SECTION 3: THE ENVIRONMENT 27. GOVERNMENT GARBAGE February 1990

In the loony leftist town where I live, we’re ordered to separate our trash into seven neatly packaged piles: newspapers, tin cans (flattened with labels removed), aluminum cans (flattened), glass bottles (with labels removed), plastic soda pop bottles, lawn sweepings, and regular rubbish. And to pay high taxes to have it all taken away.

Because of my aversion to government orders, my distrust of government justifications, and my dislike of ecomania, I have always mixed all my trash together. If recycling made economic sense—and this is an economic question, not a dogma of the mythical earth goddess Gaia—we would be paid to do it.

For the same reason, I love to use plastic fast-food containers and nonreturnable bottles. The whole recycling commotion, like the broader environmental movement, has always seemed to have a large malarkey component. So I have never felt guilty—just the opposite—nor have I yet been arrested by the garbage gendarmes. But I was glad to get some scientific support for my position in the December 1989 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

Professor William L. Rathje, an urban archaeologist at the University of Arizona and head of its Garbage Project, has been studying rubbish for almost 20 years, and what he’s discovered contradicts almost everything we’re told.

When seen in perspective, our garbage problems are no worse than they have always been. The only difference is that today we have safe methods to deal with them, if the environmentalists will let us.

The environmentalists warn of a country covered by garbage because the average American generates 8 pounds a day. In fact, we create less than 3 pounds each, which is a good deal less than people in Mexico City today or Americans 100 years ago. Gone, for example, are the 1,200 pounds of coal ash per year each American home used to generate, and our modern packaged foods mean less rubbish, not more.

But most landfills will be full in 10 years or less, we’re told, and that’s true. But most landfills are designed to last 10 years. The problem is not that they are filling up, but that we’re not allowed to create new ones, thanks to the environmental movement. Texas, for example, handed out 250 landfill permits a year in the mid-1970s, but fewer than 50 in 1988.

The environmentalists claim that disposable diapers and fast-food containers are the worst problems. To me, this has always revealed the anti-family and pro-elite biases common in any left-wing movement. But the left, as usual, has the facts wrong as well.

In two years of digging in seven landfills all across America, in which they sorted and weighed every item in 16,000 pounds of garbage, Rathje discovered that fast-food containers take up less than 1/10th of one percent of the space; less than 1 percent was disposable diapers. All plastics totaled less than 5 percent. The real culprit is paper—especially telephone books and newspapers. And there is little biodegradation. He found 1952 newspapers still fresh and readable.

Rather than biodegrade, most garbage mummifies. And this may be a blessing. If newspapers, for example, degraded rapidly, tons of ink would leach into the groundwater. And we should be glad that plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Being inert, it doesn’t introduce toxic chemicals into the environment.

We’re told we have a moral obligation to recycle, and most of us say we do so, but empirical studies show it isn’t so. In surveys, 78 percent of the respondents say they separate their garbage, but only 26 percent said they thought their neighbors separate theirs. To test that, for seven years the Garbage Project examined 9,000 loads of refuse in Tucson, Arizona, from a variety of neighborhoods. The results: most people do what they say their neighbors do: they don’t separate. No matter how high or low the income, or how left-liberal the neighborhood, or how much the respondents said they cared about the environment, only 26 percent actually separated their trash.

The only reliable predictor of when people separate and when they don’t is exactly the one an economist would predict: the price paid for the trash. When the prices of old newspaper rose, people carefully separated their newspapers. When the price of newspapers fell, people threw them out with the other garbage.

We’re all told to save our newspapers for recycling, and the idea seems to make sense. Old newspapers can be made into boxes, wallboard, and insulation, but the market is flooded with newsprint thanks to government programs. In New Jersey, for example, the price of used newspapers has plummeted from $40 a ton to minus $25 a ton. Trash entrepreneurs used to buy old newspaper. Now you have to pay someone to take it away.

If it is economically efficient to recycle—and we can’t know that so long as government is involved—trash will have a market price. It is only through a free price system, as Ludwig von Mises demonstrated 70 years ago, that we can know the value of goods and services.

Environmentalists don’t seem to understand this. They ask their followers to ignore price signals and cut their consumption of everything from gasoline to paper towels. This one plank in the environmental platform I agree with, since it will make these goods cheaper for the rest of us. I’m happy to have my standard of living raised by voluntary poverty from what Ronald Reagan once called “the tree huggers.”

Some left-liberal economists claim prices can’t solve the garbage problem because of “external diseconomies.” Since greedy capitalists are out to make a fast buck, the theory goes, they produce goods that impose costs external to their businesses, i.e., trash. But all businesses have spillover effects, good and bad, and in a free market, this creates opportunities for other entrepreneurs. The donut industry may help make people fat (an external diseconomy). Should it be forced to sponsor Weight Watchers? Or, more to the point, should the public be taxed for a new federal Department of Corpulent Affairs?

The cave men had garbage problems, and so will our progeny, probably for as long as human civilization exists. But government is no answer. A socialized garbage system works no better than the Bulgarian economy. Only the free market will solve the garbage problem, and that means abolishing not only socialism, but also the somewhat more efficient municipal fascist systems where one politically favored contractor gets the job.

The answer is to privatize and deregulate everything, from trash pickup to landfills. That way, everyone pays an appropriate part of the costs. Some types of trash would be picked up for a fee, others would be picked up free, and still others might command a price. Recycling would be based on economic calculation, not bureaucratic fiat.

The choice is always the same, from Eastern Europe to my town: put consumers in charge through private property and a free price system, or create a fiasco through government. Under the right kind of system, even I might start separating my trash.

28.
GROSS DOMESTIC BUNK
June 1994

The Commerce Department, which costs $3 billion a year, is touting one of the most brainless economic ideas of our generation. What ought to be called the Anti-Commerce Department announced the concept on Earth Day, which appropriately enough is also Lenin’s birthday.

In cahoots with the environmentalists, the bureaucrats have dreamed up a new formula to calculate the Gross Domestic Product, resulting in a Green GDP. The present GDP attempts (and fails) to calculate economic productivity. The new GDP would make a bad figure worse by subtracting the alleged “environmental cost” of productivity.

The Greens have a zero-sum attitude toward economic growth, and so we are supposed to deduct “resource depletion” from the productive employment of capital and time. Such a figure could come in handy on Sunday morning talk shows.

“The economy is growing at 3 percent,” an economist might say. “But that drains our resources by 3 percent,” responds the environmentalist. “And that comes out to zero,” concludes the moderator.

Agriculture might seem like a useful activity, but not if we reduce productivity by supposed soil depletion. How is that to be measured? Not by a mere farmer, whose livelihood depends on preserving the soil, but by an official in Washington, DC.

Did building a new house require the cutting down of some trees? Subtract them from the GDP. Is that juicy steak delicious? Too bad. Steak requires cows, which environmentalists hate. Reduce the GDP by that T-bone too. Enjoy driving? It harms Mother Earth, so take it away as well.

In fact, every human activity except dying offends some environmentalist. It’s enough to make you glad to be alive. Artificial lighting, eating, driving, logging, plowing, building, heating, cooling, showering, using paper bags, having children, and even breathing are all objectionable to the Greens. Taken to their logical end, in fact, environmentalism requires bringing the economy to a standstill, and then reversing it. As is clear from their own literature, only the subordination of man to plants and animals (except cattle, who should be killed but not eaten) will please them in the long run.

Using the regulatory state, the Greens have been moving us toward their totalitarian goal. All over the country, Americans have been forbidden to use their own land as they see fit. If it’s a swamp or bog (i.e., a “wetland”) or holds an “endangered” species, such as the recently sanctified Delhi Sand Fly, shut it down. Your name may be on the deed, and you may pay taxes on it, but the government is the real owner, since it decides how the land is to be used, if at all.

Environmental regulations are why it costs so much to get your air conditioner repaired, why wood prices are so high, why your car can’t pass emissions inspection even though it’s only a few years old, why you are forced to collect old newspapers so the city can recycle them at tremendous expense, and charge you for it. That trees are a crop, like asparagus, that can be grown, used, and grown again, is inadmissible.

There’s no science or logic to the bulk of their claims, whether it’s global warming, holes in the ozone layer, acid rain, or any of the other Mother Green fairy tales.

But just as the American people are catching on, the Greens are trying to trick us again. They tell us the GDP ought to be reduced—not by the cost of their fanatical controls—but by the costs of capitalism itself. They want us to believe that free markets, not the “Clean Air” Act and other crippling laws, are the problem.

With the Green GDP even the craziest regulation could be made to appear beneficial. The statistical construct is so perverse, in fact, that it will increase as our standard of living declines. The poorer the people, the richer the Earth.

Not that the present GDP is any great shakes. Constant Commerce Department revisions—we call them mistakes in the private sector—are enough to make the figure a laughing stock. George Bush lost the 1992 election in part because the Commerce Department said we were in a recession. After the election, the department said, whoops, we’d been in a recovery.

And floods and earthquakes account for a substantial rise in the GDP, because the figure does not and cannot account for wealth destruction. Los Angeles can be devastated by failing offices and burning homes, but once the repairs begin, the government records a building boom.

Henry Hazlitt tells the story of the boy who breaks a store window, as Keynesians stand around and convince themselves it’s a productive act. But the story was intended to illustrate an economic fallacy, not provide the intellectual foundation for a Commerce Department model.

Before the government started trying to calculate productivity, it should have taken time to define it. The Austrian economist Herbert Davenport, in his 1913 book The Economics of Enterprise, is helpful. He suggests that: “Economic production is the bringing about of changes appropriate to command a price.” A price suggests scarcity, utility, and profit. “Anything that meets this test is economic production,” he adds. “And nothing else is.”

What if a good or service seems useful, but it doesn’t command a price in the market? If nobody wants it, it’s not economic production. “Pianos could not be wealth in a society lacking musical tastes,” says Davenport, “or books wealth to savages.”

Davenport then asks: “Are thieves producers?” No, for the holdup man does not “give us anything for our money.” He simply takes it by force. This is not productive behavior.

Davenport’s discussion raises another question: what about the grandest larceny of all, $1.6 trillion taken from the private sector by the central government every year? If that property weren’t seized, it could be put to private, productive use. Taxation, like theft, is a net loss to society, and should be subtracted from the GDP. Government spending is also a net loss, although it increases the GDP just like an earthquake.

In his book America’s Great Depression, Murray N. Rothbard suggested an alternative figure: the Private Product Remaining. It subtracts government spending and taxing from overall productivity. Economist Robert Batemarco picked up the idea and prepared an alternative set of statistics that shows declines in living standards where the government wants us to believe we’re richer.

Instead of subtracting the supposed costs of economic liberty from the GDP, as the Greens propose, we need to take away the costs of government, including environmental regulations, which interfere with private property and cost hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

As usual, then, the Commerce Department has it backwards. If we are going to attempt national income accounting, it should be an honest undertaking. It certainly should not be more dishonest than the present figure. And by Davenport’s and Rothbard’s definition, and Batemarco’s calculation, our economy is getting less and less productive. Big government and its allies are responsible.

29.
MY VICE: HATING THE ENVIRONMENT
August 2000

I am a sinner but unrepentant. You see, I don’t practice environmentalism, and I don’t believe in it. I don’t recycle and I don’t conserve—except when it pays to do so. I like clean air—really clean air, like the kind an air conditioner makes. I like the bug-free indoors. I like development, as in buildings, concrete, capitalism, prosperity. I don’t like swamps (and that goes for any “wetland,” even the ballyhooed “Everglades”) or jungles (“rainforests”). I see all animals except dogs and cats as likely disease carriers, unless they’re in a zoo.

When PBS runs a special on animal intelligence, I am unmoved. I’m glad for the dolphins that they can squeak. I’m happy for the ape that he can sign for his food. How charming for the bees that they organize themselves so well for work. But that doesn’t give them rights over me. Their only real value comes from what they can do for man.

According to modern political and religious doctrine, all these views make me a sinner. The mainline churches long ago became quasi-Manichaean, heralding blessed poverty and swearing never to disturb blessed nature with the stain of human action. And we all know about the vogue of New Age religions. Public-school kids are taught the religion of eco-sentimentalism.

Even the new Catholic Catechism seems mushy on the subject. “Man’s dominion over inanimate and other living beings granted by the Creator is not absolute... it requires a religious respect for the integrity of creation” (par. 2416). I have no idea what this means. It seems like a sop to the new paganism. Do killer bees and killer bacteria have “integrity” worthy of “religious respect”? To my mind, nature is only valuable if it serves man’s needs. If it does not, it must be transformed.

Even in free-market circles, I’m expected to herald the beauty and moral integrity of nature before I discuss property rights and markets. In fact, “free-market environmentalists” insist that we accept the goals of the greens, while only rejecting some of their statist means as the best way to achieve those goals. I don’t buy it. The environmentalists are targeting everything I love, and the struggle between them and us is fundamental.

Only the Randians can be counted on to make any sense on this issue. They assert what used to be the Christian position only a few decades ago: namely, that man occupies the highest spot in the great chain of being. The interests of no animal, no species, no living thing, should be permitted to trump the need for human flourishing. But for such outrageous talk, the Randians have been banished by many libertarians on grounds that their strategy is all wrong.

One wise Randian once implored me to closely examine the word “environment.” What does it refer to? he asked. Well, you can tick through the list of environmental concerns: air, water, animals, trees, the ozone, etc. But where does it stop? What are the boundaries of what is called the environment? What it really means, he said, is: “anything but man.” He was right. A perfect environment would be a world without people. How monstrous to allow the greens to take even one step toward this goal!

Not just Rand, but also St. Augustine believed that the purpose of nature is to serve man:

Some attempt to extend this command [“Thou Shalt Not Kill”] even to beasts and cattle, as if it forbade us to take life from any creature. But if so, why not extend it also to the plants, and all that is rooted in and nourished by the earth? For though this class of creatures have no sensation, yet they also are said to live, and consequently they can die; and therefore, if violence be done them, can be killed. So, too, the apostle, when speaking of the seeds of such things as these, says, “That which thou sowest is not quickened except it die;” and in the Psalm it is said, “He killed their vines with hail.” Must we therefore reckon it a breaking of this commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” to pull a flower? Are we thus insanely to countenance the foolish error of the Manichaeans? Putting aside, then, these ravings, if, when we say, Thou shalt not kill, we do not understand this of the plants, since they have no sensation, nor of the irrational animals that fly, swim, walk, or creep, since they are dissociated from us by their want of reason, and are therefore by the just appointment of the Creator subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our own uses.

How glorious, St. Augustine also wrote, to see human habitations spreading where once unchecked nature reigned. That’s my view too. I don’t care how many homilies I hear about the glories of nature, from the pulpit or Congress or the media, I’m against it, unless it has been changed by man into something useful or otherwise valuable. Things that grow are for food, clothing, decoration, or lawns. All swamps should be drained, all rain forests turned over to productive agriculture.

Not being a do-it-myselfer, my favorite section of the hardware store features bug killers, weed killers, varmint traps, and poisons of all sorts. These killer potions represent high civilization and capitalism. The bags are decorated with menacing pictures of ants, roaches, tweezer-nosed bugs, and other undesirable things, to remind us that the purpose of these products is to snuff out bug life so it won’t menace the only kind of life that has a soul and thus the only kind of life that matters: man.

The only problem with pesticides is that they aren’t strong enough. “Fire-ant killer” only causes the little buggers to pick up and move. Why? Some time back, the government banned the best pesticide of all: DDT. As a result, the country is filled with menacing, disease-carrying flying and crawling insects. Whole swaths of formerly wonderful vacation property have been wrecked because we are not permitted to use the only substance that ever really worked to wipe these things out. In the third world, many thousands have died since the abolition of DDT thanks to increased malaria and other bug-borne diseases. All this because we have decided that bugs have a greater right to life than we do. All this because we ignore a key tenet of Western thought: all things not human are “subjected to us to kill or keep alive for our own uses.”

Such thoughts can get you arrested these days because environmentalism is our official religion. Consider the Styrofoam question. I refuse to hold a paper cup with hot coffee, not when a perfectly wonderful insulated cup is available. When I demand the coffee shop give me Styrofoam, they shrink back like Dracula before the crucifix. I explain that Styrofoam takes up less than 0.001 percent of landfill space, and that inked paper is actually more poisonous for ground water, so maybe they better not subscribe to the New York Times, but it doesn’t matter. For them, paper cups are holy and Styrofoam is the devil. Evidence just doesn’t matter.

We know where environmentalism actually came from. The left once claimed that the state could make us better off. The bigger the government, the more prosperous we would be. When that turned out not to be true, they changed their tune. Suddenly, they began to condemn prosperity itself, and the place of the oppressed proletariat was taken by oppressed members of the animal, plant, and insect kingdoms. We have adopted poverty as a policy goal, complete with its own civic code of ethics.

From time immemorial until the day before yesterday, Western man has seen nature as the enemy, and rightly so. It is dangerous and deadly. For the sake of our own survival it must be tamed, cut, curbed, controlled. That is the first task of civilization. The first step to civilization’s destruction is the failure to understand this, or to call this attitude a sin.