Environmental Regulations

We don't need environmental regulations. In fact, the presence of "regulations" is the cause for environmental degradation. Regulations are, after all, permissions given by the government for one entity to pollute the property of others. Instead, we need strict enforcement of property rights. Under such a regime, you would be perfectly free to spoil your own land -- at your own cost. But you would not ever have the right to pollute your neighbor's land without his consent. There would thus be a zero-tolerance policy for pollution. The liberal / socialist may say, "but under this type of system, rich people and corporations would buy land and destroy it." False. The value that can be extracted from land can NEVER exceed the value of the land itself -- it is a mathematical and economic impossibility. If there are $2 million of oil reserves under your property, then your property is worth $2 million plus. It can never be worth less than $2 million, and it can never be profitable to spend money in the reckless pursuit of that $2 million in reserves, since to do so would result in net revenues of less than $2 million. Under a libertarian regime of absolute property rights, any activity that violated the property rights of others would be punishable at both the civil-tort and criminal levels. One could not pollute the air unless the pollution could be confined to one's own air space (impossible), and one could not pollute the water unless the pollution stayed in one's own water and did not violate the property rights of other land owners. Under such a regime, environmentalist groups would be able to "save" the environment more effectively. Instead of lobbying Congress for new environmental laws, environmental groups -- which are notoriously well funded -- could spend their collective resources buying land. Then, they could manage that land in an environmentally sound manner. For example, if ANWR were privatized and sold to the highest bidder, the Siera Club and affiliated groups could buy it and ensure that drilling would never take place there. Alternatively, if drillers could muster more money to purchase the land, then this would mean that humanity valued the oil more than the unspoiled land. However, if the land were privately owned (even by drillers), then its owners would have an incentive to extract value from it in the most environmentally sound manner possible, since they would not want the land to be worthless once all of the underlying resources had been extracted. Again, land cannot possibly be worth less than the underlying resources, so the price for ANWR would have to be higher than the value of the oil that could be immediately extracted -- thus, it would be in the interests of its owners to leave a "salvageable" value to the land, and this can only be achieved through sound environmental practices. Regulations enable polluters and pollution. They give advantages to big businesses over small, and developed countries over developing. Anyone shilling for more regulations is unknowingly (or sometimes knowingly) shilling for more pollution, unfair corporate profits, and Western hegemony. We do not need environmental regulations.