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The BIRCH BARK BBS  / 414-242-5070
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The Future of Freedom Foundation * May 1996

If Liberty Mattered, Once More, 
a Presidential Candidate's Press Conference: Part IV
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by Richard M. Ebeling

Mother Jones: Mr. Candidate, in your opening statement, you made
what surely must be one of the most irresponsible proposals ever
heard from a candidate in this or any other presidential election.
Can you really expect the American people to take you seriously
when you propose to sell off practically all government-owned land,
including national parks and wildlife preserves? Do you actually
want to leave the environment to the shortsighted profit motive of
the marketplace, in which the green of the dollar counts for more
than the green of the fields?

The Candidate: Few issues have been more misunderstood and
misrepresented than the problems of conservation and the
environment. One of the most vital functions performed by a
free-market economy is to assist in the economizing, caring for,
and maintaining of those things which people value and which are
very limited in supply. Nothing is a stronger force for
conservation than the profit motive. 

When a person is allowed to own something, he has an incentive to
think twice before he wastes, misuses, or abuses it. If he does
misuse or waste what he owns, he directly suffers the cost, he
loses the benefits that could have been his if only he had showed
more care for his property. And nothing is likely to result in
greater abuse and misuse of something than when it belongs to
nobody. 

The tragedy of many of the policies advocated by those in the
environmental movement is that they want to put control over the
things that they consider most precious in the hands of those who
have the least capability of making reasonable decisions about
preserving those valued resources and rare gifts of nature.
Government management and control of the environment is another
example of that false trust in socialism that has led to so many
disappointments in so many different parts of the world in our
century. Indeed, in countries like Russia, which have borne the
brunt of the socialist experiment in our times, the worst
environmental disasters and conditions have been experienced. 
What is worth preserving in nature? What are the best means and
methods to care for it? Should we merely maintain what we have, or
should we perhaps try to augment its amount? Have we set aside too
much and, in fact, encroached too heavily on the attainment of
other things we value, as well? 

How are we to know the answers to these questions? Even the most
die-hard environmentalist, unless he is one of those few extremists
who would like to see man extinct in the belief that everything is
worth preserving except the human race, believes that some land
must also be used for residential housing, places of work, and
non-wildlife recreation. To live, man must grow food, raise
animals, and use resources for his clothing, his daily amenities of
life, and his arts and sciences. 

The advantage of leaving these problems to the marketplace is that
it is then in the hands of the people themselves to decide these
issues. People want more wildlife areas for aesthetic appreciation
or recreational enjoyment? The greater demand for these things, as
expressed in the prices that consumers are willing to pay for them,
increases the profitability for owners of land and resources; thus,
they use less of what they own for other purposes and instead shift
their resources into these more highly valued uses; if owners fail
to do so, they will miss out on the higher income they could be
earning.

If an increased demand for housing and arts and crafts brings about
an increased rate of deforestation, the remaining forests not yet
touched by the woodchopper's ax will rise in price because of their
increasingly greater scarcity. This creates incentives on the part
of forest owners to think ahead and replant trees at a greater
rate, so that higher profits can be reaped in the future through
harvesting or other uses valued by the general public. If urban
areas begin encroaching on areas of natural beauty, and if members
of the society value them enough to be willing to pay for their
preservation in their untouched state, the market will see to it
that ownership of these areas passes into the hands of these people
because that is where the greatest monetary returns are to be
gained.

Where are the pollution problems, the ecological imbalances, the
seemingly excessive depletion of natural resources, and the
destruction of areas of natural beauty? They are, invariably, in
those places in society in which private-property rights have not
been permitted to be developed or where the property rights in
existence have not been clearly delineated so there are degrees of
ambiguity as to what is mine and what is thine.

In many of these cases, the land and resources in question are
either in a "no-man's-land" of complete non-ownership or they are
under the jurisdiction of the government. Non-ownership always
produces what is known as "the tragedy of the commons." Where there
is no owner, there is no one upon whom falls the cost for every
excessive misuse of a resource. And with no one directly feeling
the cost of his actions, in the form of lost income or depleted
resale value by not maintaining or better preserving the property,
then everyone who has access to that ownerless resource will try to
get as much out of it before someone else comes along and attempts
to use it up before them.

Where the property rights are not clearly specified, people often
will act in ways that do not take into consideration the full
effect and costs of their actions upon others. In other words,
blurry property rights result in resources and land being wrongly
or excessively used in various ways because the user does not have
to weigh in the balance and pay for all of the consequences of his
actions upon others. It is not the profit motive but rather the
less-than-clearly delineated property rights that causes people to
act in environmentally undesirable ways, because they aren't
required to pay full costs for their resource-use decisions. This
is the source of practically all the pollution problems that many
people today are concerned about.

Where do too many of the most well-intentioned environmentalists
turn for solutions to these problems? Unfortunately, they turn to
the state. Yet, the state, precisely because it is not in the
market-oriented, profit-making business, is the institution in the
society least able to know how to handle these problems.
Politicians running for office are concerned with the accumulation
of votes from special-interest pressure groups. Bureaucrats who are
delegated the authority to control and manage government-owned land
and resources are concerned with bigger budgets and expanded power
for themselves as part of their rationalization for remaining in
existence. And special interests who lobby the state for
environmental regulations and ownership by the government are
interested in getting what they want at the expense of others in
the society, others to whom they are unwilling to pay the real and
full market price to get those others to use their land and
resources in the ways that they, the environmental activists, would
like to see it applied. 

By politicizing environmental problems, the perverse result is to
undermine the market's quiet rational and reasonable mechanism for
finding out what people really value in terms of the environment
and what they are really willing to pay as the actual cost to get
the things they say they desire. Instead, we have today a great
deal of environmental chaos. It is precisely because I think that
environmental problems are both serious and important that I
advocate getting the government completely out of the environmental
business and putting it back where it belongs, in the hands of the
people themselves through private ownership and the competitive
forces of the marketplace.

The New York Times: Mr. Candidate, given your out-of-the-mainstream
views, can you really expect to attract more than a handful of
ideological extremists like yourself? And aren't you just helping
to reinforce the already unhealthy negative attitude toward
government that seems to be growing in society today?

The Candidate: I find your question interesting because I consider
the views I'm offering to the American people to represent a
philosophy of moderation. It is my opponents in the race for the
presidency, both Democrat and Republican, who in my opinion
represent the extremist approach to politics in America today. 
On issue after issue, what do my opponents offer the American
people? Government solutions of one type or another for the
supposed problems of the day. Government solutions are inevitably
monopoly solutions. The government taxes the people and then
imposes on them one method for tackling the problem claimed to be
crying for an answer. Or the government imposes one set of rules,
regulations, and controls upon all the members of the society, to
which they are then made to conform and obey. 

Every government solution either prohibits or narrowly restricts
the application of alternative means and methods for the solution
of the problems of concern to various people in the country. What
can be more extremist than to claim to have "the" answer? 

The fundamental answer that I am offering the American people is
that the solutions to the problems that confront or concern them
will more likely be found if men are free to creatively compete in
an open, unhampered arena of peaceful market interaction. In the
market, no hierarchy of values is imposed on all, and no single
method for solving a problem is imposed on everyone. Instead, the
free society is a community of men tolerant of each person
following his own path, guided by his own conception of the good
and the worthwhile, and left uncoerced to make up his own mind
about how best to pursue what is important to him through a network
of diverse and ever-changing voluntary relationships and
associations with his fellow human beings. 

Am I espousing a "negative" attitude or message about government in
society? Yes. But only as the opposite of the positive side of the
same coin. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins with
the words: "Congress shall make no law. . . ." I believe that,
especially during this century, the Congress has passed many laws
that it should not have passed because they have served to limit or
deny the liberty of the American people in ways that are
inconsistent with the original intent of the Constitution and, more
fundamentally, are inconsistent with a proper understanding of what
human freedom means. In that sense, my message is "negative" since
I think that these impediments to human freedom should be repealed
and abolished.

But the other side of that message, indeed the essence of it, is a
positive one: that each man should be free to live his own life, to
choose his own ends, and to select his own means for their
attainment, and to enter into those interpersonal relationships and
associations that he finds most useful and supportive to make his
time on earth the best that he thinks he can make it. Out of such
a free society will come a more prosperous, creative, and
culturally advanced community of men than any alternative
governmentally restrained, controlled, or commanded social
arrangement could ever produce. It is this positive society of
liberty that I would like to see in America in the 21st century
that is right ahead of us.

Now, ladies and gentlemen of the press, I must excuse myself,
because I have an appointment at a local veterans' hospital at
which I shall present my proposal for selling off all
government-owned medical facilities. 

NEXT MONTH: 
"Free Trade, Peace, and Goodwill Among Nations: The
Sesquicentennial of the Triumph of Free Trade" and a review of
Classics in Austrian Economics: A Sampling in the History of a
Tradition," edited by Israel M. Kirzner
by Richard M. Ebeling

JULY:
"If Liberty Mattered, Once More, a Presidential Candidate's Press
Conference: 
Part V"
by Richard M. Ebeling