EKIP– Expert Club for Economics and Politics A Different Opinion
Murray Rothbard, "For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto"
Even if we assume that natural resources are entirely private and that the free market would preserve them much better than government regulation, what can we say about the problem of environmental pollution? Wouldn't we suffer from increased pollution caused by "capitalist greed"?
First of all, there is this empirical fact: a regime of state ownership, even socialism, has proven to be no solution to the problem of pollution. Even the most enthusiastic supporters of central planning admit that the poisoning of Lake Baikal in the Soviet Union is a monument to unnecessary industrial pollution inflicted on a valuable natural resource. But the problem is much more complex than that. Consider, for example, two vital areas in which pollution has become a serious problem: the quality of the air and of waterways, particularly rivers. These are two areas in which a regime of private ownership is not permitted.
State ownership and environmental pollution
Let's look at rivers first. Rivers and oceans are generally state property; full private ownership is not allowed for water bodies. The state is the de facto owner of rivers. But state ownership is not true ownership because, although state administrators exercise direct control over the resource, they do not have the ability to exploit its capital value in the free market.
Government officials cannot sell rivers or shares in them. Therefore, they have no economic incentive to maintain the purity and value of rivers. It follows that rivers are “propertyless” in an economic sense, and therefore government officials allow their pollution. Anyone is allowed to throw garbage and pollute the rivers.
But consider what would happen if private companies could own rivers and lakes. For example, if a private company owned Lake Erie, then anyone who dumped their trash into the lake would be sued for trespassing on private property and would be required to pay for the damage and cease their harmful activities immediately. In other words, only private property rights can ensure the cessation of pollution, understood as damage to a natural resource.
Pollution of water bodies can be minimized through private ownership
The fact that rivers are nobody's property is also the reason why there is no owner who systematically protects his valuable resource from outside interference. However, if a lake had an owner, then anyone who decided to pollute it would not be able to do so for a long time, because the owner would protect his property immediately (1).
Professor Dolan writes:
If General Motors owned the Mississippi River, we can say with certainty that businesses and municipalities located along its banks would pay heavy fees for its use and that the water would be as clean as possible to maximize revenue from businesses wishing to lease part of the river for drinking water production, tourism, or fishing (2).
At the same time, as the owner, the state has allowed the pollution of rivers, it is also the largest active generator of pollution, especially in its capacity as the operator of municipal sewers. Cheap chemical toilets that burn waste without polluting the air, soil and water exist. But who would invest in chemical toilets when the municipal administration provides free sewage to its customers?
This example draws our attention to a problem that is similar to the case of the slowdown in the development of aquaculture technologies due to the lack of private property. If the state, as the owner of water, allows its pollution, then industrial technologies will become (and already are) water polluting. If a given production is allowed to pollute rivers indefinitely due to the lack of their owner, then these will be the types of production technologies that we will have at our disposal.
The same applies to air pollution.
If the problem of water pollution can be solved by privatizing water, what about air pollution? How can libertarians possibly have a solution to such a serious problem? It's obvious that air can't be privatized, right? But the answer is: there is. We live in a world where radio and TV frequencies are privately owned. The same goes for airline routes. Civil aviation routes could be privately owned; there's no need for a Civil Aviation Board to allocate and restrict routes between different cities.
But in air pollution we are concerned not so much with the ownership of the air itself as with the protection of private property in the lungs, fields, and gardens. The key fact about air pollution is that the source of the pollution disperses unwanted substances—smoke, nuclear radiation, sulfur dioxide, and so on— through the air into the lungs of innocent victims, as well as onto real property. Vapors of this type that harm human health or property constitute an aggression against the private property of the victim.
Air pollution is ultimately just as much an act of aggression as setting fire to someone else’s property or causing bodily harm. Air pollution that harms others is simply aggression. The primary function of the state – in the form of the courts and the police – is to prevent aggression. Instead, the state has failed miserably in its task of protecting citizens from air pollution.
Government intervention is what makes the pollution problem worse
It is important to realize that the failure of the state is not simply a matter of ignorance, but of the excessive time lag between the discovery of a new technological problem and its addressing. While some modern pollutants are new to us, factory smoke and its ill effects have been known about since the Industrial Revolution. The problem has been known to American courts since the late 19th century, when they deliberately decided to allow industrial polluters to infringe on the private property rights of others.
To achieve this, the courts systematically weakened the protection of private property inherent in the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. Before the mid- to late 19th century, any harmful air pollution was considered a violation of the law, a scourge against which the victim could file a complaint with the court, which in turn ordered the polluter to cease the pollution immediately. But in the 19th century, the courts began systematically to change the laws protecting citizens against dangerous negligence to allow air pollution from a factory as long as it did not exceed the usual levels of pollution from similar manufacturers.
The advent of factories and the associated pollution of orchards has been accompanied by lawsuits by farmers against the polluters of their property. But the judges are effectively saying, "We're sorry. We know that industrial fumes are damaging your property. But there are things more important than private property, namely the common good. And the common good is that industry and industrial progress are something positive, and therefore your private property rights must give way to what is good for the community." Today we all pay the cruel price that is the consequence of this rewriting of private property rights in the form of lung diseases and other things. And all in the name of the "common good"! (3)
Authorities too often protect the interests of polluters
The same principle underlies case law regarding air pollution, as illustrated by the Ohio court’s decision in Antonick v. Chamberlain (1947). Residents of a suburb near Akron sued the operator of a nearby private airport for excessive noise pollution. Ruling in favor of the airport owner, the court ruled:
In deciding this case, although our primary concern is justice, we must take into account not only the gravity of the conflict between the owner of the airport and the owners of the nearby properties, but also the public policy of the generation we live in. We must take into account that the construction of an airport... is a matter of high public interest and its prevention would have consequences which would not only seriously prejudice the owner's interest, but would also represent a serious loss to society as a whole.
To cover up the crimes of judges, legislators, and federal and state governments have passed rules that prevent victims of air pollution from pursuing class actions against polluters. Obviously, a single factory pollutes the air of a community where tens of thousands of victims live, and it is impractical for each individual victim to seek damages from the polluter alone. In such cases, the common law holds that a claim by several victims could be considered a claim on behalf of an entire “class” of victims with similar grievances.
But legislators have systematically prohibited such “class” lawsuits in pollution cases. Therefore, a victim of pollution can only sue a polluter individually, in individual cases. And the victim is prohibited by law from bringing lawsuits against mass polluters that harm large numbers of people in a given region! As Frank Bub writes, “It’s like the state telling you that it will (try to) protect you from a thief who steals only from you, but it won’t protect you from a thief who steals from everyone else in the neighborhood.” (5)
You can read Part II of this essay here.
(1) Jack Hirshleifer, James C. DeHaven, and Jerome W. Milliman, Water Supply; Economics, Technology, and Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), chapter IX.
(2) Edwin G. Dolan, "Capitalism and the Environment," Individualist (March 1971): 3.
(3) See E.F. Roberts, "Plead the Ninth Amendment!" Natural History (August–September 1970): 18ff. For a definitive history and analysis of the change in the legal system toward growth and property rights in the first half of the 19th century, see Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977).
(4)Quoted in Milton Katz, The Function of Tort Liability in Technology Assessment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Program on Technology and Society, 1969), p. 610.
(5) Frank Bubb, "The Cure for Air Pollution," The Libertarian Forum (April 15, 1970): 1. Also see Dolan, TANSTAAFL, pp. 37–39.
