Dr. Block, Dr. Walter Block, has been a senior research alum at the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Director of the Center for the Study of Economics and Revention.
This week, he moved to Massachusetts, where he will assume the position of Professor of Economics at Holy Cross College.
Dr. Block is a political author on scholarly articles on economics. He is a regular contributor to the Financial Post and writes a syndicated column for certain newspapers.
Dr. Block is also an economic commentator on national television and radio. He also lectures widely on public policy issues.
When we found out he published a book called Economics and the Environment, A Reconciliation,
we decided he would be the perfect choice for sharing with us his perspective of how environmental problems may be addressed through the free market.
Please join me in welcoming Dr. Ludwig.
Thanks for the kind introduction. We face great environmental dangers. These dangers fit equally in amongst the top problems facing us. War, disease, starvation, pestilence, drugs. It might even be contended that the environmental problems are as dangerous as all of them, perhaps even as all of them,
At risk are air, ozone, greenhouse effect, deserts, water, species extinction, oil spills, hazardous wastes, all this goes on and on.
I'd like to share with you on a personal note several perspectives that caught me interested in the problem originally,
or that indicate the perspective from which I approach it.
One of them was an insult to the great city of Los Angeles that I was there several years ago,
The theory started coming out of my head, and I wasn't particularly unhappy with it.
It's just that the air hurt.
You know, when the air hurts, there's something weird going on.
And there are places in Southeast Asia where people wear gas masks just to go out and walk with dogs.
And it was right along the lake here we caught fire.
Now I don't know where you come from, but where I come from, lakes aren't supposed to catch fire.
I mean, we don't know who's our new daughter there.
Maybe it's some sort of magical potion.
But it's a weird experience.
And then there was this great cartoon I saw in New Yorker magazine
where there was this mother and daughter.
This little girl was maybe 10 years old.
She was eating in an outdoor restaurant.
And the idea of the caption would say something like,
from the mother,
hurry up and get her to the daughter agency before it gets cold.
No, the caption was, hurry up and get her to the agency before it gets dirty.
Given these environmental problems, a whole environmental movement has arisen to address them, but it is a weakness of this mainstream environmental movement. It doesn't cover the entire possible political-economic spectrum.
I don't say it's limited to the views of these following people, such as Leslie Brown, David Suzuki, Barry Conner, Paul Ehrlich, Tom Hayden, Earl Sreep, Don Vend, John Denver, Raul Baldwin, Ruth Mann, Ralph Nader, Jeremy Griffin, Paul E. Moyer.
It's not limited to these people, but certainly these people have been nominating the dialogue on this issue.
And I think if we're going to maximize our chances of reducing or solving environmental problems,
a section of dialogue should search all the way for these people,
to such people as Adam Smith or Milton Friedman or Friedrich Hayek,
people associated with the free enterprise point of view.
Then there would be more options, and there's a better chance of success.
I'm here today to present a free enterprise perspective on environmental problems.
My claim is that environmental problems are created by socialism,
by Government Interventionism, and then the cure of environmental problems is free enterprise and capitalism.
But before I go into this analysis, I want to consider who the other ball players are,
because sometimes you can't tell who the two dinosaur are.
And I've divided the group into four aspects.
First, about the innocents.
I guess I include my own children, who are now age 13 and 11,
and they come home from school and you know, daddy, this is not far and nearly sound,
cut this out, your car smokes too much from the exhaust.
They get stuck at school, and pretty much it's indicative of what's going on on TV,
or the newspapers, or John Landry's view of our economy.
It's mainly that greed or the marketplace is responsible for the environmental problem.
But these are innocent people, and I think the average person in the street is pretty much innocent of anything on this.
Then there are the two groups that I call the leading socialists. The first one are the Marxists. These are five of the old Marxists who have seen their ideal, their life's dream, their life's ambition and come and conquer on the other side of what used to be the Iron Curtain.
They're true believers, they want socialism, they don't trust an individual initiative or anything like that or an individual responsibility, they want the state to control our lives, they see that red socialism is no good, so they become green socialists.
These are the people I call the water gnomes. They're green on the outside, but they're still red on the inside.
The second group that we're in, social rights, the rabble of tree-lovers, the eco-terrorists, the maniacs, the human-magers, these are the people that say trees have rights, trees have as many rights as people, what do you mean cutting down a tree, how do you like to be cut down?
These are the people that throw blood at women who wear fur coats, these are the people that advocate bombing of vans and other such like activities.
No, I'm not really a big fan of the red socialists. They killed millions of people, but at least they were sort of pro-human.
The reason that they did this was because in a very early leading way, they wanted to promote the human condition.
They thought socialism was the best way to do it. But these green socialists, they have something else.
I mean, they see human beings as burdening. There are some, you know, wild quotes from this group to the effect that the humans are like a virus.
The fourth group I think are people like myself, I hope people like in the audience here, who don't blame the market for environmental problems, but who want to see in the market at least a potential solution.
Let me read two very brief quotes from the Green Socialists.
One is, who was talking about the contamination near the city beaches.
I think the motivation is to read, you know, not caring about the planet, not caring about the ocean,
and not caring about the people who live on the planet and only use the ocean. Read.
Another quote.
They would rather rape the environment and make a lot of money for themselves than not rape the environment,
Fortunately, however, there are already strong signs that the market philosophy is being incorporated into environmental thinking to some small degree.
I've mentioned this with groups like the Nation Conservancy, Dox Unlimited, Audubon Society and Sierra Club. They don't get A plus marks, so this is not an F either.
They've realized that you can't buy a politician. You need to own your red line.
Now this year you're getting a pay off or a higher pay off and, oh yes, they've reincluded you. Next year something else is more sexy and more involved. What the hell with the environment.
So they realize that if they want to protect and preserve the environment and the environment themselves, they can't rely on the political sphere.
So instead of asking the government to buy woodlands, wetlands, et cetera, et cetera, they may buy it themselves.
They may voluntarily raise some food public, which is in the old capitalist voluntary tradition.
There was an amazing story on the Audubon Society with the Rain National Forest Reserve right here in Louisiana.
Now, guess what was discovered on the green forests of the earth? Natural gas alone.
And you'd think that the ordinary barnacles, say oil, gas, yacht, you know, that sort of stuff, were against it.
But, because they owned it, their incentives were very different.
They realized that if they developed it in a way that would not harm their holdings,
they would then be able to have more than millions of four acres of gold, and that's exactly what they did.
Whereas had that been a public reserve, how can bet your boots they'd be down in Washington and testify, oh no, no, let's never develop any oil and gas or anything.
The hell with civilization in effect, it was actually a bond gas name.
Well, my orientation is to try to reconcile economics and the environment.
That's the title of our book, Economics and the Environment, Reconciliation.
What I'm going to do is use economic means to achieve environmental ends.
And the best way to introduce economic means by generating a crisis is by using street signs.
Street signs are very important. We take them for granted all too often.
And yet our lives would be unmanageable without the money. Imagine coming to a certain city and trying to make a way around it. It would be all but impossible.
There are stories in medieval times when a town was surrounded by an invading army. What they would do is take down the streets on them.
On the ground that the local folk knew how to get around them, the invading army would be rendered helpless.
Not by Boehm's powers, but by taking away street signs, which on the indirecting side-posts of the Geography.
Well, the reason I'm going on and on about street signs is because there's an analogy between street signs, geography, and prices to the...
What are you doing to me?
Oh, okay. I'll carry on.
There's an analogy between street signs and geography, or urban geography, or the geography in general, and prices to the economy.
But just as we have to have accurate prices, not any old street signs will do.
If some genie snuck in in the middle of the night and changed old street signs in an arbitrary way, it would be no better than no street signs at all.
Let me give you an example of a subunit union in an early area where I haven't had some data on, moving on to crisis, to show what kind of lousy students I've got there with their economy.
There are five people at each course dinner who won $14. A month's rent, $3.00. A bread, $0.03. A car, $100,000. I don't have a good car. I mean a Lodge. A TV, $10,000. A pair of jeans, $1,000.
That's why the Soviet athletes all day buy jeans, not because they have sped-ish jeans, but because they know it's the princesses' weekend.
In Bulgaria, it costs $14 a ton of steel. The price of steel is $100 a ton.
A 250-mile trip by air is $1. The cost of a bus ticket is less than the cost of printing the ticket.
The mortgage rate is 2% and this is in an inflationary period of 100%. So it's minus 98% in effect.
Microwave oven, 10,000 lev. Average salary, 600 lev per month.
So with price signals like this, it's no source of amazement that the whole use of the banking company has gone include.
In the USSR and the East of Europe, I can't see to what's happening now, these notes were written six months ago or a year ago, and things are changing now.
But as of a year ago, there was a misallocation of economic resources.
But in the United States and the rest of the world, we have a misallocation of environmental resources.
Because our prices are a little bit of a different story.
Our environmental prices are socialistic prices.
They're not based on free enterprise.
So the solution to the problem is to have private property
rights, which lead to accurate prices, which
guide us in a rational manner.
But problems in the environment, non-intrinsic to the market,
they're due to non-market institutional arrangements.
Now, I could stop right here, because that's
all I have to say.
The rest of it is just illustrations, but I think I'll give you a little bit of instructions
just so you don't get me on the bones.
What I would really like to do, if I had three hours, would be to go into detail over the following problems.
Air pollution, hazardous waste, plastic, tigers, nukes, bugs in the house, forests, seigees,
and also the Reimars effect, ozone layer, overpopulation.
But we're severely constrained for time, so what I'm going to do is to take one of these cases, plastic on the plastic,
and to do something in depth and then take two or three others and give you a thumbnail section
of how I would proceed with this kind of analytic perspective.
The reason I'm so hot-blooded about classics is because I was very hot when I found that McConnell was holding in Moscow.
I mean, to me, this was a real indication of capitalist Western success. I mean, like, more encapsulates our way of life than McConnell's.
I mean, my kids swear on it. They, you know, I'm sure their children and grandchildren also swear on McConnell's.
So they opened up New Orleans and Moscow, and this was a joyous experience. However, did you people know that there are many towns and villages in the United States that enter the free home of the brave, where they will not allow involvement?
Or at least, they would not let involvement come back, but about a year ago, on the plastics. They would not allow involvement because they engaged in using sarcoma plastics, and this was seen as an abomination.
That's why I'm wanting to use this as an illustration.
So what I'm going to assume for the sake of our engine, and later on I'll take that back,
is that plastics are as evil as anyone has ever said they are when you go all this up.
Plastics are from all those kinds of products, so they're environmentally unfriendly, they're non-biodegradable,
they're toxic waste, they're, you know, they're real bad stuff.
And I want you to come along with me in a following that goes on.
Assume that you've gone shopping for the local supermarket, they've loaned up your purchases, you've paid for it, and now they ask you that inevitable $64,000 dollar question.
We're going to put ourselves in the place of the person in that position, and we're going to ask what motivations attach to that person, and right now there's only one motivation.
Healing for Alpha, Music for Creatures, Love for the Planet, something like that.
In other words, if you're a nice dog, you'll take the paper.
And if you're as a rotten sample, as you guys are, you'll take the plastic.
But we know what Atkinson said about benevolence.
He said benevolence is not the benevolence that the butcher and the baker can't signal
because the product is rotten, wrongly added selfishness.
Now I'm not putting benevolence against self-interest, I'm saying if this is a serious problem, and it is, then it behooves us to look for energy and motivation.
But I'm not knocking benevolence, I think benevolence gets the moves of the world.
I mean, our churches, our society, this organization is based on benevolence, this is a voluntary organization.
So that's all in the well and good, and I'm in favor of benevolence, I don't want you to say anyone is anti-benevolent.
However, I think it would be nice if we also had some dishes that are better off, but we don't.
Why not? Well, let's go into the economics of it. The economics of it are, as I included in my chapter to this book,
that it costs, say, just for illustration purposes, it costs a penny to produce a paper bag and it costs a penny to produce a plastic bag.
And you go scratching your head, well, it's a penny versus a penny, so you have no economic incentive whatsoever.
Why is this? Why is the crisis then? Remember that? Why is the crisis so lousy?
Why is it such a lousy, no-good, god-imposed? Here's a crucial problem.
The crisis is slowly coming to an end, and it's saying, we can't help you.
I mean, I feel crisis should be that it would cost 20 bucks for the plastic bag, right?
And a penny for a paper bag, and then everyone would be led to sit by invisible hands and shoot a paper bag.
That cost of evidence would solve the problem, but it's not working. Why isn't it working?
I'll give you one guess. The answer is, socials.
Socialism in a coincide-on-the-way area, namely, garbage disposal.
Right now we have socialized garbage disposal.
The government says, in effect, to us, okay, well, how much is it going to cost for us to cart away all your garbage?
How much will it cost, say, a thousand bucks, just to figure it out?
Okay, well, we'll tax you guys a thousand bucks, forget about the fact that we have a budget deficit.
We'll tax the whole thing, and then we'll give you these services for free.
You pay for it, too.
We've got the freeways, only they shouldn't be called taxways. They're not freeways, they're taxways.
Well, garbage is not a free way, it's a tax way.
They collect money from you and then give it to you for free.
So you have all the economic incentives to do anything.
How would it be under the Korean Cross?
How would it be if we privatized solid waste management
or garbage disposal industry?
OK, now, if you think about the mental discernment
for the moment in the supermarket checkout camera,
you now own a couple of hundred acres,
and you're thinking of going into business as a dump site owner.
OK, but we're still saying that plastics is the sky which will be earth.
And you're kind of playing the paper and plastic question.
And you say to yourself, well, plastic is bad news, Charlie.
If I have a lot of plastic in my property,
I'll have to be able to grow anything here.
So I won't have to be able to live here.
It's just an abomination.
Will I have a lot of plastic?
Sure.
If you're effective, I'm able to stay here now.
You want to make a lot of profits.
So you charge what a customer feels.
As close as you figure out, and again, this is just a number for illustration purposes,
that the real true cost of putting one plastic bag in your earth will be $5.
Well, that's what the price of disposing of a plastic bag will end up being.
You can't get more than that because of competition.
The true cost is only $5, and you charge $6, and someone else on the division will go down to $5, $95, $98, go down to $5.
You won't charge us in $5 to use the true costs to you on $5.
So when the codder, that is the trucker who goes from home to the car design to the car design, comes to you,
he says, I'll take all the costs if you want, and a charge of $5 each.
He goes to the homeowner and says, homeowner, sure, I'll take all that cost, any cost if you want it.
Makes no difference to me.
$5 a shot.
And now let's get back to our original middle experiment.
We're back in the supermarket shipping as a counter.
Only now we have a very, very, very different economic analysis.
Remember before it was a penny versus a penny.
Well, it's still the third penny versus penny to buy the bloody things.
Right?
But now the paper is a penny to buy, a penny to dispose of for a grand total of two cents.
Where the plastic is a penny to buy and five bucks to dispose of for a grand total of five or one.
Now, is there anyone here who doubts that the whole concept will go away if that was the dress we were basically at the end of the system market, China, China China?
Of course all will probably go away.
I'm not saying that no one ever would use plastic bags.
I was in the hospital last month for knee surgery, I mean, serious.
And they had a plastic bag, they were dripping stuff into my elbow.
Well, those kind of plastic bags will be used because their value presumably is more than my elbow.
We use it more than one of us than a penny.
It's worth more than one of us than a penny rather than five of us.
Okay, that is the area of the illustration that I want to go into in some depth.
I'm almost out of time, so I want to make just a few concluding remarks.
First of all, I've been assuming that classic is the scourge of the earth.
This is not necessarily true. I only assume it for illustration purposes.
There is this garbologist. A garbologist is the garbage. There's an archaeologist. There's an ancient mining expert.
You know, we're also going to see a mayor of the garbage. We're going, yeah, we're going to go where?
He sees a mayor of the garbage who goes, yeah, starts jewellering and, you know, bringing a kid in there
and who the press starts into it and then analyzes it.
Well, this is the son of William Rafferty, who's analyzed, I don't even want to explore this, I'll say, my son of archaeology, my son of a doctor, but it doesn't work.
But anyway, he's analyzed, now he's a garbage from 50, 60, 70 years ago, and he's as wise as he was in earth.
It doesn't really, it's not common.
But I'm just a doubly economist, so what do I know about these finer points of chemistry?
All I know is the prices, you know, the paracetamol on a cracker, I say prices and prices of cattle is a dream.
Let me very, very briefly in conclusion go over a few other areas.
Air and water pollution, running out of resources in the whole population.
And I'll include them in all the questions in the session.
First on the air and water question, it's the same hot and responsive.
People dump it into the water, people dispose of it, they waste it in the air, they have to pay a price.
The price is zero, so of course they'll do it.
If you were a business person and you were filled with green and you suddenly pull it to your very core, you would still have to realize that if you dispose of your waste in a very expensive way and your competitors just bump it into the air and water, you go broke.
So that's no recipe for solution. The recipe for a solution is to get a price for bumping into the air and water. And the technicalities are present, and that will take a long time to go into, but the principle is clear.
Running out of resources or a station of analysts.
Do you know what happens when this is blacked out?
What happens to the price of candles?
Blacked out as it goes off.
Well, this entices us to use lots of them, and it gives signals to those with student signs.
It gives signals to the reducers to stop producing more of it.
So everything is fine.
But we don't have prices for some resources and for some analysts.
Elements or nostrils, alligators, heart blocks, things like that.
If we did it, as the danger of them became more severe going extinct, the prices then would rise.
This would entice people, induce people, that people would be led by abscesses and this will have to save them all more.
And we don't have that. We don't have prices. And we need part of this market there.
Third, overpopulation. As far as I'm concerned, I'm a big lover of humanity. I'm a humanist.
In the sense of sexist or racist, it can maybe even be anything.
I say the human, but it's against all these issues.
I'm sorry, I'm un-publicized, I've heard some of my best friends being human beings.
And I like human beings.
As far as I can see, the Earth is empty.
Anyone who's ever been on an airplane and looked down, can verify that.
I used to live in Canada and fly across there, now there's an empty country, I mean, there's no one there.
25, 20, well, it's like a little bit of sunshine in the world.
Calculations have shown that if every member of the human race, all six billion of us, were organized into four personal family units, and given 82 hundred square feet to live on, that's the average five-yard backyard and middle-class house, everybody, all six billion of us, could fit into Texas.
If the whole human race did that, a lot of togetherness here, I'm talking serious togetherness,
We fit into a cube one mile by one mile by one mile.
That's where the everything is wrong.
The place is really empty.
We only have starvation because of overpopulation.
In India and Bangladesh, there is starvation,
but it's not due to overpopulation.
It's due to socialized agriculture.
There's starvation in Ethiopia, and Ethiopia is empty.
The reason for that starvation is socialization of agriculture.
There are places that are highly concentrated in populations,
I was once the biggest on this issue, and I went on and on rattling, giving my views, and at the end of what I said is, there is my opponent.
He's going to come up in here and tell you that there are too many people on the earth. And yet, that is a contrary position.
The theory that he cannot believe it, because he has it within his power to reduce the size of the population by one.
The fact that he's saying that the way that people want to argue with me shows that he doesn't believe his own army.
Now about Rambly, Ludwig Mises, and the cadet leaders with Murray Hoppe's law hands.
And finally, the insistent decision of both sides of a contradiction to be against people and to go on.
If you can't be decently, you're in the right frame.
Thanks for your attention.
Thank you very much.
What are you going to do?
I have a question about your chamber classes.
First of all, the phrase in my mind in this chamber class is,
The other thing is, when we say, if you charge $500 to pick it up, this is a series of proposals they've put out on the boards of Rhode Island, the environmental community, the kind that I represent, the statics perspective, the only one who's saying no, this is a lot of good idea, because you're going to find it not dumb, you're going to find people not putting their trash out, putting their trash to that line. So sometimes political considerations and human actions go beyond the certain economic
Yes, I think that's a very good question and a very insightful one. I have several examples. First of all, on the recycling, and we bring our own back, whether paper or plastic, that we keep reusing on the recycling.
Well, the price system is the same as that too.
I mean, the price system is cohesive.
It's not just related to the question of plastic or paper.
It's also covering the question of how much garbage.
And how much wrapping.
See, the wrappings that are now given to us in foods and dough and whatever
are based on a zero price of the soul.
It's perfectly rational for a manufacturer to buy Rappers like they do now, given the prices that they're facing. But these prices aren't as reasonable as a thousand dollars per question.
See, if we had a price system that indicated what the true costs of disposing of Rappers were, Rappers were the paper class or whatever, then we would be led as if by invisible hands to recycle optimally.
In the dark, we don't know how much to recycle. You can't say recycle is the answer, because it has to be optimal recycling.
Should we recycle tissue paper? Should we recycle? Yes, we should recycle 40-year-old old choices and the market politics. Recycle it, but not recycle 40-year-old whatever.
Now, with regard to the Midnight Company stuff and the Rhode Island thing, the charging part of dollars,
I heard Goldishare say, we're going to have the free market,
and the price of bread is going to be raised.
Has anyone seen the contradiction here?
I mean, if we have a free market, Goldishare
has nothing to do with the price of bread.
We have a free market of frisbees and rubber bands
and paper clips.
And which doesn't get involved in the pricing of those things?
Well, we're not going to have anything
to say about what the price of plastics are.
I mean, that's not the free-end process, you know, Rhode Island Senator House or something that says, oh, the price should be, how in bloody places do they know what the price should be?
That's prices, and that's our intervention. What I'm saying is privatize the solid waste management industry, and let the price be generated the way the price of science is generated.
Now, if you would look around at what the problems are, there are no problems with bubble gum, paper plates, rubber bands, because there's no revenue involvement there.
Where ever this problem is, there can be a problem. So I see less of it and I'm worried.
And we've been wrong to think like that.
Honestly, no matter what, we're human beings and some of us are going to be floating on it.
We rape, we murder, we steal. Okay?
We have chance for such activity. And hopefully, if the police were not so busy doing all sorts of other things they shouldn't be doing,
They could concentrate on victims' crimes, how victims' crimes, and we would sock people out of this.
But I think that most people would not burn plastics or don't trespass plastics on other people's property
if we had penalties that really socked them.
I mean, if you went to jail for 20 years for doing this, some people would think twice.
If the true price of a plastic bag is $5, and I'm not simplifying it, I'm not saying it should be.
I'd like to say something about our Federation. We sell bags, and we don't use bags, we work people. We recycle our bags, and this is a natural thing that we do.
We have the right to live with all this in the past, and we've got a lot of companies where everything is much much more on the right to live on the outside of the floor than to check their time preference.
I'm sorry, I can't hear. Could the rest of you please allow for me to be heard?
We have sorts of questions because we, as foreign partners, went out and invited these companies to speak, talking about their companies, people like Jean-Baptiste, people that threw out two things.
What was the money they got? Who was the money? Wirtzoff. Now they have Wirtzoff on their bikes, and they're patented.
So, I think what you're saying is wonderful, but I think that the biggest part of the task I'm able to do, and it's not really too much, because we were not able to reach the threshold of financial discipline.
It was a different group every few years, and we've been able to get out of the middle of nature. And I just want to say that's what we're part of.
Well, I'm one of this group, and other groups, such as the Audubon Society, which have acted in this regard to try to help the environment.
But the analogy that comes to my mind is that you're not a pilot, and the directional symbols are out, and you're trying to land a plane, and you're the arm.
Or, to use my other analogy, you're trying to get around town and there are street signs.
What you're doing is making believe that there are street signs, and eventually you go, if there were street signs.
In order to be less analogous, or not argue, I acknowledge you so much, what you're trying to do is act in such a way as if we had a real price system for environmental concerns, and act in that way.
Sort of like in my case, when I'm using $5 as an example of a price event. So I think that we're on parallel paths. What I'm trying to do is say, in order to accomplish the task of this organization,
It would be very humble if it had some student science that would enable not only you to do some good works, but would focus the subject interests of the whole society in this way.
So I see ourselves in one parallel path, sort of painting in the same direction, but I'm using economic analysis, you're using common sense.
Yes?
I have to dispute one of your facts if I understood you correctly, but all the population in the world today can be compressed in a one mile queue.
I'm pretty good at visualizing things. I don't think the entire population of New Orleans would fit into a one mile queue.
You're not pressing like any.
Well, I'll tell you what. I don't have the citation here, but if you write to me at Holy Cross Economics Department,
Ludwig von Mises, Zip Code 01610, let me repeat that, economic performance, Holy Cross College, Ludwig von Mises, W.O.R., C.E.S., C.E.R., Zip Code 01610.
I mean, it's sort of rough, and when I read the Chinese in the speech, I can't give you all the footnotes. You can appreciate it.
A lot of this, you have to take one of the shots forward and by the book and see the footnotes there.
I just went through the arithmetic. It does work.
It does. Well, there you go. We have a maximum position. We're assuming, I think, something like five foot, eight tall, like, you know, a foot and a half wide and maybe six inches deep or something like that.
Cubic foot.
I'm sorry, I can't hear you.
Regarding the midnight show, how would you count the hours?
I'm sorry, I can't hear you.
Regarding the midnight show, how would you count the hours?
He is worse than the slave quarters, you know, Peter Sardines, or people stuffing their songs into any telephone booth, and I think the man is correct, but, you know, we'll have to work on this. We'll do this together. Yes?
How would you catch these people? And you think that the police are out there doing something that they shouldn't be doing when they're
I think I've been misinterpreted here. I am certainly in favor of the police not being murderers and rapists.
I believe I'm very much in favor of that. Those are the bad guys and the police are the only ones that I think can do it.
But there are many other crimes that I don't really think are crimes, like violating criminal control regulations or so-called economic crimes.
And I think if we have them off the books, we have more police power.
I think that we should use money for policy because we, in general, live in a society that's not the same as it should be.
But I think that one additional thing that the police could do would be to stop people who use plastic, by murdering an entity or bumping it onto other people.
But as I made the point with the other woman that was back there, right now we vision everyone but plastic.
But I don't think it would be that. I think it would be the usual criminal element of one or two percent. If we had a crisis, I insist that if the crisis lasted at full cost, not just buying it, but disposing of it, it's five dollars. It's not that people would be up to the odd bits in class and wondering how they'd get rid of it. They wouldn't buy it in the first place.
The dumping of garbage in the remote places, we actually had a policeman in an airplane spotting the doctors, and they still don't.
Well, in our case, what we have to do is double the penalty and double it again and go ahead and do it again.
Yes?
I'm really sorry, I'm going to do justice to the question, I have to do the same thing.
Did you intercept or list our money throughout the city for taxation towards direct environmental treatment?
No. We're trying to get away from taxation. I only mention this in response to the League on Identity and Customs.
I think the League on Identity and Customs is a really non-important issue.
Because I think that in a free enterprise system, which we now do not have, the Midnight Company question would be a very uncertain question.
I think that right now, under environmental socials, it's a crucial question.
But I think that the answer for it is not mainly the police and raising taxes for law police.
I think that is a very unsophisticated solution, elegant solution is a high system, a series of environmental street signs which will lead people in their own selfish interests not to act in such an inefficient manner in the first place.
You know this expression, don't fight the allocators, drain the swamp.
Well, what I'm advocating here is not that we fight big math numbers one by one and, you know, do, we're going to grant you a totally new jail view, we're going to get your facts fighting out here,
because the way to get them is to drain the swamp, if I can use this non-environmental analogy.
And the way to drain the swamp here is by having a process in which leads most people to act in a way that is cooperative one way or another. Yes?
I'm not a big fan of tax incentives or taxes. I think that is a government solution and I think the government is all the same up to Garrison. The government is the source of the problem. It's not pure.
Now, having gone into the air pollution situation in greater depth, in the depth that I've had in the class versus paper, I really made the following even more awesome.
Let me just make some of them because it's pertinent to your question.
In the 1830s, when there were what we would now call environmental cases, in those days they were called nuisance cases,
So what happened was some woman would hang out for washing on a back line, and a factory would bell short so I could never want to regret, and she had the liberty on her, and she'd go to court asking for an injunction, not just for any old man, but she'd ask her court order to get that factory to stop it, and she'd get it. She'd get it.
And this meant that factory owners had an incentive to develop smoke prevention devices, to use research and development to solve this problem, to use high-grade anthracite coal instead of low-grade sulfur coal, to act responsibly because the courts in the 1830s were upholding property rights and we had property rights.
Or a forum would go to court and say this big bad railroad got sparks on my haystacks
And the same thing, the courts would grant each other the belief
And the economy was moving toward a rational response to the environmental problem
And whatever, in the 1840s and the 1850s, and please don't ask me for all the citations, they're interference
Take my word just for a moment
In the 1850s a new legal policy started to purvey the society
No longer are private property rights important. The next time a little old lady or a farmer came in, the court would sneer at her and say, how are you stealing property rights? You're allowing me selfish individualistic property rights. It's something more important than your miserable property rights.
What's that? That's public interest. And drumrolls, ah, public interest. And what does the public interest consist of? The public interest consists of economic growth. And how are we going to get economic growth?
Why have you manufactured? So who the hell is your carpentry? Who will let these guys run the roughshod of you? They'll let them use the air and the water and your carpentry as free disposal sinks.
Or do they have an incentive to use anthracite policies? No longer did they have an incentive to engage in smoke prevention devices.
No longer do they have any incentive to consider the marketer as other people. Why should they? If they did, they'd go broke, because other people wouldn't.
One thing that emanated from this career was that they didn't build high song stacks. The old song stacks used to be 10 feet high. Now they're 300 feet high. You know why?
We're sweeping the problem of the market into the clouds.
So, of course, this particular factory is bothering this woman.
This factory is bothering that woman and that factory is bothering this woman.
This is no solution. This is a government solution.
What I'm saying is we've got to turn back the clock.
I need to use that instruction, but I can't think of that one.
Get back to the 1830s.
You see what we're doing is we're missing 160 years of Christian development
Development that our capitalists would have been working on to solve the problem.
That's why the problem is so hard.
Do you know that stuff in forensic medicine?
You know, A stabs B.
And he gets the teeniest speck of blood and he washes his clothes.
They can still, months later, with forensic technology, find out who the blood was from
and get the murder.
At least they can do it with a technical story, isn't it?
I think that they already did.
But here's forensic environmentalism.
and Capitalism.
It's nowhere.
If I just had a gust on me, nobody knows where that idea came from.
And yet, if we had been working 150 years on this, instead of trying to get someone up
to the moon to talk about it in a wasted sense, if we had 160 years of research and development
in this whole particle forensics, there'd be nobody free to invariably come.
I mean, this is serious classic, some guy with three bags full of plastic, this is companies.
The reason we have the problems we have is we took a wrong turn in the 1830s.
And the solution to that is, I think, property rights.
And three processes, and they're only from property rights and not from government tax solutions and not from government solutions.
Government has a role to play.
Mind you, the government's on the fire.
If the state's in the fireplace, that's great.
If the fire gets added to the living room, you have problems.
Well, what the government has to do
is protect property rights, protect persons,
have the judiciary, the courts, all these police,
and that's about it.
That's about it more than that.
Maybe something like social welfare program or something.
But as far as the economy, very little else.
Instead, we recognize we're doing all sorts of things,
In the 1840s, and up until about 15 years ago, entrepreneurs were given carte blanche to be air and water on each other's lines.
And all of a sudden, we wake up 150 years ago, and we say, how do we get out?
You need a gas mess, and that's what we're going to do.
We're going to get out of here.
We wake up one hundred and fifty U.S. families. How will it count? If you need an answer, that's the wrong answer.
If you assume it's game 30, it must be a full degree and tackle it. Right? Yes. We need more entrepreneurship. Nonsense.