From: smith@ctron.com (Larry Smith)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Re: Is car pooling for real? (was Re: Are bikes really less polluting?)
Date: 27 Jul 92 15:04:21 GMT
Reply-To: smith@ctron.com
Organization: Cabletron Systems, Inc.

In article <1992Jul24.194747.8927@cco.caltech.edu>, rkrii@cco.caltech.edu (Roberk Kim Rickenbrode II) writes:
>{Malcolm}   If so, what is the proper US-speak
>         term for planning how to co-ordinate resources and needs by means of
>         appropriate pricing?
>
>{Smith} "The Free Market".
>[Larry Smith`s signature deleted]

>  Except that the free market does not correlate resources and needs very well.

Except that that conclusion only and inevitably comes from people with a
vested interest in control and more control.  Socialists, in other words.

>For example, up to now, heavy industry had a free ride as far as pollution 
>was concerned because the secondary costs -- pollution, loss of habitat, etc --
>were absorbed by those afflicted, with the exception of legal compensation. 

Hardly.  As these costs are identified and sorted out with at least some tiny
modicum of scientific fact they are charged back to the industries and markets
involved.  Which is why every car now leaves the factory carrying nearly a
thousand dollars worth of pollution control and safety equipment.  This is a
perfectly valid market "force" and were it not for people like yourself who
seize every opportunity to work their political agenda, such forces would
work even better.  But the system gets distorted and damaged and inequities
result when the redress continues into out-and-out punishment, as it now does
for the car, which is daily blamed for for more damage and pollution than it
is really responsible for in order to justify the excessive fees and taxes
charged against them for other purposes.  Specifically, purposes of social
engineering.  Meanwhile, other sources more egregious go unrecognized while
the debate rages over cars.

>There are movements now to have the sources accept some of these costs --  
>internalizing the externalities -- by taxes of some form.  While this 

"Taxes" are the answer only if the question was "how do we louse things up?"
"Taxes" aren't used to address the problems, they are used to support the
welfare state, the national debt or that corporate welfare system called the
national defense industry, which between them account for something like 90%
of the Federal budget.  The only real "solutions" that have come out of gov't
regulation come in the form of legal requirements, such as emissions require-
ments.

>will give the free market more information and allow for the most efficient
>allocation of resource use and needs via prices, it does so only within
>a limited framework.

The framework, as you call it, it established and maintained by the gov't.
It is not a feature of the free market system.

>                     For example, future needs are ignored by the tacit
>assumption that money in the bank is equivalent to wood in the forests (ie,

This is your reading of it, and not based in fact.  In fact, in a *true* free
market system, large tracts of land would be extensively protected, by the
people, like yourself, who purchased it to protect it.  They could be owned
by foundations or universities, or by entertainment companies dedicated to
hunters or campers or other "outdoor" types.  This does not happen for two
reasons, both related to the gov't.  First, the gov't has subsumed the
"entertainment" aspect with the National Park System, whose easy and usually
free access inhibit competition.  Second, the gov't has, at the behest of
"environmentalists" assumed broad powers to regulate and control land, thereby
reducing its value and making it a poor investment.  It has distorted and
damaged the free market and closed off many options that might otherwise now
be employed to protect the environment.

In short, the environmentalists put all their eggs in one basket, and then
complained when the voters gave it to the Republicans to hold.  What did you
expect?

The rest of your post follows from this flawed analysis.  Since I don't buy
your premise, you must surely understand there is no point in debating your
conclusions.

>  Read _For the Common Good_ by Daly and Cobb for a much more lucid and
>scholarly portrayal of misplaced confidence in the market, and the rest
>of modern economics.

And I would heartily suggest "When Gov't Goes Private" for a very lucid and
scholarly portrayal of how the free market can be used *by* gov't has a very
powerful and flexible tool to accomplish exactly what you propose.  Except,
of course, that powerful, central, socialist control.

Larry Smith (smith@ctron.com) No, I don't speak for Cabletron.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Daily I'd go over to Congress - that grand old benevolent national asylum - and
report on the inmates there.  Never seen a body of men with tongues more handy,
or information more uncertain.  If one of those men had been present when the
Deity was on the point of saying "Let there be light" we never would've had it.
Newsgroups: sci.environment