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8 Environment |
Imagine you are about to acquire a house, and have the unusual choice of buying it or renting it. You do the sums and find that the two sets of cost are identical. The only difference is that if you rent it the landlord gets to pay for repairs but enjoys any appreciation in its market value, whereas if you purchase it you pay those expenses and receive that future gain.
Now, question: in which of the two cases will you take the trouble to do most to improve the house, keep it nicely decorated, its garden well tended, etc?
And that's why, other things being equal, homes that are owned by the occupier tend to be much better cared for than homes that are rented. We can tell that easily, just from a drive around the neighborhood!
In Segment 7 under "The Nature of Taxation" we noted that the self-ownership axiom leads logically to the conclusion that we exclusively own not just our own lives but also any property acquired without theft or deception - whether by making it or by exchanging our labor for it.
And ownership of the things around us is entirely central to the matter of environmental care.
Another question, to illustrate this vital point. Imagine you are a sheep farmer living a couple of centuries
ago in England. You have some grazing land, and a flock of sheep, and know that within the village
there are several acres of grass land known to be "common"; that is, anybody wishing to use it is free to
do so, in any way except to build or live on it. This is fact, incidentally; all over that country there are
parcels of land called "commons" to this day.
So you have the choice: you can graze your flock on the common land first, or on your own land. Which do you choose, in your own rational self-interest?
Again the question is simple and the answer, obvious. But now notice the result: come Spring time, all the local sheep farmers rush to use the common grass first, and very soon it becomes over-grazed; not only is there none left, the ground is damaged so that it cannot readily grow more. It may be useless for the rest of the year. So what has happened is that a perfectly good resource has been spoiled, because it was "owned" by everybody instead of by somebody. Everyone acted in their own interests, yet in total everybody acted against their own interests! That's the paradox, and it's known as "the tragedy of the commons."
"Public Property"
"Property" is stuff that is owned; and as we've seen, "ownership" means that somebody has the exclusive right to control and dispose of the stuff. Therefore stuff is property only if it has an identifiable owner, some person or group of persons with the right to control and dispose of it after having acquired it in a proper manner; such as by a voluntary exchange under contract."Public" on the other hand means that there is no identifiable person or group; the term refers to everyone or nobody - or possibly to the government, whose composition changes frequently and which never acquired anything by voluntary exchange or other honest means.
Accordingly, "Public Property" is an oxymoron; the two terms contradict one another, and as Aristotle said, "contradictions do not exist in reality but only in the minds of those who do not think clearly." It is a gigantic myth; a classic case of "garbage in" which leads to all manner of "garbage out" (literally) in damage to the environment, as in the "commons tragedy" above.
In the 19th Century demand for whale oil was high, but nobody owned the oceans - they were, and are, "public
property." Result: the near extinction of whales, prevented only by the discovery and exploitation of
hydrocarbon oil and its ever more affordable extraction and refinement by such as J D Rockefeller.
Today there is sometimes alleged to be "overfishing" when fishing fleets catch "too many" fish. Again: nobody owns the ocean, it's "public property", so there is no owner to rent out fishing rights and fish stock is endangered. The fault is not with the fishers, but with the absence of property rights. A nice example of this was the case of the Cayman Turtle (albeit not exactly a fish!) that was fast going extinct because there was no identifiable owner. A for-profit turtle farm was founded in 1968 to raise them in captivity, selling some for meat and releasing others into the ocean; end of problem.
There is also alleged to be "dumping" of damaging emissions such as CO2, soot carbon and sulfur into the atmosphere. The root of the problem is that nobody owns the atmosphere, so nobody is there to rent out limited pollution rights (for his portion of the air) and sue if they are exceeded. Similarly garbage may be dumped into a "public-property" river, with damage downstream; nobody owns the river, so nobody is there to moderate or prevent the practice.
We need not suppose that it's easy, to get ownership rights established for such huge resources as the oceans or the atmosphere; of course not. But pollution and misallocation of resources will certainly continue until they are so established; because their absence causes the problem.
Collective Farming
When the Pilgrims settled near Plymouth they followed a communist agricultural method; the land was said
to be "common" and the principle followed was "[labor] from each according to his ability, [food] to each
according to his need." The result was that the colony was nearly wiped out by malnutrition and resulting
disease; only in the nick of time were individual property rights established so that each farming family
kept the fruits of their own labor - and exchanged them of course in the market. American agriculture
has hardly looked back, and remains the breadbasket of the world.
Such collective farming was imposed on Russian peasants in the 20th Century, and by its end the Soviet Union was, likewise, close to starvation. By 1989 one-third of all food consumed there was produced by the peasants allowed to own about 10% of the available land and keep or market what they grew. The disaster in China during the same period is even better known; tens of millions died.
Those dreadful examples followed imposition, by government, of the myth of "public property." When true ownership - private property - was re-established, prosperity followed.
Why? - simple: motive! The farmer's personal rewards depend on his labor, and as the land owner he has a direct interest in making it as productive as possible over as long a period as possible. In that simple principle lies the solution to the problem of over-harvesting of timber; if the logging is on "public land" nobody is motivated to plant new trees for the next generation. Proper tree-farming, with the owner having a direct long-term interest, does. If there is "too much" forest clearance in the Amazon river valley, the reason is right here in this Segment: that land is said to be "public" instead of being actually owned.
Government Control
Perhaps dimly perceiving that problems follow a failure to establish private property rights, all too often governments step in to muddy the waters. The political process is used to set rules. Being a political process, the rules are chosen to favor those who are politically strong - whether they have an interest in the asset being controlled, or not (and it's not easy to tell which is worse.) Rules, expensive to obey, are set for factory owners about how much pollution they may emit; and laws by their nature being one-size-fits-all, sometimes they may help, sometimes they have a net negative effect (not improving the environment, while making the goods produced more expensive.) Since there is no market operating, through which the price of polluting could be rationally determined, it's hit and miss at best.
With an exception here and there, the practical evidence from around the world is that the more powerful
the government, the worse the damage to the environment. Through the 1990s, Chinese cities were laden
with smog. The former Communist area of Europe is still notorious for gross pollution
from its often needless, old-technology and uneconomic steel and power plants. Those who suppose
government to be the solution to wicked capitalist polluters should take a tour there - and it's no
coincidence that history's only serious nuclear power accident occurred in the Soviet Union, where private
ownership and responsibility were most fully suppressed and where government control was tightest.
The notion that government control is an appropriate way to keep the environment healthy is also
demolished by the fact that by far the most dangerous threats to it have been deliberately created by
government, as weapons of mass destruction. No matter (for now) that those weapons may
never be used; they do exist, and unless they are safely taken apart they will threaten all life on Earth for thousands of years to come. Example: the storage of 2,600 tons of bio-chemical weapons at
Pueblo, CO. The destructive
power of what those half-buried huts contain could, if released, turn the planet into a desert. Trouble
is, everything is stored in canisters and the canisters are going rusty. Work is now in progress to
dispose of them safely - good, let's hope it succeeds. But they were put there by government in the
first place.
In 2005 there was a disaster in New Orleans; much of that city sheltered behind levees, and they fell
apart under the impact of an unusually strong hurricane. Pretty well everyone was blamed for it except
the actual culprits: government. Government built the levees, causing massive imbalance to the water
table and even the coastline. Government designed them to withstand Class 3 hurricanes but nothing more.
When hundreds of thousands of homes were flooded, it was to government that the victims turned, and it
was government that promised a virtual blank check to rebuild - without pausing to ask whether it was
sensible to rebuild. This article shows detail.
The environment is far too delicate to let government anywhere close!
Segment Review
Vague and alarming generalities are the stock-in-trade of the "Greens" and this application of reason may have been unfamiliar to most students. Before proceeding please address and answer these Questions, and run any difficulty by your Mentor - and do spend time in "Further Reading", especially the articles with free on line access.
For further reading:
Everyday Anarchy, Part 3 by Stefan Molyneux
The World's Biggest Oxymoron
The Sacred Green Cow
"No Turning Back" by Wallace Kaufman
"The Bottomless Well" by Huber & Mills "Death by Government" by R J Rummel