pronunciation is getting better of these. I had a hard time in chemistry in college and now I'm back in it.

605
01:05:45.180 --> 01:05:50.180
Right. It's a bit of a distraction or something.

606
01:05:50.180 --> 01:06:04.180
It is alleged that the CFCs, in aerosol and foam products and air-conditioned refrigerators, act in such a way as to combine with oxygen as to either increase or decrease ozone.

607
01:06:34.180 --> 01:06:38.980
and the scientific community is, again, not of the overwhelming opinion that there is any

608
01:06:38.980 --> 01:06:42.060
ozone hole problem.

609
01:06:42.060 --> 01:06:48.140
Another interesting point is that the people behind this ozone stuff are mainly DuPont.

610
01:06:48.140 --> 01:06:53.620
DuPont is in favor of prohibiting freons and CFCs and things like that.

611
01:06:53.620 --> 01:06:57.700
And it's also an interesting point, which I'm sure is completely coincidental and has

612
01:06:57.700 --> 01:07:18.700
And nothing to do with this, that Dupont holds patents for the substitutes for Freon. Now I want the jury to just, you know, to just not consider this as at all relevant, but it might be of interest to someone to know just, you know, these backgrounds here.

613
01:07:18.700 --> 01:07:24.100
But let's suppose that there really is a problem. Let's suppose, you know, you know, the economists

614
01:07:24.100 --> 01:07:28.500
will assume they can't open it. Let's assume a problem. Let's assume that DuPont is innocent

615
01:07:28.500 --> 01:07:32.660
and let's, you know, because it could be, it's not a logical contradiction to suppose

616
01:07:32.660 --> 01:07:37.780
that there is a problem. Well, then we get back to the, to the old stamping grounds of

617
01:07:37.780 --> 01:07:43.340
pollution. If it really is true that to use an aerosol can or an air conditioner or refrigerate

618
01:07:43.340 --> 01:07:52.020
with Present Technology is to dissipate the ozone layer and to increase skin cancer, it

619
01:07:52.020 --> 01:07:56.260
seems to me that this is a prima facie case of violation of property rights.

620
01:07:56.260 --> 01:08:01.740
Now it's true it's hard to see who's going to own the air and we really need a lot of

621
01:08:01.740 --> 01:08:06.060
thinking about that, but we don't have to own the air, we just have to own the rights

622
01:08:06.060 --> 01:08:12.060
not to be aggressed against and I think it's not too much of an extension of rights violations

623
01:08:12.060 --> 01:08:17.780
to assume that if it really did work this way, it would be a rights violation.

624
01:08:17.780 --> 01:08:19.580
Maybe I'm being impure in this.

625
01:08:19.580 --> 01:08:22.260
Maybe a rights violation is only with a gun, but I don't think so.

626
01:08:22.260 --> 01:08:26.620
I think that if the allegation were true, we have no embarrassment about it philosophically.

627
01:08:26.620 --> 01:08:31.060
We would just say, yes, this is a violation of property rights, and we stop it.

628
01:08:31.060 --> 01:08:32.060
Period.

629
01:08:32.060 --> 01:08:37.660
So again, I don't think that there's anything in the environmental challenge that makes

630
01:08:37.660 --> 01:08:41.460
us reconsider our philosophy of freedom.

631
01:08:41.460 --> 01:08:45.580
Not only is our philosophy of freedom right and just, it is also pragmatic.

632
01:08:45.580 --> 01:08:51.660
Last but not least, oh no, not last, next to last but not least, is your population

633
01:08:51.660 --> 01:08:52.660
growth.

634
01:08:52.660 --> 01:08:57.500
People are saying, well, you know, there are too many people around here.

635
01:08:57.500 --> 01:09:02.060
In China, they forbid people from having more than one child, and it's really disgraceful

636
01:09:02.060 --> 01:09:06.020
what happens because people are biased toward having male children, and they find out they

637
01:09:06.020 --> 01:09:08.540
have a female child, and they abort.

638
01:09:08.540 --> 01:09:11.900
You wonder what's going to happen in 20 years in China when there are all these boys running

639
01:09:11.900 --> 01:09:12.900
around and no girls.

640
01:09:12.900 --> 01:09:17.500
It'll be a social prostitution and it'll be a social disarray.

641
01:09:17.500 --> 01:09:23.900
There are some statistics that might convince you that we have no overpopulation problem.

642
01:09:23.900 --> 01:09:29.980
One of them is that if we took everybody on the earth, all six billion people of us, and

643
01:09:29.980 --> 01:09:35.940
put them into Ontario in the form of four people to a family, pardon me for using such

644
01:09:35.940 --> 01:09:49.940
I don't mean to curse or, you know, to be obnoxious, but, okay, well, local mores, yes.

645
01:09:49.940 --> 01:09:55.700
If we put everybody on the earth, all six billion of us, into the province of Ontario

646
01:09:55.700 --> 01:10:00.140
in the form of four people to a house, where the house is the usual middle-class sized

647
01:10:00.140 --> 01:10:05.860
house with a front yard and a back yard and two stories, I think it's 8200 square feet,

648
01:10:05.860 --> 01:10:12.340
Everybody on earth would fit into Ontario. That's one instance to convince you of how

649
01:10:12.340 --> 01:10:16.460
empty this planet is. Another one is if you just took all the people, and I think you

650
01:10:16.460 --> 01:10:23.220
count them as three cubic feet, if you stuck them all into a cube, the cube would be one

651
01:10:23.220 --> 01:10:28.300
mile, namely a mile up a mile wide, a mile deep, you can get everybody in it. It'd be

652
01:10:28.300 --> 01:10:35.740
a little crowded, you know, there'd be some, you know, I'm not advocating that we do this,

653
01:10:35.740 --> 01:10:40.820
You know, it would make the New York subway system look, you know, like empty, but, you

654
01:10:40.820 --> 01:10:46.060
know, we'd all be living cheek by jowl here, but it would just be for a few seconds.

655
01:10:46.060 --> 01:10:50.940
You know, the way college kids get into a phone booth, well, that would be something

656
01:10:50.940 --> 01:10:51.940
like that.

657
01:10:51.940 --> 01:10:56.900
Well, I mean, if it's just one square mile and this earth is a lot bigger, I forget how

658
01:10:56.900 --> 01:11:01.460
big it is, you know, there are very few people.

659
01:11:01.460 --> 01:11:07.460
It's also not true that poverty is correlated at all with overpopulation.

660
01:11:07.460 --> 01:11:12.460
You know, we speak of the teeming masses of India and all the Indian support, but what

661
01:11:12.460 --> 01:11:18.460
about the teeming masses of Toronto or the teeming masses of Paris or London or Manhattan?

662
01:11:18.460 --> 01:11:23.460
I mean, they're teeming, or San Francisco, well, forget about San Francisco for a moment,

663
01:11:23.460 --> 01:11:27.460
Los Angeles, they're teeming in there, but they're pretty rich.

664
01:11:27.460 --> 01:11:31.340
and then there are people that are dying like flies in a desert like Ethiopia where there

665
01:11:31.340 --> 01:11:38.020
are hardly any people for square miles. If you make a table where you put rich or poor

666
01:11:38.020 --> 01:11:45.500
and population density, you conceal in all the boxes. That is, you get some poor concentrated

667
01:11:45.500 --> 01:11:49.740
countries, some poor empty countries, some rich concentrated countries, some rich empty

668
01:11:49.740 --> 01:11:56.060
countries. Poverty has got nothing to do with overpopulation. What it's got to do with is

669
01:11:56.060 --> 01:12:03.420
The Big G. Too much G. That'll get you every turn. I once debated somebody on this and

670
01:12:03.420 --> 01:12:07.820
I used the following argument and I got roundly booed and hissed, but I'm sure in this audience

671
01:12:07.820 --> 01:12:13.140
I won't. What I said is that my opponent has it within his power to reduce the population

672
01:12:13.140 --> 01:12:22.940
by one. The fact that he's sitting over there waiting to get on this podium shows that he

673
01:12:22.940 --> 01:12:30.760
He doesn't believe in his own theory. He's a hypocrite. And then I sat down. And they

674
01:12:30.760 --> 01:12:38.500
booed me mercilessly. Well, and he got up and sort of, you know, a little sickly grim,

675
01:12:38.500 --> 01:12:43.780
because it's true. I mean, if he's so concerned about extra people, you know, let him take

676
01:12:43.780 --> 01:12:49.420
the one action that the libertarians want. It allows him to deal with this problem and,

677
01:12:49.420 --> 01:12:53.980
You know, let's have one more person, but I don't, you know, even him, I don't think

678
01:12:53.980 --> 01:12:58.420
he should kill himself because I think people are precious and people are very valuable.

679
01:12:58.420 --> 01:13:04.780
And I take a very long run perspective on this problem, very, very long run. My long

680
01:13:04.780 --> 01:13:11.220
run perspective is that one day, not soon, but in a couple of billion years, the sun

681
01:13:11.220 --> 01:13:18.020
will go out. And on that time, we'd better have technology and enough spaceships or beam

682
01:13:48.020 --> 01:13:52.220
I see this world, instead of 6 billion people, you know, 60 trillion people, and I think

683
01:13:52.220 --> 01:13:57.020
we could all fit very happily if we didn't have any zoning laws, that you can't build

684
01:13:57.020 --> 01:13:58.020
more than 10-story buildings.

685
01:13:58.020 --> 01:14:03.220
I mean, you know, with technology like that, in a couple of dozen years, or even now, we

686
01:14:03.220 --> 01:14:09.260
can build 150-story buildings, you know, if we build 3,000-story buildings and own the

687
01:14:09.260 --> 01:14:14.460
oceans, we can get a lot more people in here without any air crowding or anything.

688
01:14:14.460 --> 01:14:20.460
and I'm not saying tomorrow but you know ultimately. I don't see any overpopulation problem. I

689
01:14:20.460 --> 01:14:26.380
see each person is indescribably precious and important and this overpopulation is just

690
01:14:26.380 --> 01:14:31.460
another incidence of this death wish that I started to talk with. I mean there are certain

691
01:14:31.460 --> 01:14:35.780
people that just, they don't want to have the decency to commit suicide on their own.

692
01:14:35.780 --> 01:14:40.020
They want to take the rest of us with them and this permeates their philosophy and the

693
01:14:40.020 --> 01:14:43.300
and the overpopulation is in these just one more instance of it.

694
01:14:43.300 --> 01:14:52.340
Let me get to cigarette smoking and then I'll pause for breath, pardon the pun, didn't

695
01:14:52.340 --> 01:14:54.980
mean it.

696
01:14:54.980 --> 01:14:59.980
Now we have to divide cigarette smoking, the effects of cigarette smoking, into two.

697
01:14:59.980 --> 01:15:04.940
On the one hand there are the intrapersonal effects and on the other hand there are the

698
01:15:04.940 --> 01:15:07.180
inter-personal effects.

699
01:15:07.180 --> 01:15:14.100
Now, our friends on the left, or our friends on the G side, want to deny this distinction.

700
01:15:14.100 --> 01:15:18.420
They want to say that everything is interpersonal. There is no such thing as smoking that involves

701
01:15:18.420 --> 01:15:24.260
only you, because we have socialized medicine. And if, who's the smoker here? You're the

702
01:15:24.260 --> 01:15:31.180
smokers here. If you smoke, you get lung cancer, then I have to pay for you, so I'll prohibit

703
01:15:31.180 --> 01:15:36.140
you from doing it in the first place. So there are no intrapersonal effects. They might think

704
01:15:36.140 --> 01:15:47.940
Well, according to that logic, we can make them not eat chocolate, make them brush their

705
01:15:47.940 --> 01:15:54.540
teeth, make them drink their milk, you know, no hang gliding, no basketball, you know,

706
01:15:54.540 --> 01:15:58.500
you hurt your knee when you go up for a rebound. I mean, there are so many things that we could

707
01:15:58.500 --> 01:16:02.140
prohibit people from doing on the grounds that if they do them, they'll hurt themselves

708
01:16:02.140 --> 01:16:03.140
and Socialization.

709
01:16:03.140 --> 01:16:04.140
We'll have to pay for them through socialized medicine.

710
01:16:04.140 --> 01:16:05.140
Well, I've got a great solution.

711
01:16:05.140 --> 01:16:06.140
I'm sure it didn't occur to any of you.

712
01:16:06.140 --> 01:16:07.140
Why not get rid of socialized medicine and keep our freedom?

713
01:16:07.140 --> 01:16:08.140
I mean, it seems a lot more logical to me.

714
01:16:08.140 --> 01:16:09.140
Okay, now let's take the case of secondary smoke where obviously it does affect other

715
01:16:09.140 --> 01:16:10.140
people.

716
01:16:10.140 --> 01:16:11.140
You know, you smoke and other people breathe in the fumes or what have you.

717
01:16:11.140 --> 01:16:12.140
So what does the government do?

718
01:16:12.140 --> 01:16:18.140
and keep our freedom. It seems a lot more logical to me.

719
01:16:18.140 --> 01:16:24.140
Okay, now let's take the case of secondary smoke, where obviously it does affect other

720
01:16:24.140 --> 01:16:30.140
people. You smoke and other people breathe in the fumes or what have you. So what does

721
01:16:30.140 --> 01:16:39.140
the government do? It very inflexibly either prohibits it or sets up smoking sections in

722
01:16:39.140 --> 01:16:46.660
And all of this is not as good as the marketplace could do.

723
01:16:46.660 --> 01:16:53.420
What the marketplace could do is be much more flexible, because remember what the market

724
01:16:53.420 --> 01:16:55.060
is trying to do is please customers.

725
01:16:55.060 --> 01:16:57.740
The customer is always right.

726
01:16:57.740 --> 01:17:02.660
And maybe what you'd have in some restaurants, say the beer and pizza parlors in the bowling

727
01:17:02.660 --> 01:17:06.540
alleys, they'd allow smoking, or at least some of them would, they'd have oil smoking

728
01:17:36.540 --> 01:17:48.540
And what we can say is that if people are allowed to compete, they're more likely to come up with solutions to the problem than a bureaucrat sitting in Ottawa or Toronto or wherever it is deciding the rest of their lives.

729
01:17:48.540 --> 01:18:04.540
So, to summarize my position, it might seem that from the concentration on the environmental issue that we have met a problem for our philosophy.

730
01:18:04.540 --> 01:18:10.980
I conclude that we have not met any problem, that the entire difficulty of the environment

731
01:18:10.980 --> 01:18:16.940
and ecology and extinction of species and pollution and all the rest is not an unraveling

732
01:18:16.940 --> 01:18:22.180
of the market, does not show an inconsistency of free enterprise or liberty, but rather shows

733
01:18:22.180 --> 01:18:25.180
that what we need is more liberty, not less.

734
01:18:25.180 --> 01:18:26.180
Thanks.

735
01:18:26.180 --> 01:18:28.180
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