WEBVTT

NOTE Environmentalism

1
00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.000
Okay, welcome to the fifth session of the ten session Steve Berger seminar with Walter Block or was it the other way around, something like that.

2
00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:22.000
As usual, I'd like to start with a moment of silence.

3
00:00:22.000 --> 00:00:27.480
Could I ask Steve to stand up for a second and embarrass him and everyone let him have

4
00:00:27.480 --> 00:00:28.480
a round of applause for...

5
00:00:29.480 --> 00:00:30.480
Hopefully, one day we'll be taking private roads to hear your seminars.

6
00:00:30.480 --> 00:00:49.640
The toll will be 50 bucks to be on the road because there'll be such demand for...

7
00:00:49.640 --> 00:00:51.080
That'll be great.

8
00:00:51.080 --> 00:00:57.040
And thanks for financing this week, it's just been a pleasure.

9
00:00:57.040 --> 00:01:02.360
Before I start on today's subject of environmentalism, I wanted to do a little housekeeping details

10
00:01:02.360 --> 00:01:08.080
from questions that have arisen from past sessions as is our practice.

11
00:01:08.080 --> 00:01:12.880
And one of the points I wanted to bring up is this whole business of default position.

12
00:01:12.880 --> 00:01:13.880
What's a default position?

13
00:01:13.880 --> 00:01:19.160
The default position is you have to buy your way out or you have to buy your way in.

14
00:01:19.160 --> 00:01:23.160
Who starts? Who is it incumbent upon what to do?

15
00:01:23.160 --> 00:01:27.160
Boy, that sounds incoherent, but let me try to explain.

16
00:01:27.160 --> 00:01:36.160
For example, Dan McCarthy raised the question of when Ben stole his hat,

17
00:01:36.160 --> 00:01:38.160
Ben, cut it out.

18
00:01:38.160 --> 00:01:46.160
When Ben stole his hat and I want to now go and get the hat from Ben and give it back to Dan,

19
00:01:46.160 --> 00:01:59.160
Do I have to get Dan's permission, or in other words, is the assumption that anyone can go and get Ben the thief and get the ill-gotten game hat from him, or do you have to get permission?

20
00:01:59.160 --> 00:02:03.160
In other words, where's the default position? Who has to do what first?

21
00:02:03.160 --> 00:02:10.160
Another example, Stephan Kinsella asks, well, what about spam?

22
00:02:10.160 --> 00:02:18.160
Do the spammers have to get your permission to spam you? Or do you have to tell them not to? Which way does it go?

23
00:02:18.160 --> 00:02:27.160
And his answer is, forget about spam, it's too highfalutin, electronic. Just take the neighborhood porch. Who can come to your porch?

24
00:02:27.160 --> 00:02:35.160
And his answer is, well, if the local Girl Scout cookie sale is coming to your porch, fine.

25
00:02:35.160 --> 00:02:38.160
Because that's sort of the implicit assumption of a neighborhood.

26
00:02:38.160 --> 00:02:48.160
On the other hand, when you get these guys that are trying to sell you encyclopedias, they have to get your permission to come there before they go on your porch, which makes some sort of sense.

27
00:02:48.160 --> 00:03:03.160
And extrapolating from this, I would say that we don't have to get Dan's permission to go get Ben and get the head out of him, because the assumption is that the rightful owner wants his property back.

28
00:03:03.160 --> 00:03:14.160
If he wants his property back, if he doesn't, if he's a pacifist, he has to announce that I'm a pacifist and leave Ben alone, I'm giving him a gift of the hat that he stole from me, it's not really theft.

29
00:03:14.160 --> 00:03:28.160
Similarly, Carianne Citrin asks with regard to the bagel, does the inside person or the bagel homesteader, does he have to notify people that there's a bagel in there or a hole in the bagel?

30
00:03:28.160 --> 00:03:34.560
Remember that example? Let me see if I can dig it out of here.

31
00:03:34.560 --> 00:03:40.960
Here is somebody who doesn't homestead X, but rather he homesteads Y.

32
00:03:40.960 --> 00:03:50.260
Does he have to notify people out here in Z that, hey, you know, you might think that I'm homesteading X and Y, but I'm not really.

33
00:03:50.260 --> 00:03:55.860
And I've been thinking about this and it seems to me that the proper default position is that he has to.

34
00:03:55.860 --> 00:04:02.860
It's just that if X is 20 square miles, you'd think everyone would know, but if they don't know, then you have to notify them.

35
00:04:02.860 --> 00:04:15.860
And again, the reason I came up with this bagel business or this target, whatever, is because of a subject that we'll be getting into tomorrow, namely abortion and positive obligations.

36
00:04:15.860 --> 00:04:21.360
And do you have an obligation to notify people that you're not feeding your kid?

37
00:04:21.360 --> 00:04:25.240
And it seems to me that default position is you most certainly do.

38
00:04:25.240 --> 00:04:28.920
And I get this from common law where you have to take the baby

39
00:04:28.920 --> 00:04:32.560
and put it on the church steps or in the hospital and notify someone.

40
00:04:32.560 --> 00:04:34.600
So the default position is that way.

41
00:04:34.600 --> 00:04:40.160
But it's a very interesting question for libertarians where the default position lies.

42
00:04:40.160 --> 00:04:46.320
Another one on this is sometimes I'm accused of being an information socialist

43
00:04:46.320 --> 00:04:50.640
because my position on murder park, remember murder park where you're allowed to kill everyone

44
00:04:50.640 --> 00:04:52.140
But it's all voluntary.

45
00:04:52.140 --> 00:04:55.140
Well, do you have to notify people that it's murder park?

46
00:04:55.140 --> 00:05:01.140
Suppose you just say, look, you know, come on in, there are rides, you know, and by the way...

47
00:05:01.140 --> 00:05:06.940
Or I invite you to my house and then I say, well, I don't like the cut of your jib and I shoot you.

48
00:05:06.940 --> 00:05:11.140
And I say, well, it's my private property, I don't have to tell you squat.

49
00:05:11.140 --> 00:05:15.740
Well, it seems to me that the default position is that if I want to invite you to my house

50
00:05:15.740 --> 00:05:19.240
and I have the right to kill you in my house, I have to notify you there

51
00:05:19.240 --> 00:05:25.240
Because the presumption is, you know, non-aggression, so the non-aggression is the default position.

52
00:05:25.240 --> 00:05:36.040
But as I say, it's a very interesting question and I want to thank Carrie Anne and Dan for bugging the hell out of me on these questions, pushing me, and I appreciate that.

53
00:05:36.040 --> 00:05:50.040
Okay, with that housekeeping detail out of the way, I launch myself now into the subject for today, which is the issue of environmentalism.

54
00:05:50.040 --> 00:05:57.040
What's going on here? What's going on here is that we face environmental crises.

55
00:05:57.040 --> 00:06:04.040
We face lots of crises, war, disease, starvation, pestilence, drugs, and environmentalism.

56
00:06:04.040 --> 00:06:08.740
I mean, you know, there are environmental dangers and it behooves us to take them seriously

57
00:06:08.740 --> 00:06:14.440
because, you know, we've only got one home, the planet, and if we screw it up, where do we go?

58
00:06:14.440 --> 00:06:16.940
It's the most hospitable place around.

59
00:06:16.940 --> 00:06:23.140
And I think the environmentalists have a point that we should at least be concerned about this.

60
00:06:23.140 --> 00:06:31.140
At risk is the air, the ozone, greenhouse, desertification, species extinction, oil spills, hazardous waste.

61
00:06:31.140 --> 00:06:33.940
The list goes on and on.

62
00:06:33.940 --> 00:06:36.180
Let me personalize this by

63
00:06:36.180 --> 00:06:39.380
equating it with a cartoon I once saw, I think it was in The New Yorker

64
00:06:39.380 --> 00:06:43.300
and there was a mother and a daughter and the daughter was oh, eight, ten years old

65
00:06:43.300 --> 00:06:46.780
and they were sitting in an outdoor restaurant and you'd think the mother

66
00:06:46.780 --> 00:06:51.180
would say to the daughter something like hurry up dear, eat your soup before it gets cold

67
00:06:51.180 --> 00:06:55.460
instead what she said is hurry up dear, eat your soup before it gets

68
00:06:55.460 --> 00:06:57.400
dirty

69
00:06:57.400 --> 00:06:59.500
because the air is so

70
00:06:59.500 --> 00:07:00.780
is so messed up

71
00:07:00.780 --> 00:07:06.280
And it's just sort of like one little vignette of what the situation is like.

72
00:07:06.280 --> 00:07:11.880
Given environmental problems, an environmental movement has arisen to address them.

73
00:07:11.880 --> 00:07:16.280
That's the good news. The bad news is that it consists mainly of people like

74
00:07:16.280 --> 00:07:23.880
Lester Bram, David Suzuki, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, Tom Hayden, Meryl Streep and John Denver,

75
00:07:23.880 --> 00:07:26.280
who are experts in environmentalism.

76
00:07:26.280 --> 00:07:36.280
And what they do is see environmental problems as a stick with which to beat up on capitalism and free enterprise.

77
00:07:36.280 --> 00:07:47.080
For them, the market is the cause of the problem, the solution is more government and an eradication of the market.

78
00:07:47.080 --> 00:07:52.880
My claim in contrast is the very opposite, that the reason we have environmental problems

79
00:07:52.880 --> 00:07:57.040
is because either we don't have private property rights or we have too much

80
00:07:57.040 --> 00:08:01.920
government intervention or we have environmental socialism or what have you.

81
00:08:01.920 --> 00:08:05.440
Now in my notes here, I now have a

82
00:08:05.440 --> 00:08:08.440
thing from On Liberty by John Stuart Mill

83
00:08:08.440 --> 00:08:11.920
where he says, you know, the idea is, you know, you're supposed to hear both sides.

84
00:08:11.920 --> 00:08:15.680
And the reason I have this here in my notes is that when I give this speech to

85
00:08:15.680 --> 00:08:20.080
non-libertarian audiences, as soon as I say that the problem of

86
00:08:20.080 --> 00:08:36.080
Some of environmentalism is government and the solution is the market, booing and hissing and they won't shut up and so I have to read them John Stuart Mill to get them to shut up, but here I think I'll skip John Stuart Mill, I don't think I'll have to do that.

87
00:08:36.080 --> 00:08:51.080
There are some signs that the left-wing environmental groups are seeing some benefits of the market.

88
00:08:51.080 --> 00:08:57.080
For example, Nature Conservancy, Ducks Unlimited, Audubon Society, Sierra Club.

89
00:08:57.080 --> 00:09:04.080
There was a case, the Audubon Society happened to own the Rainy National Forest Preserve in Louisiana.

90
00:09:04.080 --> 00:09:15.080
They bought it vast acreage, many square miles. They bought it in order to keep the ducks and our brothers of field and stream safe.

91
00:09:15.080 --> 00:09:19.080
And then guess what happened? They discovered natural gas right there.

92
00:09:19.080 --> 00:09:26.080
Now, you know what the Audubon Society would say when natural gas or oil is discovered in parkland?

93
00:09:26.080 --> 00:09:30.080
Don't use it, it's the invention of the devil or something.

94
00:09:30.080 --> 00:09:35.880
But what they did is they reasoned as follows. They said, look, if we follow our usual pattern,

95
00:09:36.560 --> 00:09:43.500
you know, we just won't use the gas and in order to get more land or save more ducks or whatever it is, we'll have to

96
00:09:44.300 --> 00:09:46.140
get contributions.

97
00:09:46.140 --> 00:09:51.460
But wiser heads prevailed within the Audubon Society and they said, look, if we develop it,

98
00:09:51.460 --> 00:09:55.340
we'll make a ton of money and then we can buy tons of nature preserves and

99
00:09:56.000 --> 00:09:59.420
we can spread our good work. And that's what they did.

100
00:10:00.080 --> 00:10:09.080
So, here you have an inkling that even the Audubon Society is receptive to market principles.

101
00:10:09.080 --> 00:10:15.080
Unfortunately, they don't extrapolate from this. They don't say that this applies to other people.

102
00:10:15.080 --> 00:10:20.080
They still say that other people should not be allowed to develop anything. Only they should be.

103
00:10:20.080 --> 00:10:38.080
The insight that markets can help is they're aware of it but they don't extrapolate it, they don't take it to their bosom, they don't use it, they just use it in a very narrow limited way.

104
00:10:38.080 --> 00:10:53.080
Okay, before I get into the environmental problems and libertarian solutions, let me lay out who the ballplayers are, so you can tell who's who and what's what.

105
00:10:53.080 --> 00:11:17.080
Well, the way I see it, there are five different groups and what I'm going to do is to divide them into left and right and under left I'll put the radical and the moderate and under right I'll put the moderate and the radical.

106
00:11:17.080 --> 00:11:32.080
The radical left are the deep ecology people for whom man is a virus and the sooner we get rid of man and save ducks and plants, the better off the ducks will all be, I guess.

107
00:11:32.080 --> 00:11:44.080
The moderate environmentalists, left-wing ones are, you know, think Ted Kennedy or think all the mainstream environmental groups that I just mentioned,

108
00:11:44.080 --> 00:11:48.080
Nature Conservancy, Sierra Club, Audubon, Ducks Unlimited, groups like that.

109
00:11:48.080 --> 00:11:56.080
They're the ones that want to have CAFE standards, make sure that cars get so many miles per gallon,

110
00:11:56.080 --> 00:12:10.080
They favor the EPA, the Clean Air Act, CITES, conventional trade of endangered species should be stopped, things like that.

111
00:12:10.080 --> 00:12:23.080
Moving on to the moderate right, you get the Chicago types, PERC, Political Economic Research Center located in Nevada, which pretty good groups.

112
00:12:23.080 --> 00:12:29.080
They favor things like tradable emissions rights, which I'll get into in a little bit.

113
00:12:29.080 --> 00:12:34.080
The problem with them, as the problem with all Chicagoans, is that they see market failure.

114
00:12:34.080 --> 00:12:38.080
I don't see any market failure, I just see government failure.

115
00:12:38.080 --> 00:12:43.080
And you might even include Pigou and people like that who say that, you know,

116
00:12:43.080 --> 00:12:47.080
pollution is an external diseconomy and therefore we have to tax it

117
00:12:47.080 --> 00:12:50.080
and have to subsidize external economies, things like that.

118
00:12:50.080 --> 00:13:05.080
So that's the Chicago School. The radical right, I guess, would be us guys or me guys or whoever, namely the libertarians who see no market failure, who see all of this as government failure and the solution as the market.

119
00:13:05.080 --> 00:13:19.080
And I just want to stick in Ayn Rand over here. I don't know where to put her. I can't put her in the left, although in this case maybe I could or should, because she has this thing about kissing smokestacks.

120
00:13:19.080 --> 00:13:28.080
Kissing smokestacks? It's not a sexual perversion, but she's always, you know, it's sort of in reaction against these people.

121
00:13:28.080 --> 00:13:33.080
She's saying things like, you know, you people who are against smokestacks, you ought to kiss the smokestacks

122
00:13:33.080 --> 00:13:37.080
because they're great, they mean civilization and this and that and the other.

123
00:13:37.080 --> 00:13:45.080
And then her thing in Atlas Shrug where the tip of this lit cigarette is sort of man's mind or something like that

124
00:13:45.080 --> 00:13:56.080
If you don't smoke you're evil. It's sort of a little weird and idiosyncratic, but I figured I'd stick her in there because she's always of interest.

125
00:13:56.080 --> 00:14:06.080
The kindergarten teachers, when my daughter was in the third grade she'd come home from school and say,

126
00:14:06.080 --> 00:14:11.080
Daddy, Daddy, you're environmentally incorrect because I wouldn't recycle or something.

127
00:14:11.080 --> 00:14:20.080
And I was ready to give it to her, but my wife told me to shut up, leave her alone, because if I convinced her of anything, all of her school chums will hate her.

128
00:14:20.080 --> 00:14:27.080
So instead I started writing about this stuff, you know, because I couldn't tell my daughter because my wife forbade it.

129
00:14:27.080 --> 00:14:37.080
But her and her kindergarten or third grade teachers, they're innocents, unsophisticated people, they naturally gravitate toward the moderate left.

130
00:14:37.080 --> 00:14:43.680
Left, they're not extreme left or radical, but now the radical tree people, you know,

131
00:14:43.680 --> 00:14:48.800
the tree huggers and the tree lovers, they're the ones that say not only that trees have rights,

132
00:14:48.800 --> 00:14:54.240
but that they have as much rights as anyone else, as us, and what's this cutting down of trees?

133
00:14:54.240 --> 00:15:00.400
How do you like to be cut down? You know, so, and they have cartoons, you know, when somebody's

134
00:15:00.400 --> 00:15:05.200
cutting down a tree, the tree is going eek, and little kids are watching this stuff, and it's just

135
00:15:05.200 --> 00:15:09.200
It's just horrible.

136
00:15:09.200 --> 00:15:19.200
Let me give you a few quotes from the radical left group to sort of set the deck here.

137
00:15:19.200 --> 00:15:24.200
Here's someone who's condemning pulp mill operators.

138
00:15:24.200 --> 00:15:27.200
They would rather rate the environment and make a lot of money for themselves

139
00:15:27.200 --> 00:15:31.200
than not rate the environment, clean up and later on stay competitive.

140
00:15:31.200 --> 00:15:41.200
These guys are here to make a lot of profit and they're making a lot of profit at the cost of our environment, a typical radical left kind of view.

141
00:15:41.200 --> 00:15:44.200
E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful,

142
00:15:44.200 --> 00:15:54.200
The world was much better in medieval times when the movement of populations except in periods of disaster was confined to persons who had a very special reason to move, such as the Irish saints.

143
00:15:54.200 --> 00:15:56.200
So no one should be able to travel anywhere.

144
00:15:56.200 --> 00:16:05.480
They say as they travel all around the world to environmental conferences in jet planes and using fuel and stuff,

145
00:16:05.480 --> 00:16:10.480
the earth first has as their motto back to the Pleistocene.

146
00:16:10.480 --> 00:16:16.560
I'm a little weak on history, but I don't think there are any people alive then.

147
00:16:16.560 --> 00:16:22.000
Some of these radical environmentalists are very specific about the man-made things that people should do without.

148
00:16:52.000 --> 00:17:00.120
Here's another quote, the danger lies not in the odd maverick polluting factory, industry or technology, but in industrialization itself.

149
00:17:00.120 --> 00:17:04.280
So they're just against industry, which means we sort of go back to the caves.

150
00:17:04.280 --> 00:17:12.880
Here's Murray Bookchin, the plundering of the human spirit by the marketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.

151
00:17:12.880 --> 00:17:21.400
Free markets, Schumacher says, take the sacredness out of life because there can be nothing sacred in anything that has a price.

152
00:17:21.400 --> 00:17:36.480
Barry Commoner writes that the origin of the environmental crisis can be traced back to the capitalist precept that the choice of production technology is to be governed solely by private interest and profit maximization.

153
00:17:36.480 --> 00:17:49.440
Here's a national park research biologist who says that until such time as homo sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.

154
00:17:49.440 --> 00:17:52.640
That's pretty harsh stuff, you know.

155
00:17:52.640 --> 00:17:56.940
Okay, I think you get the idea, these people are maniacs.

156
00:17:56.940 --> 00:18:02.340
And we've got to, I don't know, somehow solve these problems,

157
00:18:02.340 --> 00:18:08.340
less maniacalism runs rampant and takes over even more than it is.

158
00:18:08.340 --> 00:18:12.140
So what I'm now going to do is read off a list of problems.

159
00:18:12.140 --> 00:18:14.840
I don't know that I'll get to them all in the hour and a half allotted me,

160
00:18:14.840 --> 00:18:16.940
but I'll make a good shot at it.

161
00:18:16.940 --> 00:18:28.940
and see if we can't apply free enterprise kinds of analysis to these problems to show why they come about and how they can be solved.

162
00:18:28.940 --> 00:18:36.740
And what I've got on my list, and if I've left anything out, please, you know, raise something and we can talk about it in the question period.

163
00:18:36.740 --> 00:18:46.440
I've got air pollution, hazardous waste, running out of resources, species extinction, oil spills, greenhouse effect, ozone layer,

164
00:18:46.440 --> 00:18:49.020
Overpopulation and Environmental Racism.

165
00:18:50.880 --> 00:18:53.940
So let's start with air pollution.

166
00:18:56.500 --> 00:19:00.100
Arthur Pagu, who is a very famous economist of,

167
00:19:00.100 --> 00:19:04.420
I don't know, 80 years ago, 100 years ago almost,

168
00:19:04.420 --> 00:19:07.160
wrote in his book, Wealth and Welfare, in 1912,

169
00:19:07.160 --> 00:19:11.220
smoke in large towns, which inflicts a heavy loss

170
00:19:11.220 --> 00:19:13.840
on the community, comes about because there is no way

171
00:19:13.840 --> 00:19:16.280
to force private polluters to bear the social cost

172
00:19:16.280 --> 00:19:29.280
So this is the classic market failure doctrine that there's no way that private enterprise can stop smoke pollution which is an external diseconomy and only the government can get in there.

173
00:19:29.280 --> 00:19:34.280
Samuelson talks about the divergence of social and private costs.

174
00:19:34.280 --> 00:19:49.280
Oscar Wang and Fred Taylor, socialists say that a feature which distinguishes a socialist economy from one based on private enterprise is the comprehensiveness of the items entering into the socialist price system.

175
00:19:49.280 --> 00:20:01.280
Tom DiLorenzo does a great job in debunking this myth. He says, well look, if the socialists are so great, then the environment in the Soviet Union order have been wonderful in Eastern Europe.

176
00:20:01.280 --> 00:20:04.740
in Europe and he finds that it's way worse than ours.

177
00:20:04.740 --> 00:20:08.340
Rivers getting on fire and pollution

178
00:20:08.340 --> 00:20:12.160
that makes our pollution look very small.

179
00:20:14.660 --> 00:20:19.660
The idea here is that the average manufacturer pays wages

180
00:20:20.080 --> 00:20:22.620
for labor, rent for buildings, interest on loans.

181
00:20:22.620 --> 00:20:24.820
He pays for insurance, he pays for raw materials,

182
00:20:24.820 --> 00:20:29.820
he pays for everything else, except he doesn't pay

183
00:20:29.820 --> 00:20:38.220
He doesn't pay for disposal of the waste products that his process involves.

184
00:20:38.220 --> 00:20:45.320
So, for example, we have a supply and demand curve, and here is the quantity of, I don't know, let's say we're making these podiums again,

185
00:20:45.320 --> 00:20:54.620
and here is the price of the podiums, and there's the supply and demand curve, and in the supply curve are all the private costs.

186
00:20:54.620 --> 00:21:02.620
And this is the actual amount that is produced.

187
00:21:02.620 --> 00:21:09.320
But, Kagoo and the mainstream economists say that there are other costs.

188
00:21:09.320 --> 00:21:14.620
The costs that are imposed on third parties in the form of pollution.

189
00:21:14.620 --> 00:21:19.520
And when we add those costs, the supply curve increases.

190
00:21:19.520 --> 00:21:23.420
And therefore, where we should be is over here.

191
00:21:23.420 --> 00:21:31.320
In other words, the optimal amount of production of these things would be the amount such that all the costs were taken into account.

192
00:21:31.320 --> 00:21:39.820
But due to market failure, they can't or won't or something take into account all these costs and therefore we have to help them.

193
00:21:39.820 --> 00:21:49.520
Then we have to tax these things and take the money to use to prevent smoke pollution or something like that.

194
00:21:49.520 --> 00:21:57.200
That would be the way that the moderate right views this issue.

195
00:21:57.200 --> 00:21:59.040
Let me tell you a little story.

196
00:21:59.040 --> 00:22:03.080
Once upon a time, long, long ago, in a faraway land,

197
00:22:03.080 --> 00:22:06.560
well actually it wasn't that far away, it was the United States.

198
00:22:06.560 --> 00:22:11.120
In the 1830s, and what I am now about to tell you,

199
00:22:11.120 --> 00:22:17.120
I get from Murray Rothbard and a guy named Horowitz of Harvard, a historian.

200
00:22:17.120 --> 00:22:24.840
In the 1830s, there was a spate of nuisance cases, that they called it nuisance cases then, we would now call them environmental cases.

201
00:22:24.840 --> 00:22:32.280
And typically what would happen would be a little old lady would hang out her washing on the clothesline,

202
00:22:32.280 --> 00:22:40.840
and she put it out there wet and clean, because she just washed it, and she came back three hours later and it was dry and dirty.

203
00:22:40.840 --> 00:23:01.840
And she'd go to the court and she'd say, that there manufacturing firm put its smoke over to my laundry and they got my laundry dirty and I want two things, one I want damages and two I want an injunction, injunction means a ruling from the court saying, you know, cut it out or we'll put you in jail or something.

204
00:23:01.840 --> 00:23:10.840
Or you got a case where a farmer, you know, had haystacks and a railroad choo-choo train came by with sparks all over the place and caught his haystacks on fire.

205
00:23:10.840 --> 00:23:20.840
And similarly, the farmer would go to court and ask for, the plaintiff would ask for damages and an injunction.

206
00:23:20.840 --> 00:23:26.840
And in the 1830s, 40s and 50s, pretty much these things were granted.

207
00:23:26.840 --> 00:23:33.840
Not always, you had to prove it, but the law was pretty much in favor of private property rights

208
00:23:33.840 --> 00:23:39.840
because the interpretation was that the soot or the sparks were trespassing.

209
00:23:39.840 --> 00:23:45.840
And just as a person can't trespass on someone else's property, neither can you send your crap through the air

210
00:23:45.840 --> 00:23:49.840
and then onto their property and into their lungs and on their laundry.

211
00:23:49.840 --> 00:23:56.840
And things were sort of hunky-dory because the law was operating as it should.

212
00:23:56.840 --> 00:24:02.840
Now, the manufacturer had to take into account the costs imposed on other people.

213
00:24:02.840 --> 00:24:06.840
And you had research and development in smoke prevention devices.

214
00:24:06.840 --> 00:24:10.840
And you had early attempts to have scrubbers.

215
00:24:10.840 --> 00:24:18.840
And then you had people trying to buy up enough land so that their stuff would only stay in a certain area and wouldn't go all over the place.

216
00:24:18.840 --> 00:24:22.840
He even had the beginnings of environmental forensics.

217
00:24:22.840 --> 00:24:24.840
Now, we all know what forensics is.

218
00:24:24.840 --> 00:24:27.840
What's that show, that cop show where they're always catching people?

219
00:24:27.840 --> 00:24:29.840
Biology, chemists?

220
00:24:29.840 --> 00:24:31.840
CSI.

221
00:24:31.840 --> 00:24:35.840
You know, they go into the laboratory and they measure this and they measure that.

222
00:24:35.840 --> 00:24:41.840
Well, you see, the reason we have forensics for blood and semen and hair particles

223
00:24:41.840 --> 00:24:46.840
and stuff under your nails is because we have laws against murder and rape.

224
00:24:46.840 --> 00:24:52.840
If we didn't have laws against murder and rape, if murder and rape was okay, you wouldn't need CSI to have forensics,

225
00:24:52.840 --> 00:24:59.840
because forensics is the study of stuff, the blood and semen and whatever, to find out who done it.

226
00:24:59.840 --> 00:25:05.840
Well, environmental forensics is an analogue of ordinary biological medical forensics,

227
00:25:05.840 --> 00:25:09.840
and what it consists of is saying, aha, here's a dust particle, where did it come from?

228
00:25:09.840 --> 00:25:17.840
Let's go get the guy who sent it over here and, you know, put him in jail or get money out of him or make him stop.

229
00:25:17.840 --> 00:25:29.840
Okay, so there was no problem. There is no market failure as long as the government or whoever it is, the forces of law and order, uphold private property rights, namely stop trespass.

230
00:25:29.840 --> 00:25:45.840
Okay, then what happened is you got the progressive period, and in the progressive period, 1890, the history of the thing was such that who was the number one power in the world?

231
00:25:45.840 --> 00:25:54.840
Great Britain, not the U.S. The U.S. wanted to be the great power, and how do you become a great international power?

232
00:25:54.840 --> 00:25:59.840
You industrialize, you have manufacturing, you have steel and iron and stuff like that.

233
00:25:59.840 --> 00:26:06.840
So in the 1870s and 1880s when the little old lady and the farmer and the other environmental plaintiffs came to court,

234
00:26:06.840 --> 00:26:08.840
they got a very different message.

235
00:26:08.840 --> 00:26:15.840
The court would say, sure they violated your private property rights, your stinking, lousy, selfish private property rights.

236
00:26:15.840 --> 00:26:20.840
There's something more important than private property rights, and that's the public good.

237
00:26:20.840 --> 00:26:22.840
And then you get a little drum roll, ta-da, public good.

238
00:26:22.840 --> 00:26:24.840
And what does the public good consist of?

239
00:26:24.840 --> 00:26:28.840
The public good consists of U.S. being the number one imperialist power.

240
00:26:28.840 --> 00:26:31.840
And we're only number two and we're trying harder.

241
00:26:31.840 --> 00:26:33.840
You know, they were really not Hertz.

242
00:26:33.840 --> 00:26:34.840
What's the other one?

243
00:26:34.840 --> 00:26:35.840
Avis.

244
00:26:35.840 --> 00:26:37.840
They were really Avisians, I guess.

245
00:26:37.840 --> 00:26:44.840
And so they said to the little old lady and to the farmer and other environmental planners,

246
00:26:44.840 --> 00:26:45.840
you know, forget it.

247
00:26:45.840 --> 00:26:47.840
We're not going to do this.

248
00:26:47.840 --> 00:26:58.840
And Murray Rothbard, one of the best things I think he's done, and the best thing in environmental economics, is a thing called air pollution, which was in the Cato Institute Journal.

249
00:26:58.840 --> 00:27:06.840
And then I copied it in my book on environmental economics and environmental reconciliation.

250
00:27:06.840 --> 00:27:17.840
He quotes somebody from Georgia in 1910 saying that the use of the air for the purposes of, it's the Athens Empire laundry case.

251
00:27:17.840 --> 00:27:22.840
And he says, the use of the air for pollutants is not actionable.

252
00:27:22.840 --> 00:27:31.840
Not actionable? Well, then of course you have market failure. Well, not market failure, but you have government failure.

253
00:27:31.840 --> 00:28:01.840
Look, suppose you're an environmental businessman, you're filled with the, you know, love for the planet and in the 1830s and 1840s you engage in smoke prevention devices and research and development and you use, what is it, the clean burning anthracite coal, even though it's more expensive than dirty burning sulfur coal because you have care for the environment and you don't want to be sued by people,

254
00:28:01.840 --> 00:28:05.840
You can make money, sure, you can make money, you can profit.

255
00:28:05.840 --> 00:28:09.840
Now, move forward to 1895, what happens to the Green Businessmen

256
00:28:09.840 --> 00:28:13.840
where the court will allow all of your competitors to pollute

257
00:28:13.840 --> 00:28:17.840
until the cows come home and they use the dirty burning, cheap sulfur coal,

258
00:28:17.840 --> 00:28:21.840
but you are using the more expensive, cleaner burning anthracite coal, you go broke.

259
00:28:21.840 --> 00:28:25.840
So Adam Smith's invisible hand

260
00:28:25.840 --> 00:28:29.840
doesn't work. Remember, Adam Smith's invisible hand is that

261
00:28:29.840 --> 00:28:37.840
You make profit and do well by serving the public good, and the public good here consists of not polluting other people.

262
00:28:37.840 --> 00:28:42.840
So the whole thing is perverse, but it's not perverse because of anything intrinsic to the market.

263
00:28:42.840 --> 00:28:50.840
It's because the government is not upholding the law of property rights and stopping pollution.

264
00:28:50.840 --> 00:28:57.840
So the answer is, go back to the 1830s, turn back the clock.

265
00:28:57.840 --> 00:29:03.840
I mean, it sounds horrible, it's not modern, but we had it right in the 1830s and the 1840s

266
00:29:03.840 --> 00:29:06.840
and have environmental suits like we did then.

267
00:29:06.840 --> 00:29:15.840
Now, the obvious objection is, well, you know, you really can't sue every car driver individually

268
00:29:15.840 --> 00:29:22.840
because, you know, it would be just chaos and to get to what Coase would say, and I'll talk about him this afternoon,

269
00:29:22.840 --> 00:29:30.840
The transactions costs of suing each and every individual car driver who goes by your house or by your town would be prohibitive.

270
00:29:30.840 --> 00:29:35.840
And Murray Rothbard's answer to that is, well, you don't have to sue each individual car driver.

271
00:29:35.840 --> 00:29:42.840
In the Free Society, all roads would be privately owned, and you would just sue the highway owner.

272
00:29:42.840 --> 00:29:48.840
In other words, there'd be many few highway owners than car drivers, right?

273
00:29:48.840 --> 00:29:53.840
So you just sue them for having a body house not of sex but of pollution

274
00:29:53.840 --> 00:29:58.840
and then they would turn around and say to their people, their customers,

275
00:29:58.840 --> 00:30:02.840
well, you know, sure, you want to drive without a catalytic converter

276
00:30:02.840 --> 00:30:06.840
and you want to drive with using high lead content gas, fine,

277
00:30:06.840 --> 00:30:09.840
but I'm going to charge you quadruple or septuple or something

278
00:30:09.840 --> 00:30:11.840
because they're going to come sue me.

279
00:30:11.840 --> 00:30:16.840
On the other hand, if you put in a little cleaner burning gasoline

280
00:30:16.840 --> 00:30:23.640
and a better motor and it doesn't smoke at the tailpipe, then I'll charge you less.

281
00:30:23.640 --> 00:30:28.240
It's very similar to what private road owners did in the days before asphalt.

282
00:30:28.240 --> 00:30:34.540
They would charge based on the heaviness of the cart and how many horses and on the width of the wheel.

283
00:30:34.540 --> 00:30:39.040
Thin wheel, think ice skates, makes a rut in the road, so they would charge you more,

284
00:30:39.040 --> 00:30:46.140
even though you can go faster with a thin wheel, a big fat wheel would sort of damp it down, so they would charge you less.

285
00:30:46.140 --> 00:30:55.640
So, in other words, the market signals would go through the intermediation of the road owner to the customers and the problem would be solved.

286
00:30:55.640 --> 00:31:01.640
And that is pretty much the solution to the air pollution problem.

287
00:31:01.640 --> 00:31:05.640
Air pollution is not endemic to the market.

288
00:31:05.640 --> 00:31:08.640
There's no market failure.

289
00:31:08.640 --> 00:31:18.640
There's no need particularly to have, what is it, tradable emissions rights.

290
00:31:18.640 --> 00:31:30.640
Tradable emissions rights are, the idea is, you know, let's say we have three companies each polluting 50 tons of stuff into the air.

291
00:31:30.640 --> 00:31:36.640
And we've decided, we being the government, because we're now not suing anyone.

292
00:31:38.640 --> 00:31:44.640
And we decided we can only have 100 tons of pollution, not 150.

293
00:31:44.640 --> 00:31:53.640
Now the old way, the left-wing way, is, well, every company has to cut down from 50 to 33 tons of pollution.

294
00:31:53.640 --> 00:32:02.640
The environmental, the right-wing or the moderate right-wing, the Chicagoite, the tradable emissions right idea is,

295
00:32:02.640 --> 00:32:10.640
Well, each one doesn't have to cut down from 50 to 33 to get from 150 to 50, from 150 to 100.

296
00:32:10.640 --> 00:32:15.640
Rather, they can buy and sell the rights to reduce pollution.

297
00:32:15.640 --> 00:32:18.640
And some firms might be more efficient at cutting it down.

298
00:32:18.640 --> 00:32:23.640
So one could cut it down from 50 to 10 and get the others to pay him to do it.

299
00:32:23.640 --> 00:32:27.640
So you still have the same 100 tons of pollution.

300
00:32:27.640 --> 00:32:39.640
But this is, and they see that this is a great improvement over Pagoo's tax system, but all of it is quasi-market.

301
00:32:39.640 --> 00:32:44.640
You know, whenever I hear the word quasi-market, I check my wallet and I check to see how many fingers I've got.

302
00:32:44.640 --> 00:32:53.640
I'm not interested in quasi-markets, I'm interested in real markets, and real markets are predicated on private property rights.

303
00:32:53.640 --> 00:32:59.740
Now, there is one more complication, and that is this thing called coming to the nuisance.

304
00:32:59.740 --> 00:33:07.840
Suppose I have an airport right there, and what I do, and now an airport wouldn't be smoke pollution,

305
00:33:07.840 --> 00:33:11.440
but it would be noise pollution, but it's the same economic thing.

306
00:33:11.440 --> 00:33:20.340
And what the airport does is it pollutes noise, and if you don't like the airport example,

307
00:33:20.340 --> 00:33:27.940
Just think of a manufacturing firm that pollutes dust, and let's say that they're the first ones there.

308
00:33:27.940 --> 00:33:32.340
So based on the homesteading, they own the airport or the manufacturing thing,

309
00:33:32.340 --> 00:33:37.140
but they also own the right to pollute in that general area, either the noise or the dust.

310
00:33:37.140 --> 00:33:42.240
And if they're there first, they do two different kinds of homesteading.

311
00:33:42.240 --> 00:33:47.240
One, the little area, and two, the bigger area.

312
00:33:47.240 --> 00:33:56.040
So, if somebody comes then and puts up a house right here, and then sues them on the grounds of pollution,

313
00:33:56.040 --> 00:34:01.640
noise or smoke, it doesn't matter, they are, quote, coming to the nuisance, unquote.

314
00:34:01.640 --> 00:34:11.240
Namely, they were their second, and they have to accept the air quality the way it is.

315
00:34:11.240 --> 00:34:17.600
See, this is an attempt to undermine the objection to the thesis I'm offering,

316
00:34:17.600 --> 00:34:20.760
namely, well, you know, if we listen to you, we're not going to have any airports,

317
00:34:20.760 --> 00:34:22.320
we're not going to have any manufacturing.

318
00:34:22.320 --> 00:34:23.880
We will. We'll have some.

319
00:34:23.880 --> 00:34:28.560
If you move to Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, where they had iron and steel there,

320
00:34:28.560 --> 00:34:33.920
and you're the type that needs an oxygen tent, you can't shut down Pittsburgh.

321
00:34:33.920 --> 00:34:38.120
You have to get an oxygen tent or move out into the boonies somewhere where the air is cleaner.

322
00:34:38.120 --> 00:34:44.320
Now, if they follow you there, if the airport follows you or the manufacturing follows you, then they have to buy you out.

323
00:34:44.320 --> 00:34:52.220
So again, we're getting back to this situation of who the onus is, where's the starting point.

324
00:34:52.220 --> 00:34:56.320
Okay, I think that's all I'll say on air pollution.

325
00:34:56.320 --> 00:34:58.120
Yeah.

326
00:34:58.120 --> 00:35:05.120
What about radio frequencies? A bunch of people have to build a house and all of a sudden radio is invented.

327
00:35:05.120 --> 00:35:13.120
Is the transmission of frequencies from a certain spot to a larger area a violation of the larger areas?

328
00:35:13.120 --> 00:35:22.120
No, Murray Rothbard talks about this in his article, which I recommend very, very highly to anyone interested in environmental economics or environmental law.

329
00:35:22.120 --> 00:35:28.620
And he says, there has to be some sort of harm, like everything has radiation, like, you know, this wristwatch has radiation.

330
00:35:28.620 --> 00:35:33.220
We all radiate stuff, but it's imperceptible and harmless.

331
00:35:33.220 --> 00:35:38.720
So he would say that radio, you know, it goes right through your house, but it doesn't harm you and you're not even aware of it.

332
00:35:38.720 --> 00:35:45.520
He would say that that would not be a violation. It's, in effect, homesteadable.

333
00:35:45.520 --> 00:35:51.420
Like, take the case that we all breathe out, and we breathe out carbon dioxide, which is a poison.

334
00:35:51.420 --> 00:35:56.620
But we've, in effect, homesteaded the right to breathe out by having our grandparents breathe out.

335
00:35:56.620 --> 00:36:03.620
You can't sue anyone for breathing out, which would be another possible objection to the thesis.

336
00:36:03.620 --> 00:36:13.420
Okay, what I want to do now is get to the issue of hazardous waste and paper and plastic bags,

337
00:36:13.420 --> 00:36:17.820
which gets a lot of people very exercised.

338
00:36:17.820 --> 00:36:33.120
Now, I'm going to give you two scenarios, and the first scenario, imagine yourself at the checkout counter of a Walmart or a Kresge's or A&P or something like that,

339
00:36:33.120 --> 00:36:42.120
and, you know, you give them your groceries and they run it up, and now they ask you that inevitable fateful question, paper or plastic bag.

340
00:36:42.120 --> 00:36:49.120
Now, I'm going to assume with the environmentalists, the left-wing environmentalists, the watermelons, you know, green on the outside, red on the inside,

341
00:36:49.120 --> 00:36:54.120
I'm going to assume that plastic is horrible.

342
00:36:54.120 --> 00:37:05.120
It's the invention of the devil, it's non-biodegradable, it poisons the ground where you have to finally get rid of it.

343
00:37:05.120 --> 00:37:07.120
It's just a horrible thing.

344
00:37:07.120 --> 00:37:16.120
Whereas paper is wonderful, it's lovely, it's biodegradable, it is like fertilizer, it helps make the earth better and all that.

345
00:37:16.120 --> 00:37:26.120
And I'm going to, you see right now in most groceries, but not all, what they do is they implicitly figure in the cost of the wrapping the paper bag or the plastic bag.

346
00:37:26.120 --> 00:37:32.120
They don't charge you for it any more than they charge you for the lighting or for cleaning the aisles.

347
00:37:32.120 --> 00:37:38.520
But let's assume that this is not so. Let's assume that they charge you

348
00:37:38.520 --> 00:37:42.440
explicitly for the paper or the plastic bag and let's assume that they charge you

349
00:37:42.440 --> 00:37:52.320
a penny for each because they're very cheap. Okay, now the argument is that the

350
00:37:52.320 --> 00:37:57.580
only incentive that you'll have to be environmentally sound, that is pick the

351
00:37:57.580 --> 00:38:07.620
Paper is benevolent because it costs a penny each and we'll draw up some sort

352
00:38:07.620 --> 00:38:17.060
of analytic framework here where here we have paper and here we have plastic and

353
00:38:17.060 --> 00:38:25.940
here we have the cost to produce or buy the paper or the plastic and it's a penny

354
00:38:25.940 --> 00:38:52.940
And the argument against the market is, well, the market is supposed to lead us by an invisible hand to do that which is in the public good, and here the only incentive that we have is benevolence, feeling for the planet or something like that, and the hippie dippies will do the paper and the rest of us will do plastic, maybe it's more convenient or something like that, and the market is not working.

355
00:38:52.940 --> 00:39:08.940
Now, the error of this is, the cause of the problem, and this is as a constant refrain, is not the market, but rather government preempting the market.

356
00:39:08.940 --> 00:39:21.940
Where did government preempt the market? Well, government preempted the market by municipalizing solid waste management, or garbage dumps.

357
00:39:21.940 --> 00:39:37.940
In most cities, there are some rare exceptions, but in most places what you do is you pay taxes and then they collect your garbage and then they ship off your garbage to the dump and that's it.

358
00:39:37.940 --> 00:39:46.940
So it costs you no more to do paper than to do plastic because you pay for it through taxes and there's no law or anything like that.

359
00:39:46.940 --> 00:39:54.700
Imagine now, we de-municipalize or privatize garbage dumps.

360
00:39:54.700 --> 00:40:11.440
Now, I tell you that paper is easily disposed of and there the cost of disposal of paper is also a penny.

361
00:40:11.440 --> 00:40:19.720
And because plastic is so horrible, the cost of disposing of plastic is five bucks.

362
00:40:19.720 --> 00:40:27.800
I'm just using this as a numerical example to illustrate what the argument is.

363
00:40:27.800 --> 00:40:31.960
Okay, now Prem, you own a garbage dump.

364
00:40:31.960 --> 00:40:38.160
How much would you like to charge if I bring a plastic bag to you, given that the cost of it is five bucks?

365
00:40:38.160 --> 00:40:46.160
No, no, no, no. No, no, no. Remember, you're a capitalist pig. You want to make profits, greed.

366
00:40:46.160 --> 00:40:51.160
Remember, we have dollar signs on our eyeballs and cash registers for hearts.

367
00:40:51.160 --> 00:40:53.160
How much would you like to charge?

368
00:40:53.160 --> 00:40:54.160
Ten dollars.

369
00:40:54.160 --> 00:40:55.160
Nah.

370
00:40:55.160 --> 00:40:56.160
Twenty.

371
00:40:56.160 --> 00:40:57.160
A million.

372
00:40:57.160 --> 00:40:58.160
A million.

373
00:40:58.160 --> 00:41:01.160
A million. There we go.

374
00:41:01.160 --> 00:41:06.160
Ben, he's charging a million dollars. What are you going to charge for plastic?

375
00:41:06.160 --> 00:41:16.160
For a competing garbage dump place, a little less, because you can make a big, big profit, right?

376
00:41:16.160 --> 00:41:21.160
And a max a million, you'll charge a little less. Where will it end?

377
00:41:21.160 --> 00:41:25.160
Adam, how much will you charge if he charges 10 bucks?

378
00:41:25.160 --> 00:41:26.160
Nine.

379
00:41:26.160 --> 00:41:28.160
Nine or 9.99 or whatever.

380
00:41:28.160 --> 00:41:35.160
In other words, in equilibrium there are no profits, so the price has to be bid down to the cost of it.

381
00:41:35.160 --> 00:41:46.160
So I assume that in a private garbage dump setting, the price of putting a plastic bag in a dump will be about five bucks, give or take in equilibrium.

382
00:41:46.160 --> 00:41:51.160
We never get to equilibrium, so it'll be 550, there'll be some profit, but it'll be roughly that.

383
00:41:51.160 --> 00:41:56.160
Whereas the cost of putting in a paper bag will be about a penny.

384
00:41:56.160 --> 00:42:07.160
See, the idea is that if you put in paper bags, after the dump is all filled, then you can put a farm there, or you can put a hotel there, or a housing development or something.

385
00:42:07.160 --> 00:42:14.160
Whereas if you put plastic, it'll be like Love Canal or something, which is a whole fallacy, but I don't want to get into that for the moment.

386
00:42:14.160 --> 00:42:21.160
And it'll be, you know, this toxic waste, toxic dump site, and you won't be able to use the land for anything,

387
00:42:21.160 --> 00:42:29.160
So you might as well get your five bucks for each plastic bag so that you're compensated for not being able to sell the land for any reasonable purpose.

388
00:42:29.160 --> 00:42:37.160
Okay, now let's go back to our original scenario. You're out at the supermarket checkout counter.

389
00:42:37.160 --> 00:42:49.160
The dump sites have been all privatized and the prices that you now face are the total price, the sum of the prices,

390
00:42:49.160 --> 00:43:00.660
is two cents and here it's 501. Now, does anyone doubt that the whole problem goes away?

391
00:43:00.660 --> 00:43:05.660
That now there is an incentive, that now the invisible hand is working?

392
00:43:05.660 --> 00:43:11.160
You're going to have to pay 501 if you pick the plastic bag and only two cents if you pick the paper bag.

393
00:43:11.160 --> 00:43:14.660
So all of a sudden, Adam Smith comes back into the picture.

394
00:43:14.660 --> 00:43:18.820
The point is that the reason Adam Smith was banished in the first place in the

395
00:43:18.820 --> 00:43:23.100
first scenario was not because there's something about the environmentalism or

396
00:43:23.100 --> 00:43:27.420
garbage or anything like that that is not conducive to markets, rather it's

397
00:43:27.420 --> 00:43:32.500
because the government screwed up and messed up and created the problem and

398
00:43:32.500 --> 00:43:41.940
then they blame it on the market. At 501, will plastic bags be used? Yes, but only

399
00:43:41.940 --> 00:43:43.940
when their value is more than 501.

400
00:43:43.940 --> 00:43:50.940
For example, you know those plastic bags that they use to drip stuff into your arm when you're in a hospital, right?

401
00:43:50.940 --> 00:43:52.940
They'll use them.

402
00:43:52.940 --> 00:43:59.940
I mean, we're not crazy here, we're not against plastic bags, but we're just saying that with a price system,

403
00:43:59.940 --> 00:44:05.940
the problem of socialist calculation that the Austrians have been very involved in doesn't arise.

404
00:44:05.940 --> 00:44:10.940
If everything has a price, then there's the solution.

405
00:44:10.940 --> 00:44:26.940
Similarly, you have a baby, Bob Murphy just has a baby, that baby has diapers, should he use plastic diapers or what do you call it, diapers, cloth diapers with safety pins and stuff like that?

406
00:44:26.940 --> 00:44:34.940
Well, there is no answer. The reason there's no answer is because all the prices are not, they're available and you can't choose.

407
00:44:34.940 --> 00:44:45.440
You have this problem of anarchy in the bad sense, or chaos, because you know what the cost of the plastic diaper is, you know what the cost of the cloth diaper is,

408
00:44:45.440 --> 00:44:50.440
but you don't know what the cost of using the water is, because you're not charged for it.

409
00:44:50.440 --> 00:44:58.440
You don't know what the cost of putting a dirty diaper into the landfill is, because it's municipalized.

410
00:44:58.440 --> 00:45:04.440
So the solution to this environmental problem of hazardous waste is that everything should have a price,

411
00:45:04.440 --> 00:45:08.280
and then we'll be able to figure it out and you can only get a price if you have

412
00:45:08.280 --> 00:45:12.600
private property rights and that means markets, not quasi-markets but actual

413
00:45:12.600 --> 00:45:22.840
real markets. What's the view on fuels? Should we go wind power, solar power,

414
00:45:22.840 --> 00:45:30.000
water power, coal, gas, oil, nuke, what? Again the same motif. If everything had a

415
00:45:30.000 --> 00:45:42.000
If we had a market price, we could figure it out, but we have, in terms of nukes, we have prohibitions of building nuclear power, which is harmful to nuclear power.

416
00:45:42.000 --> 00:45:48.000
On the other hand, we have the Price Anderson Act, which subsidizes all sorts of things, so you don't know.

417
00:45:48.000 --> 00:45:59.000
The solution to that problem, you see, libertarians or Austrians or what have you, we don't have stock in coal companies or oil companies and therefore we're pro-coal or pro-oil.

418
00:45:59.000 --> 00:46:09.000
Our view, I think, is let there be a fair race between all of the possible fuels and let people pick whatever they want

419
00:46:09.000 --> 00:46:15.000
based on price or convenience or what have you, but let the prices reflect the full costs.

420
00:46:15.000 --> 00:46:20.000
And the reason the prices are not reflecting the full costs has got nothing to do with market failure.

421
00:46:20.000 --> 00:46:26.000
It's because government is not allowing, the government is subsidizing and taxing and making complicated

422
00:46:26.000 --> 00:46:29.280
And nobody can figure out what to do.

423
00:46:29.280 --> 00:46:34.280
The thing about Love Canal, and here the PERC people are very good,

424
00:46:34.280 --> 00:46:38.520
what happened is that the Hooker Chemical Company sold the land,

425
00:46:38.520 --> 00:46:42.800
I think they were forced to do it, I'm not sure, they sold it for a dollar and they

426
00:46:42.800 --> 00:46:44.880
they gave them a letter saying, you know, there's stuff

427
00:46:44.880 --> 00:46:47.680
under here that we got

428
00:46:47.680 --> 00:46:50.520
three foot thick cement walls around,

429
00:46:50.520 --> 00:46:54.000
be careful, and the government said, no, no, no, don't bother us.

430
00:46:54.000 --> 00:46:59.700
And then they stuck pipes through it later and the stuff got into the Love Canal.

431
00:46:59.700 --> 00:47:05.100
So again, this is not a market failure, this is a government failure.

432
00:47:05.100 --> 00:47:08.200
I have to tell you about my man William Rathgee.

433
00:47:08.200 --> 00:47:12.300
Maybe I'd better spell that because it's a hard name to...

434
00:47:12.300 --> 00:47:17.800
William Rathgee is a garbologist.

435
00:47:17.800 --> 00:47:19.600
What's a garbologist?

436
00:47:19.600 --> 00:47:26.240
A garbologist is to garbage as an archaeologist is to ancient statues.

437
00:47:26.240 --> 00:47:29.760
Most people see a mound of garbage and we go, whoa, you know, let me get away from it.

438
00:47:29.760 --> 00:47:33.600
The garbologist says, oh no, you know, let me...

439
00:47:33.600 --> 00:47:38.600
Sort of like nobody really grows up wanting to be a proctologist or a garbologist and, you know,

440
00:47:38.600 --> 00:47:46.280
mothers don't say, my son, the garbologist, but in any case, Rathje is a garbologist

441
00:47:46.280 --> 00:47:55.840
And he studies garbage dumps, and what he tells us is that the real problem is not plastic, it's paper, especially telephone books.

442
00:47:55.840 --> 00:48:03.720
They set off methane gas, and they're just a big pain in the neck, whereas plastic is inerted, it's not poisonous or anything like that.

443
00:48:03.720 --> 00:48:07.960
Well, remember I told you the can't open a joke about assuming things?

444
00:48:07.960 --> 00:48:10.880
As an economist, we have a specialization in division of labor.

445
00:48:10.880 --> 00:48:17.200
I don't know who's right on this, whether it's paper or plastic, that's the good guy or the bad guy.

446
00:48:17.200 --> 00:48:21.200
But all I can do is, you know, use a different, I would reverse the case and say,

447
00:48:21.200 --> 00:48:26.440
aha, you know, it's the paper that's five bucks and the plastic is only a penny.

448
00:48:26.440 --> 00:48:38.120
The point is, we don't have any, what's the word, desire to have any particular fuel or paper or plastic or anything.

449
00:48:38.120 --> 00:48:45.920
All we're saying is, let there be market prices based on private property rights and the problem goes away.

450
00:48:45.920 --> 00:48:49.620
Okay, the next issue is running out of resources.

451
00:48:49.620 --> 00:48:56.120
Now you get this group, the Club of Rome, and the Club of Rome will say things like this.

452
00:48:56.120 --> 00:49:03.920
They'll say, well, we use 10 tons of stuff per year.

453
00:49:03.920 --> 00:49:15.580
We have proven resources of a hundred tons per year, and therefore in ten years, we'll run out of this stuff, geniuses.

454
00:49:15.580 --> 00:49:21.580
They don't realize that as you start to run out of stuff, what happens to the price of it?

455
00:49:21.580 --> 00:49:32.160
Price of it rises. When the price of it rises, you go look for more of it, you use substitutes for it, and the problem goes away.

456
00:49:32.160 --> 00:49:37.820
And you don't run out of anything.

457
00:49:37.820 --> 00:49:48.860
There was a bet between Paul Ehrlich, who won the Genius Award by the MacArthur Foundation,

458
00:49:48.860 --> 00:49:56.260
which I think is half a million bucks or some serious money for these left-wing geniuses.

459
00:49:56.260 --> 00:49:59.020
And he had a bet with Julian Simon.

460
00:49:59.020 --> 00:50:04.700
And this was in the 70s or the 60s or some long time ago, 80s, I forget when it was.

461
00:50:04.700 --> 00:50:08.940
And they bet 10,000 bucks on whether we'd be running out of resources.

462
00:50:08.940 --> 00:50:18.340
And they agreed that the way to determine whether we're running out of resources is whether a market basket of resources rose or fell in price compared to other things.

463
00:50:18.340 --> 00:50:27.820
And I guess the market basket of goods was like, you know, a ton of copper and a pound of gold and a bushel of wheat.

464
00:50:27.820 --> 00:50:30.700
and you know this that and the other you know just sort of what's happening with

465
00:50:30.700 --> 00:50:39.120
the price index of those five or ten things and the genius lost our man Simon

466
00:50:39.120 --> 00:50:46.620
won and that hasn't stopped the Ehrlich I mean Ehrlich is the one who says when I

467
00:50:46.620 --> 00:50:50.900
get to overpopulation I'll have a lot more to say about Ehrlich you know we're

468
00:50:50.900 --> 00:50:55.460
doom and gloomster in the 60s and 70s 80s every 10 years he writes a book

469
00:50:55.460 --> 00:51:01.460
saying, you know, that in 10 years from now we'll all die from lack of food and, you know, we're still going.

470
00:51:02.960 --> 00:51:08.460
Now, right before Julian Simon unfortunately died, they were thinking of another bet.

471
00:51:09.960 --> 00:51:16.460
And the way Paul Ehrlich wanted the bet was, now it was on things like fish.

472
00:51:17.460 --> 00:51:18.460
Are we going to run out of fish?

473
00:51:18.960 --> 00:51:24.460
And Ehrlich wanted the bet to be just on fish that you catch in the ocean.

474
00:51:25.460 --> 00:51:33.660
And Simon said, no, no, no, let's make it all fish, you know, fish that you find in the ocean and fish that you find from fish farming.

475
00:51:33.660 --> 00:51:41.260
And Ehrlich didn't want that back.

476
00:51:41.260 --> 00:51:50.660
What else do we have on depletion of stuff?

477
00:51:50.660 --> 00:51:58.660
With regards to deforestation, in my class on environmental economics, I show these cartoons where they're hacking down the forest.

478
00:51:58.660 --> 00:52:04.660
There's this wonderful guy, Cyril Sneer, lumber profiteer.

479
00:52:04.660 --> 00:52:06.660
This cartoon is really precious.

480
00:52:06.660 --> 00:52:08.660
And he's cutting down all the trees.

481
00:52:08.660 --> 00:52:12.660
You know, he says every tree is money and there's no such thing as petty cash.

482
00:52:12.660 --> 00:52:17.660
And he's got these great quotes about, you know, kill all the trees.

483
00:52:17.660 --> 00:52:31.660
And it turns out that he's killing all the trees on government land, because he has a contract to do with those trees as he wishes for six months and he's got to get them all in by the end of six months.

484
00:52:31.660 --> 00:52:43.660
But suppose he owned the land. Would it make sense to kill all the trees and not replant? No, it's silly. So the cause of the problem is government ownership.

485
00:52:43.660 --> 00:52:51.660
Out West, the sage brush revolution or rebellion or whatever, they've got this stuff of letting wolves loose.

486
00:52:51.660 --> 00:52:55.660
Why do they let wolves loose on their own property?

487
00:52:55.660 --> 00:52:59.660
I mean, suppose they let wolves loose in the city or something.

488
00:52:59.660 --> 00:53:07.660
I mean, the idea here is that if we have private property, again, I hate to sound like a broken record or a parrot repeating and repeating,

489
00:53:07.660 --> 00:53:12.660
but these problems come about because of government ownership, not because of anything intrinsic to the market.

490
00:53:12.660 --> 00:53:28.660
Okay, the next one is, what else have we got here? Ah, species extinction. I think I can get this in before the break.

491
00:53:28.660 --> 00:53:33.660
Species extinction. Now remember we went over the tragedy of the commons the other day?

492
00:53:33.660 --> 00:53:41.660
And we said that when you own stuff, together when it's communal, everyone tries to suck up more of the orange juice or the Coca-Cola,

493
00:53:41.660 --> 00:53:49.980
Coca-Cola that is communally owned, whereas when you own it yourself, you tend to preserve it.

494
00:53:49.980 --> 00:53:57.660
Well, there's this evil, horrible movie, which I really like, and I had to suspend my judgment when I watched it,

495
00:53:57.660 --> 00:54:04.860
Dances with Wolves. Anyone see that movie? It's a really good movie if you can forget about your brain,

496
00:54:04.860 --> 00:54:11.860
and just sort of, you know, oh yeah, yeah, you know, groovy man and, you know, if you're a little drunk, it might help, you know,

497
00:54:11.860 --> 00:54:17.860
but you have to suspend your critical faculties if you want to enjoy these Hollywood left-wing movies.

498
00:54:17.860 --> 00:54:25.860
But the motif there was that the Indians were great guys and they would only shoot as many buffaloes as they needed,

499
00:54:25.860 --> 00:54:32.860
whereas the white men are the devil and, you know, they just shoot them all and they're evil.

500
00:54:32.860 --> 00:54:42.860
Well, the reason we had the buffalo become extinct, almost become extinct, is because they weren't owned.

501
00:54:42.860 --> 00:54:50.860
The reason the cow never came within a million miles of extinction is because it was always privately owned.

502
00:54:50.860 --> 00:55:06.860
Now I'm going to illustrate this. Here is a cow. I'm going to give him a smiley face because he never came within a million miles of being extinct and he was privately owned.

503
00:55:06.860 --> 00:55:16.860
And here's a buffalo, and I'll give him an unhappy face, because he almost went extinct.

504
00:55:20.860 --> 00:55:26.860
They're the same animal. I mean, they both moo, I think. I'm not sure if they moo.

505
00:55:26.860 --> 00:55:30.860
I've never been that close to a buffalo, but they're both big and fat and give milk.

506
00:55:30.860 --> 00:55:33.860
And if you crash into one of them, you're in trouble.

507
00:55:33.860 --> 00:55:40.260
and, you know, they have horns and they're both stupid and, you know...

508
00:55:40.260 --> 00:55:44.860
Why did one become extinct and the other never within a million miles of extinction?

509
00:55:44.860 --> 00:55:50.260
Why doesn't the farmer go into his lower 40 with a machine gun and start mowing down all his cows?

510
00:55:50.260 --> 00:55:51.660
Rat-tat-tat-tat!

511
00:55:51.660 --> 00:55:54.160
Whereas that's what they do with the buffalo.

512
00:55:54.160 --> 00:55:56.160
The reason is opportunity costs.

513
00:55:56.160 --> 00:55:59.760
If you kill a cow today, what's the cost of it?

514
00:55:59.760 --> 00:56:02.460
It's the... the cost of it is a cow tomorrow.

515
00:56:02.460 --> 00:56:06.140
Well, you don't have a count tomorrow, so it's a big cost to shoot a count today.

516
00:56:06.140 --> 00:56:10.700
It doesn't mean you don't shoot him or kill him or slaughter him, but you don't

517
00:56:10.700 --> 00:56:17.340
shoot the young ones or the female ones that can give birth and all.

518
00:56:17.340 --> 00:56:23.260
Whereas, what's the cost of shooting a buffalo today? Is it a buffalo tomorrow? No, it's nothing!

519
00:56:23.260 --> 00:56:26.740
Because if I don't shoot it, Ken's going to get it.

520
00:56:26.740 --> 00:56:30.100
Right? I mean, it's running by me and Ken and then Steve,

521
00:56:30.100 --> 00:56:43.200
And if I don't shoot it, Ken will get it, and if Ken doesn't shoot it, Steve will get it, so we'll all grab it, and we'll just use the tongue, or the liver, or whatever the delicacy is, and we'll leave them littered all over the place.

522
00:56:43.200 --> 00:56:57.100
The Indians did it too, the way they would kill buffaloes, they'd run them over a cliff, and you just can't be picky about who you run over the cliff, it's the whole kit and caboodle run over the cliff, but that's another issue about Indians and white people.

523
00:56:57.100 --> 00:57:10.100
But the point is that if you have private property rights, there's no extinction because there are costs of killing it and you handle them in a reasonable way.

524
00:57:10.100 --> 00:57:17.100
And if they're not owned, well, then the sky's the limit. And then we have overfishing and killing.

525
00:57:17.100 --> 00:57:24.100
Look, the elephant is just a cow with a funny looking nose, right? I'm not into biology.

526
00:57:24.100 --> 00:57:42.100
Okay, there are other differences. You need a strong offense for an elephant or a rhino, but the reason that they don't allow this is because the governments are perverse.

527
00:57:42.100 --> 00:57:48.100
What the government is saying is that since they're extinct, we can't have markets and it's illegal to sell ivory.

528
00:57:48.100 --> 00:57:50.100
The very opposite is the case.

529
00:57:50.100 --> 00:58:00.100
See, their analysis is that the reason elephants and rhino are going extinct is that the ivory is very valuable and the rhino horn is even more valuable.

530
00:58:00.100 --> 00:58:02.100
It's $100 an ounce or something like that.

531
00:58:02.100 --> 00:58:05.100
And therefore, you shouldn't shoot it.

532
00:58:05.100 --> 00:58:17.100
The point is that if the only reason the elephant and the cow and the buffalo have a chance of extinction is because they are valuable.

533
00:58:17.100 --> 00:58:24.100
The animals that are much more in danger are not these big animals, but it's the creepy, crawly, disgusting animals that slither around.

534
00:58:24.100 --> 00:58:31.100
Those are the ones that are more in danger of being extinct, because we'll just stamp them out because they're disgusting and ugly.

535
00:58:31.100 --> 00:58:35.100
Who will preserve those animals?

536
00:58:35.100 --> 00:58:43.100
The ones that will preserve those animals are a very specialized group, namely, what do you call it?

537
00:58:43.100 --> 00:58:57.100
namely, what do you call it, pharmaceutical companies, because they might, there was this other movie, Medicine Man, with Sean Connery, 007 guy,

538
00:58:57.100 --> 00:59:03.100
and they found some cure for cancer in the Brazilian forest and they were cutting down the forest.

539
00:59:03.100 --> 00:59:19.100
Well, pharmaceutical companies and biology departments of great universities would buy up parts of Brazil or wherever they think that there'd be a shelf of animals that could teach their students or be part of future medicines.

540
00:59:19.100 --> 00:59:27.100
And they would safeguard them. But there's no reason to worry about the elephant or the rhino. All you have to do is privatize them.

541
00:59:27.100 --> 00:59:38.100
Now it's true, you can't put an elephant in a barnyard, it needs a bigger space and you have to put a thicker fence or an electrified fence, but as I say, the elephant is just a big cow, it's the same principle.

542
00:59:41.100 --> 00:59:49.100
Okay, you guys ready for some wonderful jokes? Not like the previous ones which were lousy, but today's for some reason are much better.

543
00:59:49.100 --> 00:59:52.100
Okay, here are some wonderful jokes.

544
00:59:52.100 --> 01:00:01.100
You know you're in California when your coworker has eight body piercings and none of them are visible.

545
01:00:01.100 --> 01:00:06.100
You make over 300,000 and still can't afford a house.

546
01:00:06.100 --> 01:00:13.100
You take a bus and are shocked that two people carrying on a conversation in English.

547
01:00:13.100 --> 01:00:23.100
You know you're in California when your child's third grade teacher has purple hair, a nose ring and is named Breeze.

548
01:00:23.100 --> 01:00:29.100
You know you're in California when you can't remember, is pot illegal?

549
01:00:29.100 --> 01:00:37.100
You know you're in California when you've been to a baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.

550
01:00:37.100 --> 01:00:42.100
You know you're in California when you have a very strong opinion about where your coffee beans are grown

551
01:00:42.100 --> 01:00:45.100
and can taste the difference between Sumatran and Ethiopian.

552
01:00:49.100 --> 01:00:51.100
These aren't that good. Let me skip them.

553
01:00:51.100 --> 01:00:55.100
You know you're in California when your hairdresser is straight, your plumber is gay,

554
01:00:55.100 --> 01:00:59.100
and the woman who delivers your mail is into S&M, and your Mary Kay rep is a guy in drag.

555
01:01:02.100 --> 01:01:05.100
You still can't remember. Is pot illegal?

556
01:01:07.100 --> 01:01:13.100
Okay, last great joke. Pay attention to this because this will absolutely be on the final exam.

557
01:01:13.100 --> 01:01:18.100
Four men were bragging about how clever their pet cats were.

558
01:01:18.100 --> 01:01:25.100
The following ensued. The first man was an engineer, the second was an accountant, the third was a chemist, and the fourth was a government worker.

559
01:01:25.100 --> 01:01:29.100
To show off, the engineer called his cat, T-square, do your stuff.

560
01:01:29.100 --> 01:01:35.100
T-square pranced over to a desk, took out some paper and pen, and promptly drew a circle, a square, and a triangle.

561
01:01:35.100 --> 01:01:38.100
Everyone agreed that that was pretty good.

562
01:01:38.100 --> 01:01:41.100
But the accountant said that his cat could do better.

563
01:01:41.100 --> 01:01:42.400
He called his cat over and said,

564
01:01:42.400 --> 01:01:44.600
Spreadsheet, do your stuff.

565
01:01:44.600 --> 01:01:47.900
Spreadsheet went out into the kitchen and returned with a dozen cookies.

566
01:01:47.900 --> 01:01:51.000
He divided them into four equal piles of three cookies each,

567
01:01:51.000 --> 01:01:53.600
and everyone agreed that that was very clever.

568
01:01:53.600 --> 01:01:56.300
But the chemist said his cat could even do better.

569
01:01:56.300 --> 01:01:57.500
He called his cat and said,

570
01:01:57.500 --> 01:01:59.600
Measure, do your stuff.

571
01:01:59.600 --> 01:02:01.500
So Measure got up, walked over to the fridge,

572
01:02:01.500 --> 01:02:04.300
took out a quart of milk, got a 10 ounce glass in the cupboard,

573
01:02:04.300 --> 01:02:06.940
and poured exactly eight ounces without spilling a drop.

574
01:02:06.940 --> 01:02:09.500
Everyone said, wow, that's a great cat.

575
01:02:09.500 --> 01:02:11.420
Then the three men turned to the government worker

576
01:02:11.420 --> 01:02:13.020
and said, what can your cat do?

577
01:02:13.940 --> 01:02:15.700
The government worker called to his cat and said,

578
01:02:15.700 --> 01:02:18.980
coffee break, do your thing.

579
01:02:19.940 --> 01:02:21.940
Coffee break, jumped to his feet, ate the cookies,

580
01:02:21.940 --> 01:02:24.380
drank the milk, peed on the papers,

581
01:02:24.380 --> 01:02:26.380
sexually harassed the other three cats,

582
01:02:27.780 --> 01:02:30.820
claimed that he injured his back while doing so,

583
01:02:30.820 --> 01:02:33.740
filed a grievance report for unsafe working conditions,

584
01:02:34.300 --> 01:02:40.600
Put in for workers' compensation and went home for the rest of the day on sick leave.

585
01:02:40.600 --> 01:02:49.200
Okay, let's get back to the economics, which is, as we know, deadly, boring and dull, so we'll do the best we can.

586
01:02:49.200 --> 01:02:55.500
There was another movie, Star Trek IV, where there were no whales because we had killed all the whales

587
01:02:55.500 --> 01:03:02.300
and our boys had to go back to the 20th century from the 25th century to bring the whales back to the 25th century

588
01:03:02.300 --> 01:03:10.100
because there were super guys that were kicking their butt, another example of, you know, species extinction.

589
01:03:10.100 --> 01:03:19.300
And the thing with whales and fish is not having quotas for fishing, which is quasi-market, but ownership of the ocean.

590
01:03:19.300 --> 01:03:22.400
And what is this fish freedom crap where they run around like maniacs?

591
01:03:22.400 --> 01:03:27.600
You know, we got to put them in pens, you know, with electrified fences and stuff.

592
01:03:27.600 --> 01:03:32.100
And the reason we don't have research and development in electrified fences in the ocean

593
01:03:32.100 --> 01:03:39.100
The reason we want to keep the whales and these other critters where we want them is because there's no private property rights in the ocean.

594
01:03:39.100 --> 01:03:42.100
That's the same thing with oil spills.

595
01:03:42.100 --> 01:03:48.100
If I own some ocean and Ken had an old boat with rust and only a single hull with oil in it,

596
01:03:48.100 --> 01:03:54.100
I'd charge him a ton of money to go in my ocean because I know that if he lets loose in my part of the ocean,

597
01:03:54.100 --> 01:03:56.100
then Steve is the next guy who'll sue me.

598
01:03:56.100 --> 01:04:03.100
So I would insist, you know, whereas if he had two holes and it was freshly painted and all, then I'd charge a lower price.

599
01:04:03.100 --> 01:04:12.100
So again, it's privatization that is lacking. It's non-ownership or government ownership which is the problem.

600
01:04:12.100 --> 01:04:20.100
Now how did the mainstream deal with the endangered species problem? They deal with it with an Endangered Species Act.

601
01:04:20.100 --> 01:04:27.580
and this has given risen to the three S's, S as in sand. So suppose you find an

602
01:04:27.580 --> 01:04:31.740
endangered species on your land, what are you supposed to do? Shoot it, shovel it

603
01:04:31.740 --> 01:04:37.940
and shut up. Because if you announce, hey look there's a parrot or something there

604
01:04:37.940 --> 01:04:40.580
they're going to come down and you're not going to be able to use your land for

605
01:04:40.580 --> 01:04:47.220
anything. They'll take it over. So it sets up negative incentives. During the break

606
01:04:47.220 --> 01:04:52.020
Ludwig, someone was mentioning that, you know, if you found the last pair of bald eagles

607
01:04:52.020 --> 01:04:57.700
on your land or some species on your land, you know, should the government stop you from

608
01:04:57.700 --> 01:04:58.700
doing this?

609
01:04:58.700 --> 01:05:02.300
Well, the point is that if it's the last pair of species, it'd be worth millions.

610
01:05:02.300 --> 01:05:08.260
You're not going to shoot them in a free society where the government won't take over your

611
01:05:08.260 --> 01:05:09.260
land.

612
01:05:09.260 --> 01:05:24.760
Okay, the next one is, what do you call it, greenhouse effect and global warming.

613
01:05:24.760 --> 01:05:30.760
Now what's going on with the greenhouse effect and global warming?

614
01:05:30.760 --> 01:05:39.760
So, what's going on, as far as I can see, as a non-meteorologist, as a non-weather person?

615
01:05:39.760 --> 01:05:46.760
Well, first of all, you know, weathermen have a lot of trouble predicting tomorrow or today.

616
01:05:46.760 --> 01:05:48.760
They sort of get it half right.

617
01:05:48.760 --> 01:05:53.760
And here, some of them are predicting what's going to happen in 100 years from now.

618
01:05:53.760 --> 01:05:57.760
And if we don't trust them for tomorrow, why are we trusting for 100 years from now?

619
01:05:57.760 --> 01:05:59.760
One problem.

620
01:05:59.760 --> 01:06:10.760
The problem is, I think what you want, or what the lay person wants, and I'm a lay person when it comes to these things, is consensus of the field.

621
01:06:10.760 --> 01:06:14.760
You don't want to hear, you know, three guys say this and four guys say that.

622
01:06:14.760 --> 01:06:26.760
There is no consensus within the field of, you know, operationally defined as people with a PhD in weather or meteorology or something like that.

623
01:06:26.760 --> 01:06:35.260
There's nothing like 98% of the people say this, whereas 98% of economists will say the minimum wage law creates unemployment for unskilled workers.

624
01:06:35.260 --> 01:06:38.260
It's just Carden Kruger and a few other crazies that won't.

625
01:06:38.260 --> 01:06:43.760
It doesn't have to be 100%, but if you get something like 90-95%, but you get nothing like that.

626
01:06:43.760 --> 01:06:46.760
You get these guys that say this and those guys that say that.

627
01:06:46.760 --> 01:06:54.760
You get this guy Bjorn Lomborg, who wrote a magnificent book, and they try to Michael Belial him,

628
01:06:54.760 --> 01:06:59.760
you know, get his book banned because he was, I don't know, something wrong

629
01:06:59.760 --> 01:07:05.760
and he's withstood the test and, you know, he makes the case that we're not going to hell in a hand basket

630
01:07:05.760 --> 01:07:10.760
and this was Julian Simon's thesis too, that things are not getting that bad

631
01:07:10.760 --> 01:07:14.760
despite government interventions which we shouldn't have.

632
01:07:14.760 --> 01:07:23.760
When I look at the weather patterns, here's what I see

633
01:07:23.760 --> 01:07:39.160
This is from 1860 to 1980 and notice the, we're talking about one degree centigrade.

634
01:07:39.160 --> 01:07:46.840
It seems to me that it's sort of flat for the last hundred years or so.

635
01:07:46.840 --> 01:07:53.040
Yes, if you start over here and you end over there, it's an upward trend,

636
01:07:53.040 --> 01:07:58.920
but if you start here and you stop there it's flat and you can sort of if you

637
01:07:58.920 --> 01:08:04.000
want to interpret the thing that it's going up you you pick a certain starting

638
01:08:04.000 --> 01:08:08.400
point in a certain any point it's going up you want to pick that it's flat you

639
01:08:08.400 --> 01:08:12.160
can do that and pretty much you can pick that it's going the other way around

640
01:08:12.160 --> 01:08:16.280
there are other problems with this stuff first of all this is the northern

641
01:08:16.280 --> 01:08:22.520
hemisphere secondly there's a thing called the heat island effect if you

642
01:08:22.520 --> 01:08:29.520
If you take your readings near cities, then you'll get an overestimate of the global warming.

643
01:08:29.520 --> 01:08:36.520
There are different places to take the readings in the air, in the water, in the icebergs, on land.

644
01:08:36.520 --> 01:08:41.520
And when I, you know, when you put it all together, it doesn't seem like much is happening.

645
01:08:41.520 --> 01:08:46.520
And the big stuff that's happening is within one degree centigrade.

646
01:08:46.520 --> 01:08:49.520
Okay, that's 1860 to 1980.

647
01:08:49.520 --> 01:08:52.320
Let's take another look over here.

648
01:08:52.320 --> 01:08:55.920
This is just the US as opposed to the Northern Hemisphere.

649
01:08:55.920 --> 01:09:05.320
And again, it looks pretty flat within one degree centigrade.

650
01:09:05.320 --> 01:09:11.920
So it seems difficult to extrapolate from this sort of a thing

651
01:09:11.920 --> 01:09:14.120
that the sky is falling and Chicken Little is right

652
01:09:14.120 --> 01:09:17.020
and we got to, you know, stop everyone from using underarm deodorant

653
01:09:17.020 --> 01:09:21.140
and refrigeration and stuff like that well now that's what do you call it

654
01:09:21.140 --> 01:09:25.540
that's ozone liar which interestingly enough the the ozone hole is over

655
01:09:25.540 --> 01:09:31.840
Antarctica but there's no industry in Antarctica and when I mentioned this to

656
01:09:31.840 --> 01:09:35.740
my left-wing environmental friends they start talking and I don't understand

657
01:09:35.740 --> 01:09:40.940
what they're talking about it's strange okay let me try another one on you good

658
01:09:40.940 --> 01:09:52.660
People. Here is one a thousand years ago, the past thousand years average

659
01:09:52.660 --> 01:09:57.980
temperature. You can see the warm period where they called Greenland, Greenland

660
01:09:57.980 --> 01:10:04.900
because it was green, that was global warming. So you know if you start over

661
01:10:04.900 --> 01:10:10.340
here and you go to here, we're having global cooling. It's interesting in the

662
01:10:10.340 --> 01:10:17.340
In the 1970s, the left-wing environmentalist movement was saying we're having global cooling and therefore the government's got to get involved

663
01:10:17.340 --> 01:10:20.340
And now it's global warming and the government's got to get involved

664
01:10:20.340 --> 01:10:27.340
And if it's global leveling, the government's got to get involved, you know, sort of whichever way it goes, the market is failing

665
01:10:27.340 --> 01:10:32.340
So I'm not sure what you get from this, but it doesn't seem that there's need for panic

666
01:10:32.340 --> 01:10:37.340
This guy at the Hoover Institute, what's his name? I forget his name

667
01:10:37.340 --> 01:10:51.340
I wrote a book saying that the global warming is good because, you know, now the northern USSR and northern Canada will be able to be fertile and stuff and won't be so bad and, you know, we'll have air conditioning or something.

668
01:10:51.340 --> 01:10:58.340
Okay, now here you have, let me get both of these in.

669
01:10:58.340 --> 01:11:02.740
Here you have a much longer period, here you have 20,000 years,

670
01:11:02.740 --> 01:11:07.540
and that looks as if we are having global warming.

671
01:11:07.540 --> 01:11:14.140
But if you look at a million years back, again it doesn't seem like much,

672
01:11:14.140 --> 01:11:21.340
and especially since this last little bit here is way before the advent of mankind.

673
01:11:21.340 --> 01:11:26.640
Okay, let's suppose though that they're right.

674
01:11:26.640 --> 01:11:32.040
Remember, they can't open, and what we do is we suppose, if we don't know as economists, we suppose this, and then we suppose that,

675
01:11:32.040 --> 01:11:36.140
and we analyze each case because we are not experts in that, or at least I'm not.

676
01:11:36.140 --> 01:11:42.440
Now, some of you might be, but I certainly don't have any strong feeling as to whether we're having global warming.

677
01:11:42.440 --> 01:11:48.340
But suppose we were. So what do they say? They say, well, we should get rid of industry,

678
01:11:48.340 --> 01:11:53.240
because industry is creating global warming, and you have only one planet, and all that.

679
01:11:53.240 --> 01:12:00.040
The argument against that is, one of the theories as to why the dinosaurs disappeared,

680
01:12:00.040 --> 01:12:08.040
is that there was this big meteor that fell somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico,

681
01:12:08.040 --> 01:12:11.340
and it created havoc and all the dinosaurs died.

682
01:12:11.340 --> 01:12:17.940
Well, every day we get hit by little teeny meteors that get smaller in the atmosphere as they come down,

683
01:12:17.940 --> 01:12:24.840
But every once in a while, there's a big mother of a meteor.

684
01:12:24.840 --> 01:12:32.940
And what they're afraid of in two, five hundred years, I don't know, is a real big meteor that can end the Earth.

685
01:12:32.940 --> 01:12:35.840
So what I'm trying to say is that there are really two dangers we have to worry about.

686
01:12:35.840 --> 01:12:42.740
Not just getting the planet a little warmer, which means that we should have less industry,

687
01:12:42.740 --> 01:12:46.340
but also worrying about meteors, which means we should have more industry,

688
01:12:46.340 --> 01:12:52.340
even at the cost of one or two degrees centigrade higher.

689
01:12:52.340 --> 01:12:54.740
Because the only way we're going to stop the big meteor,

690
01:12:54.740 --> 01:12:58.240
which might come in two or four hundred years, we don't know,

691
01:12:58.240 --> 01:13:04.440
is to go up there with spaceships and blow it up or steer it away or do something like that.

692
01:13:04.440 --> 01:13:09.840
And in order to go up to a meteor that's around Jupiter now in two hundred years,

693
01:13:09.840 --> 01:13:12.040
we've got to have a technological society.

694
01:13:12.040 --> 01:13:19.320
We can't do that living in the caves and no toilet paper kind of society.

695
01:13:19.320 --> 01:13:31.480
So even if it's true, it's not clear that what is indicated is that we have to end industry.

696
01:13:31.480 --> 01:13:34.920
Okay, what else do we have?

697
01:13:34.920 --> 01:13:38.960
We have environmental racism. What's environmental racism?

698
01:13:38.960 --> 01:13:52.760
Environmental racism is the siting of garbage dumps and facilities that are not pretty in areas inhabited by black people.

699
01:13:52.760 --> 01:14:01.560
And this is seen as, you know, another capitalist trick that, you know, we're inherently racist.

700
01:14:01.560 --> 01:14:09.660
The proper analysis that I think of this is that it's not really a black-white thing, it's rather a rich-poor thing.

701
01:14:09.660 --> 01:14:14.960
And it just so happens that blacks are poorer than whites on average, for reasons I don't want to go into now,

702
01:14:14.960 --> 01:14:20.460
so that these places are sited in poor areas.

703
01:14:20.460 --> 01:14:27.460
Why is it that you don't have a cement factory in downtown New York City?

704
01:14:27.460 --> 01:14:34.660
Sorry? Land values. Not zoning. I mean, they wouldn't allow it, but the key is land values.

705
01:14:34.660 --> 01:14:41.360
I mean, you can't put a cement factory on the corner of, you know, 57th Street and 6th Avenue. It's crazy.

706
01:14:47.360 --> 01:14:54.260
It's land values. Now, there are two ways to go. One, the people are already living there, and now you put in a garbage dump.

707
01:14:54.260 --> 01:14:58.260
The other is the garbage dump is already there and then the people move in there.

708
01:14:58.260 --> 01:15:00.260
Suppose the garbage dump is already there.

709
01:15:00.260 --> 01:15:02.260
You've got to have a garbage dump somewhere.

710
01:15:02.260 --> 01:15:06.260
It's already there. Who's going to be moving in? Rich or poor people?

711
01:15:06.260 --> 01:15:10.260
Poor people because the land around the garbage dump would be lower value

712
01:15:10.260 --> 01:15:14.260
and poor people want to build a house, they go to a lower valued area.

713
01:15:14.260 --> 01:15:17.260
Poor people don't go to California to build a house because, you know,

714
01:15:17.260 --> 01:15:22.260
to buy a little bungalow in the outskirts of San Francisco is a million dollars.

715
01:15:22.260 --> 01:15:28.260
So if you want a little bungalow, you have to go to flyover country.

716
01:15:28.260 --> 01:15:35.260
I was teaching in Conway, Arkansas, at the University of Central Arkansas after I left Holy Cross.

717
01:15:35.260 --> 01:15:38.260
And I bought a house there and the house cost $60,000.

718
01:15:38.260 --> 01:15:46.260
And this was just a couple of years ago and I had about a half an acre and it was a 1200 foot house.

719
01:15:46.260 --> 01:15:50.260
A friend of mine had a house in California that was a little smaller than that.

720
01:15:50.260 --> 01:15:57.160
was like 900,000. So poor people naturally tend to gravitate toward lower real estate values

721
01:15:57.160 --> 01:16:00.960
and lower real estate values are in places where nobody wants to be.

722
01:16:00.960 --> 01:16:05.060
You know, sometimes what they do is they take a survey of which is the best city to live in

723
01:16:05.060 --> 01:16:10.260
and they do this and that and the other and, you know, nearness to schools and this and that and the other.

724
01:16:10.260 --> 01:16:14.260
The best way to figure it is real estate prices because that's what people want to live.

725
01:16:14.260 --> 01:16:19.860
The market is sort of telling you what the best place to live is based on real estate prices.

726
01:16:19.860 --> 01:16:26.160
So, it's not environmental racism, certainly not when the poor people move in second after the place is already sited.

727
01:16:26.160 --> 01:16:29.260
Now, how about the other way around, when there are people there?

728
01:16:29.260 --> 01:16:38.960
Well, where will you... Now, remember you were all in the role of private garbage dump owners?

729
01:16:38.960 --> 01:16:42.860
Where are you going to put your garbage dump? In the middle of Manhattan? No.

730
01:16:42.860 --> 01:16:46.460
You're going to put it out somewhere in the boonies, where poor people live,

731
01:16:46.460 --> 01:16:50.360
and poor people are overrepresented as black people.

732
01:16:50.360 --> 01:16:52.960
So it's got nothing to do with racism. The whole thing is silly.

733
01:16:52.960 --> 01:17:00.660
It's just another stick with which the enemies of the free market try to beat up on capitalism.

734
01:17:00.660 --> 01:17:03.960
Okay, let's now go to overpopulation.

735
01:17:03.960 --> 01:17:08.660
What's happening in the overpopulation area?

736
01:17:08.660 --> 01:17:14.660
In the overpopulation area, people like Paul Ehrlich are saying,

737
01:17:14.660 --> 01:17:19.660
You know, we're going to choke on our own whatevers and we'll have too many people.

738
01:17:23.000 --> 01:17:26.340
And population density is the cause of environmental problems

739
01:17:26.340 --> 01:17:29.240
and they go into all this stuff, you know, every person,

740
01:17:29.240 --> 01:17:31.340
every baby that's born is going to eat, you know,

741
01:17:31.340 --> 01:17:34.580
10 tons of turnips and five tons of spinach

742
01:17:34.580 --> 01:17:36.140
and where are we going to get it from?

743
01:17:36.140 --> 01:17:37.420
And we're going to run out of the earth

744
01:17:37.420 --> 01:17:40.020
and on and on with the overpopulation.

745
01:17:40.020 --> 01:17:59.020
Thomas Sowell offers us the following analysis, and what he says, he says he relates population density,

746
01:17:59.020 --> 01:18:08.020
I'm trying to make this more clear, I guess that's better, I guess you have to make it as big as possible, there we go.

747
01:18:08.020 --> 01:18:31.020
What he says, what Tomasol says is, if the overpopulationists were correct, then the countries that have the highest density of population, namely the most like the horror scenario of Paul Ehrlich, would be the poorest, and the places that are the emptiest would be the richest.

748
01:18:31.020 --> 01:18:36.020
You get that? In other words, if overpopulation means we're all going to choke our own waste products

749
01:18:36.020 --> 01:18:40.020
and we're all going to die of starvation because there's just too many people on the planet,

750
01:18:40.020 --> 01:18:48.020
then high density places would tend to be very poor and low density places would be very rich.

751
01:18:48.020 --> 01:18:58.020
So what you should have is a supply curve, namely these three boxes should be filled in.

752
01:18:58.020 --> 01:19:28.020
You've got it, namely there ought to be entrance in those three boxes, namely the very heavily dense places should be poor, and the very low population places should be rich, and you should have only those three boxes, but in actual point of fact there is no relationship between population density and wealth, and therefore you cannot make any such

753
01:19:28.020 --> 01:19:31.020
and the Basile Equation.

754
01:19:37.020 --> 01:19:39.020
Any of you ever been in a plane lately?

755
01:19:41.020 --> 01:19:43.020
That's a silly question.

756
01:19:43.020 --> 01:19:47.020
If you look down, the bloody U.S. is empty.

757
01:19:47.020 --> 01:19:49.020
There's nothing there.

758
01:19:49.020 --> 01:19:51.020
Okay, every once in a while you see New York City, about this big,

759
01:19:51.020 --> 01:19:53.020
and then you see Philadelphia.

760
01:19:53.020 --> 01:19:55.020
And this is the East Coast, which is more populated.

761
01:19:55.020 --> 01:19:59.720
and then you go over the mountains in West Virginia and there's nothing there.

762
01:19:59.720 --> 01:20:02.020
You go to the west of the Mississippi, there's nothing.

763
01:20:02.020 --> 01:20:07.320
There's absolutely nothing. Okay, there's Chicago and Denver, but the place is bloody empty.

764
01:20:07.320 --> 01:20:13.320
And the U.S. is, you know, not an empty place compared to other places in the world.

765
01:20:13.320 --> 01:20:16.720
I mean, you go to northern Canada and there's nothing there.

766
01:20:16.720 --> 01:20:19.520
There's an igloo or something.

767
01:20:19.520 --> 01:20:23.220
The earth is empty.

768
01:20:23.220 --> 01:20:46.420
Another way to put this is Thomas Sowell, who says suppose we were to take all the population of the earth, all 6 billion people and put them into the form of a single-family house of about 2,500 square feet with a normal front yard and a normal backyard, how big a territory would you need to fit all 6 billion people in?

769
01:20:46.420 --> 01:20:52.020
Now look, there'd be no shopping, there'd be no roads, there'd be no playgrounds, there'd be nothing.

770
01:20:52.020 --> 01:20:57.920
Just people in these little single-family houses, middle-class style, you know,

771
01:20:57.920 --> 01:21:02.520
2500 square feet with a front yard and a back yard. And you know the answer is?

772
01:21:02.520 --> 01:21:03.120
Texas.

773
01:21:03.120 --> 01:21:10.520
Texas, that's right. The whole country could fit into Texas. The whole world could fit into Texas.

774
01:21:10.520 --> 01:21:16.020
Just to give you an idea of how empty the place is.

775
01:21:16.020 --> 01:21:19.500
When I was a kid,

776
01:21:19.500 --> 01:21:23.900
what we used to do when we were feeling silly was have contests

777
01:21:23.900 --> 01:21:27.420
as to how many people you could fit into a telephone booth.

778
01:21:27.420 --> 01:21:31.780
I see John saying, yes, yes, I remember that.

779
01:21:31.780 --> 01:21:37.740
Whatever. Nowadays you can't fit people into a telephone booth because there's no such thing as a telephone booth.

780
01:21:37.740 --> 01:21:41.180
Such is progress, you know, you have these little things there and

781
01:21:41.180 --> 01:21:45.420
even without, you know, there's no booth. Nowadays I understand what the kids do is

782
01:21:45.420 --> 01:21:52.860
is they all gather in a musical thing and they put somebody above them and they, what's that called?

783
01:21:52.860 --> 01:21:58.300
Moshing, where you put someone above you and crowd surfing, that's it.

784
01:21:58.300 --> 01:22:04.300
Well, suppose we go back to my generation, forget about this crowd surfing stuff,

785
01:22:04.300 --> 01:22:10.300
and we get back into a telephone booth and we ask how big would the telephone booth have to be

786
01:22:10.300 --> 01:22:40.300
To get everyone in the world into it, the average person, I guess I'm 5'8", it's roughly the average person of the world and I'm, I don't know, a foot thick and maybe two feet wide and 5'8 tall and we, and now look, this telephone booth is going to get crowded and it's going to be smelly in about a minute and I'm not advocating that we do it, but if we did it, how big would the telephone booth have to be to fit all the people in it?

787
01:22:40.300 --> 01:22:49.300
The answer is one mile cubic, a mile high, a mile wide, and a mile deep, and everyone could get into it, just one cubic mile.

788
01:22:49.300 --> 01:22:59.300
Just to give you an idea of how few people there are, and there are these people saying, you know, there are just so many people and we're going to, I don't know, whatever.

789
01:22:59.300 --> 01:23:15.300
Now, taking a long run view, one of these days if the government gets off our back, we're going to colonize the moon and Mars, and we're going to go to other solar systems,

790
01:23:15.300 --> 01:23:22.300
and if you take a real long view the sun is going to go out one day, and we'd better be not only on other planets but other solar systems.

791
01:23:22.300 --> 01:23:31.300
To do that we need more people. For every 10 million people you get one semi-Einstein or one Mises.

792
01:23:31.300 --> 01:23:36.300
So the more people the better, if the human race is going to survive.

793
01:23:36.300 --> 01:23:44.300
So what these people are doing is putting their heads in the sand and I'm offering a more open scenario.

794
01:23:44.300 --> 01:23:52.300
Now, here is a ploy that I use when I debate people.

795
01:23:52.300 --> 01:24:00.300
I remember using this and boy was I booed because it was a hostile audience and I said my opponent is going to come up to the podium here in about a minute

796
01:24:00.300 --> 01:24:04.300
and he's going to tell you that we have too many people.

797
01:24:04.300 --> 01:24:11.300
He has it within his power to reduce the size of the population by one.

798
01:24:11.300 --> 01:24:16.300
But by the fact that he's sitting over there, I note that he hasn't done it.

799
01:24:16.300 --> 01:24:21.300
See, he's a hypocrite. He's acting incompatibly with his own crappy theory.

800
01:24:21.300 --> 01:24:26.300
Oh, boo, boo, you know, his, this is horrible, you know, you can't say that.

801
01:24:26.300 --> 01:24:30.300
But it's true. The argument is intellectually incoherent.

802
01:24:30.300 --> 01:24:33.300
It violates praxeological insight.

803
01:24:33.300 --> 01:24:39.300
Namely, you can't non-contradictorily say there were too many people because you're alive.

804
01:24:39.300 --> 01:24:44.300
If there were too many people, you should kill yourself.

805
01:24:44.300 --> 01:24:47.300
Okay, I still have a few minutes for questions.

806
01:24:47.300 --> 01:24:51.300
Anyone have any questions on this stuff?

807
01:24:51.300 --> 01:24:54.300
Questions, objections?

808
01:24:54.300 --> 01:24:57.300
Well, I've got more here and I don't want to...

809
01:24:57.300 --> 01:25:01.300
Let me see if I've got anything else here.

810
01:25:01.300 --> 01:25:06.300
Sure, as I said, you know, questions can be free-ranging on anything.

811
01:25:06.300 --> 01:25:18.300
I'm still going back to the doughnut and the example you gave of something in the center of a landlocked property is a homestead in the X area.

812
01:25:18.300 --> 01:25:30.300
A person in Y has to put up a sign saying there's this property here that's not homestead and they have to let people go through Y to get to X and homestead it.

813
01:25:30.300 --> 01:25:43.300
Wouldn't that then hold true for any other kind of property and not just land and the garbage in your house and things that you don't want?

814
01:25:43.300 --> 01:25:48.300
Well, I'm not sure I understand you, but see right now we have two dimensions.

815
01:25:48.300 --> 01:25:58.300
Remember in the episode of the Simpsons where he put a big umbrella over the whole city so that everyone would have to pay him for electricity and there'd be no sunlight?

816
01:25:58.300 --> 01:26:01.300
Well, he would then be precluding people in an upward direction.

817
01:26:01.300 --> 01:26:04.300
You couldn't do it in a downward direction either.

818
01:26:04.300 --> 01:26:08.300
But I'm not sure I understand what you mean by, in your house, keeping garbage.

819
01:26:08.300 --> 01:26:13.300
Well, if you're not, I mean, if you have something you don't want in your house,

820
01:26:13.300 --> 01:26:20.300
and it's kind of the same concept to be forestalling by not putting up a sign outside your house

821
01:26:20.300 --> 01:26:24.300
and also not allowing an easement for people to walk through your house

822
01:26:24.300 --> 01:26:27.300
and get this piece of property in your house that you don't want.

823
01:26:27.300 --> 01:26:32.300
So, in other words, I keep garbage in my house and it smells up the neighborhood?

824
01:26:32.300 --> 01:26:38.300
No, just that you keep garbage in your house that you don't want.

825
01:26:38.300 --> 01:26:42.300
And so by keeping it in your house and not letting other people know outside your house,

826
01:26:42.300 --> 01:26:44.300
you have the stuff in your house and you don't want it,

827
01:26:44.300 --> 01:26:48.300
I'm not letting you do it and I'm not telling you it's there for stalling,

828
01:26:48.300 --> 01:26:53.300
in the same way that person Y is keeping in effect this property X.

829
01:26:53.300 --> 01:27:06.300
I see, I see, I see what you're saying. You're a nasty girl. That's a vicious reductio. That's, Adam?

830
01:27:06.300 --> 01:27:14.300
No, no, no, it's not garbage. What it is, if I understand you correctly, I've got this bicycle. I'm just not using it.

831
01:27:14.300 --> 01:27:21.300
But I'm not letting anyone else use it either. Don't I have an obligation to say, hey, here's a bicycle, come take it?

832
01:27:21.300 --> 01:27:25.300
And I'm just sort of being mean, right?

833
01:27:25.300 --> 01:27:29.300
Well, can we kick her out?

834
01:27:29.300 --> 01:27:35.300
I mean, how dare you criticize me in an intelligent way?

835
01:27:35.300 --> 01:27:38.300
No, I'm kidding. You know I'm kidding.

836
01:27:38.300 --> 01:27:40.300
That's a very, very good point.

837
01:27:40.300 --> 01:27:44.300
You must be a good chess player and a very bright person.

838
01:27:44.300 --> 01:27:46.300
This isn't the first time you've got me good.

839
01:27:46.300 --> 01:27:49.300
Let me see if I can wiggle out of this one.

840
01:27:49.300 --> 01:27:52.980
See, what I'm saying, there's a difference that I can think of.

841
01:27:52.980 --> 01:27:58.420
I don't know if it's a relevant difference that it'll satisfy you that it's relevantly different, but at least it's different.

842
01:27:58.420 --> 01:28:03.340
See, the reason I'm all up on this X business, and it could be the Z because everyone could be in the X,

843
01:28:03.340 --> 01:28:07.620
and now you're precluding everyone from the rest of the world, doesn't matter, goes both ways,

844
01:28:07.620 --> 01:28:16.660
but my justification for this is that as nature abhors a vacuum, libertarian theory abhors something unowned.

845
01:28:16.660 --> 01:28:28.260
Now, you have to concede to me that the bicycle I've got in my back bedroom is owned, or at least it was once owned, so it doesn't apply.

846
01:28:28.260 --> 01:28:37.660
And if I want to keep the bicycle there, I'm getting some enjoyment from keeping the bicycle there, keeping it from all you good people, but it's different.

847
01:28:37.660 --> 01:28:42.960
Now, I don't know that it's relevantly different, but at least it's different at a first shot.

848
01:28:42.960 --> 01:28:56.960
In that example, I sort of see a parallel between having knowledge of something that you are not giving out to people, is that okay?

849
01:28:56.960 --> 01:28:59.960
And from your earlier statements, you said that, of course it is.

850
01:28:59.960 --> 01:29:05.960
So if you've got, say X is a mountain, Y is the area around the mountain, someone is homesteaded, Y,

851
01:29:05.960 --> 01:29:09.680
and why and people would look up and you know people see the fence there and why

852
01:29:09.680 --> 01:29:18.560
and they would assume that X is also homesteading but you know why isn't it going to tell them one way or the other?

853
01:29:18.560 --> 01:29:27.560
You know whenever I'm introduced to a new person and they find out that I'm an economist they say well will the share of the stock go up or down or something?

854
01:29:27.560 --> 01:29:33.160
And I say I don't know and if I did know I wouldn't tell you because I would take advantage of it myself.

855
01:29:33.160 --> 01:29:40.720
If I really knew for sure, I would, you know, buy it and not tell you because you'd lower the price or, you know, lower the profit for it.

856
01:29:40.720 --> 01:29:46.400
So you might try the reductio. Well, each of us has knowledge that we're not telling other people.

857
01:29:46.400 --> 01:29:53.720
Do we have an obligation to tell the knowledge? No. Now we're getting into positive obligations, Bill.

858
01:29:53.720 --> 01:29:57.240
And I think the same thing applies to the bicycle, but it was a real good try.

859
01:29:57.240 --> 01:30:00.680
And I appreciate the thought that went into that.

860
01:30:00.680 --> 01:30:05.880
Other questions? Did you already hand up Adam? No? I thought you did. Prem?

861
01:30:05.880 --> 01:30:19.680
The problem I have with this scenario is that it seems like by saying that Y has a positive obligation to tell others that there is this un-owned, un-homestead land within the bounds of their property,

862
01:30:19.680 --> 01:30:26.680
It seems to me that it's like Z has a right to X, but ultimately Z doesn't necessarily has a right to X.

863
01:30:26.680 --> 01:30:31.680
It's simply that if they're able to get to X and it's not pre-owned, they can then own it.

864
01:30:31.680 --> 01:30:36.680
But if no one owns X, no one necessarily has the right to own X.

865
01:30:36.680 --> 01:30:40.680
Well, first of all, I would just correct you on a minor point.

866
01:30:40.680 --> 01:30:42.680
I'm trying to get out of this positive obligation.

867
01:30:42.680 --> 01:30:44.680
So I'm saying it's not a positive obligation.

868
01:30:44.680 --> 01:30:48.680
It's rather inherent in the idea of homesteading and in the idea of property rights.

869
01:30:48.680 --> 01:30:58.680
But that's a minor point. But on the major point, I do disagree with you. I think people do have a right to homestead, unhomesteadable, unhomesteaded land.

870
01:30:58.680 --> 01:31:04.680
Everyone has a right to homestead, unhomesteaded land. Now the objection that Hans Hoppe and I have gotten into,

871
01:31:04.680 --> 01:31:14.680
or the dispute that we've gotten into on immigration, is I say right now there's vast lands in Utah and Montana and in the West.

872
01:31:14.680 --> 01:31:22.680
And suppose somebody came in from Bangladesh with a helicopter or he was a good pole vaulter, you know, he just sort of got there.

873
01:31:22.680 --> 01:31:26.680
What law is he breaking by being there?

874
01:31:26.680 --> 01:31:29.680
You see, I sort of share Hans' view about immigration.

875
01:31:29.680 --> 01:31:35.680
I don't like being overrun by hordes of people who are going to engage in suicide bombing and stuff like that.

876
01:31:35.680 --> 01:31:37.680
And I'd like to keep them out.

877
01:31:37.680 --> 01:31:42.680
But I think the only way to keep them out is to first privatize every square inch of the U.S.

878
01:31:42.680 --> 01:31:47.680
And then Hans' point kicks in, because then immigration is trespassed.

879
01:31:47.680 --> 01:31:51.680
But as long as this one square inch of unowned land in the middle of Montana,

880
01:31:51.680 --> 01:31:55.680
or in the middle of Nevada, and there's plenty in the middle of Nevada,

881
01:31:55.680 --> 01:32:00.680
I can't see my way clear to agreeing that people who go in there and homestead it

882
01:32:00.680 --> 01:32:03.680
are violating any libertarian law.

883
01:32:03.680 --> 01:32:08.680
But as I say, these are tough issues, and we're out of time,

884
01:32:08.680 --> 01:32:11.680
or should I, can I go a little bit more, or should I shut up?

885
01:32:11.680 --> 01:32:15.680
Okay, two more questions. Stephen and him.

886
01:32:15.680 --> 01:32:21.680
You may have addressed this in prior sessions.

887
01:32:21.680 --> 01:32:30.680
Ignore the question, but what is either the most economically just or efficient way

888
01:32:30.680 --> 01:32:45.680
You would advocate for privatizing the general resources that are either publicly owned or state land in Nevada or Montana or the oceans or the roads.

889
01:32:45.680 --> 01:32:54.680
That's kind of a libertarian solution to getting from a state of public ownership to putting it in private hands.

890
01:32:54.680 --> 01:32:59.380
You're a vicious fellow too. That's a very tough question.

891
01:32:59.380 --> 01:33:06.380
And I would divide it into two. First is the unowned stuff, the middle of Nevada, I mean the government claims it but they never homesteaded it.

892
01:33:06.380 --> 01:33:14.380
There I would say the first guy that parks himself in there and starts mixing his labor with the land, fixing up the cactus or whatever you do there.

893
01:33:14.380 --> 01:33:21.380
That's easy. Then what do you do for the library? The Auburn has a library, it's a public library.

894
01:33:21.380 --> 01:33:26.380
Well, if we had the God's eye view and we knew exactly from whence all the money came,

895
01:33:26.380 --> 01:33:33.380
what you'd do is sell it or give a share of that library building in proportion to the taxes that went into it.

896
01:33:33.380 --> 01:33:37.380
In other words, it would mainly be auburnians who would own that library.

897
01:33:37.380 --> 01:33:42.380
The street here in front of the Mises Institute, what's the name of the street?

898
01:33:42.380 --> 01:33:45.380
Magnolia, whoever paid taxes.

899
01:33:45.380 --> 01:33:49.380
Now, if you couldn't find out who paid the taxes, then maybe based on the frontage,

900
01:33:49.380 --> 01:34:03.380
Like the Mises Institute has 50 yards of frontage, so they own 50 yards over the total length of the thing, a share in the company called the Magnolia Company.

901
01:34:03.380 --> 01:34:12.380
If you couldn't find that out somehow, what Margaret Thatcher did with the public housing was reasonably good.

902
01:34:12.380 --> 01:34:17.380
Namely, you sort of throw up your arms and say, we don't know who owns this, but we know who's homesteaded it.

903
01:34:17.380 --> 01:34:20.380
namely the people that are there right now, so they own it.

904
01:34:20.380 --> 01:34:24.380
And that might be a good way to do the public housing, it would be very politically acceptable

905
01:34:24.380 --> 01:34:27.380
because the people in the public housing are poor and black,

906
01:34:27.380 --> 01:34:33.380
and if you just said, we'll give it to you, and now you can buy it and sell it to whomever you wanted,

907
01:34:33.380 --> 01:34:37.380
and a market develops, all the poor people would be booted out of Manhattan,

908
01:34:37.380 --> 01:34:40.380
as they should be, because what the hell are they doing there?

909
01:34:40.380 --> 01:34:46.380
There's no room for poor people, and blacks happen to be poor, but that's irrelevant.

910
01:34:46.380 --> 01:34:51.380
Manhattan is a fountainhead of wealth. You just can't have poor people.

911
01:34:51.380 --> 01:34:56.380
The poor people have to come in from the suburbs or the Brooklyn or somewhere to clean the places or whatever.

912
01:34:56.380 --> 01:35:00.380
There's a public housing development right next to Lincoln Center.

913
01:35:00.380 --> 01:35:03.380
You know what Lincoln Center means in terms of real estate values.

914
01:35:03.380 --> 01:35:09.380
And there they are paying $25 a month for their apartment. It's crazy.

915
01:35:09.380 --> 01:35:16.380
So, another way is, there was this thing in British Columbia, the BCRIC, British Columbia Resources Investment Corporation,

916
01:35:16.380 --> 01:35:24.380
where they gave five shares to every citizen of British Columbia in the company, the private company called BRIC.

917
01:35:24.380 --> 01:35:32.380
So there are various ways of doing this, and it's sort of complicated, and there are different principles, but there's a hierarchy.

918
01:35:32.380 --> 01:35:37.380
First, give it to the rightful owner. Second, if you can't figure that out, then this, then that.

919
01:35:37.380 --> 01:35:40.380
And I'll have a bit more to say about this when I talk about reparations.

920
01:35:40.380 --> 01:35:43.580
It's somewhat related.

921
01:35:43.580 --> 01:35:46.780
You get me afterward. I'm not messing with you.

922
01:35:46.780 --> 01:35:47.780
Thanks for your attention.