From: ald@clipper.ingr.com (Al Date)
Newsgroups: sci.econ,talk.environment,talk.politics.misc,talk.politics.theory
Subject: Re: Global Village
Date: 13 Aug 92 17:48:19 GMT
Organization: Intergraph Advanced Processor Division - Palo Alto, CA

In article <1992Aug8.210022.23302@usenet.ins.cwru.edu> bj368@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Mike E. Romano) writes:
>
>Did the government actually build the warheads and the reactors?
>Of course not.
>Private industry happily built them...which is an excellent example
>of how business totally lacks morality and will happily wreck the
>earth if libertarians have their way.
>-- 


This statement ignores a lot of empirical data.

In the first place, the nuclear power industry was "facilitated"
by liability limitations passed in Congress, without which the
industry could not have bought liability insurance.  It is doubtful
that a free market, through its own dynamics, would have allowed
this industry to occur, without considerably more assurances of
safety at least.  But the libertarian economists have been saying
that for years, and nobody listened.

As to warheads, there is no market for warheads outside of govt
agencies.  There may be some valid use for warheads in national
defense (or perhaps I should say there may have been a valid use)
but it is simply ridiculous to blame their existence on the markets
which simply respond to demand.  Even more warheads were created
in the non-market economy of the USSR.

This is not to say that freely acting individuals do no damage
to their environment.  But freely acting, wealthy individuals also 
support ecological organizations and make green-ness a desired 
"consumer item."  They are willing and able to pay to clean things
up.  This is not the case with people who are living from hand to
mouth.  But it turns out that unconstrained government IS a major,
if not the dominant source of identifiable eco-destruction in the 
modern world.

If we compare the ecological problems of the West to those of the
former USSR bloc, we find a double or triple
order of magnitude of difference.

There are over 600 nuclear waste dump sites WITHIN THE MOSCOW CITY
LIMITS.  There are hundreds of thousands of people walking around
the Ukraine (and elsewhere) who have been exposed
to mega-doses of radiation.  There are entire cities whose air is
so polluted that 90% of the inhabitants have respiratory problems.
There is a lake in Siberia which consists of crude oil 6 feet deep
20 miles long and a mile wide, which is still growing from leaks in 
a pipeline nearby.

Total oil leaks in the ex-USSR, mostly onto fragile Siberian forest land,
equal one Exxon Valdez PER DAY, ongoing.
Forest lands are clear cut and allowed to erode to an extent unimaginable
in the USA.

The Arctic Sea is dying due to ongoing dumping of raw radioactive 
materials.  The Aral Sea is disappearing due to diversion of all its
water to grow cotton in Uzbekistan, resulting in a huge dustbowl
where there used to be a hundred square mile eco-system.  The dust just
from the ex-Aral Sea has increased global airborne dust by 5%, 
according to National Geographic.

Every river in the ex-USSR is contaminated beyond the imagination of
Westerners.  Billions of acres of topsoil are eroded away.  Biological
and chemical weapons have gotten loose and wiped out entire areas.
Nuclear bombs were used for hundreds of geological "experiments," 
threatening the underground water supply for centuries.  [US News & WR]

All this is the tip of the iceberg; information which is only becoming
available since the emasculation of the KGB.  What we have in the
ex-USSR is a man-made ecological disaster which is unparalleled,
and truly frightening.

It is impossible to imagine this kind of damage occurring in the West.
Why?  Because of property rights and civil law.  Whereas property 
rights allow an individual to do some damage, they also allow an
individual to protect.  Single source air and water pollution is
mitigated by lawsuits.  The legal ownership of your own body gives
you the power to protect it from encroachment.  This power simply 
did not exist in a system which destroyed property rights.  People
had no recourse, nor even the ability to gather the information needed
to know what they were being exposed to.

In conclusion, propertarianism can be harnessed as a strong force
for the protection of the environment, although it is certainly
not a panacea in and of itself.  On the other hand, a system without
individual property rights, where a central authority makes all
economic decisions, is potentially devastating to the environment, due to a
lack of checks and balances, and due to its actual scale.


There is much to be gained by the decentralization of power, both in
humanist and ecologicial terms.  For this reason, I call for a coalition
of non-statist Greens and ecologically-concerned Libertarians.


--Al Date