Before founding CEI, Smith served as the Director of Government Relations for the Council for a Competitive Economy, as a senior economist for the Association of American Railroads, and for five years as a senior policy analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency. Only such a decentralized institutional framework for expressing environmental values offers any hope of integrating our environmental values into our modern world. Only private ownership allows the rich system of voluntary exchange which would make possible environmental values to compete with other human values. Free market environmentalism does represent a radical departure from the status quo in environmental policy, even though it is largely based upon the application of contemporary political economy and indebted to the work of Nobel Laureate economists F.A. Hayek, Ronald H. Coase, James Buchanan, and Milton Friedman. Cultural theorist Aaron Wildavsky argued that the basic motivation of the more irrational environmental activist is radical egalitarianism.
Egalitarians typically object to all societal asymmetries.
This instinct adapts easily to the environmental policy arena. Egalitarian resentment of change welcomes the suggestion that cancer is caused by corporate malfeasance or that modern technology is responsible for declining public health. The separation between church and state was critical to the cessation of earlier religious conflict . That venture was largely unsuccessful. The premature death of the modest environmental reform bills of the 104th Congress should be attributed to a failure to communicate the principles of the reform agenda to the public, not to any public policy over-reach.