Let Freedom Reign

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THE POLLUTION PROBLEM

Pollution is but a sampling of the problems into which we have collectivized ourselves. But it is serious enough to be of grave concern.

Why are people so disturbed about pollution of air and water? It is not simply because they have become more refined and aesthetic, but because they begin to realize that we have reached a critical point in human habitation of the earth.

There was no split of opinion . . . last year when more than two hundred experts from fifty countries met in conference. Within twenty years, they decided, life on our planet will be showing the first signs of succumbing to pollution: the atmosphere will become unbreathable for men and animals; life will cease in rivers and lakes; plants will wither from poisoning.1(Italics mine.)

Even if the pollution problem is only half as bad as these experts believe, it must be conceded that the condition of the planet’s air and water is deteriorating. More and more people are concerned about pollution, and their apprehensiveness is justifiable. The paradox is—as I shall bring out later—that many of these same people ignore or even favor other forms of pollution which may be more destructive! But pollution, favored or not, is difficult to remedy—something like unscrambling eggs. It’s a matter of undoing that which has been done.

If we examine only one source of air pollution—motor vehicles—we may be able to uncover what’s involved in other sources of pollution; indeed, a principle or two may come to light.

The first gasoline buggy polluted the atmosphere. However, the owner felt no guilt; and no one else sensed any injury. The winds, rains, sunshine—agents of nature—were so overwhelmingly corrective that no detectable traces of poisonous gases remained in the air people breathed.

But during the intervening decades motor vehicles in the U.S.A. have multiplied 100 million times while the corrective forces of nature are the same now as always. As a consequence, it’s the pollution that now overwhelms nature! While we as offenders feel little if any more guilt than the single owner of long ago, we as inhalers of polluted air have a genuine sense of injury. Most of us are at once offenders and the offended; we keep right on polluting the air ourselves as we increasingly direct our criticisms at others. Driver after driver bemoans the polluted air with little if any awareness that he himself is polluting it. “The pot calling the kettle black!”

Viewing the problem in this manner, it is plain that we glossed over a very important point between the first gas buggy owner and today’s millions of owners. The first owner did no offense; many of us are now offending. What turns precisely the same act—car driving—from offenseless to offending?

Here’s the point most of us glossed over: It begins with a fact that we’ll all concede, namely, that I have no more right to poison the air you breathe than I have to poison the food you eat. But the air I pollute does not become poisonous to you until nature is overwhelmed, that is, until she can no longer dissipate the poisons.

Little wonder that we miss the point. As a car owner, I do nothing differently today than I did sixty years ago when driving my first auto. I poisoned no one then; now I do. Neither you nor I have altered our behaviors; therefore, external forces must have converted us from offenseless persons to offenders. External to you and me are (1) the millions of others who now pollute the air and (2) the limitations of nature to cope with the excessive pollution. Another way to explain our confusion: I do not poison others when driving in fresh-air country but begin to do so as I approach a metropolis. Offenseless and offending while on the same trip with the same tank of gas!

Plainly, we have no awareness of a change from harmless to harmful as we drive from open country to congested city. Nor did we sense any change when and where forces external to our individual selves turned the air from fresh to poisonous. It is thus understandable how we let pollution get out of hand. While our unawareness is excusable, the problem is not thereby dismissed; pollution is an enormous and rapidly increasing threat and will continue as such unless and until we come to grips with it.

The air pollution dilemma is not a problem exclusive to you and me. It has become a social problem no less than other destructive activities: killing, thieving, misrepresenting, poisoning, and so on. Thus it is that pollution cannot be remedied short of a resort to social devices, namely, legal prohibitions. This is where the agency of society—government—comes in. For the role of government is to codify the thou-shalt-nots and to enforce their observation. In good theory we employ the defensive force of government to inhibit and restrain that which is destructive.

Self-Imposed Disciplines

What then does this suggest? It means we approach this problem in the same manner as we do the poisoning of food. Impose penalties for infractions! In short, make it illegal to drive a polluting vehicle or otherwise contribute to tropospheric pollution in any area in which the forces of nature can no longer keep the troposphere free of poisonous gases.2

When nature can no longer cope with man-made contamination, then man must discover ways to avoid self-destruction. We can’t go on willy-nilly, eating our cake and having it, too. Our cherished comforts and affluence must be attended by at least a few disciplines. This is to say that we cannot go on forever enjoying our horseless carriages without, on occasion, “bringing them to rein.” Otherwise, they’ll run over the cliff with us!

Of course, this remedy, at first blush, appears to be worse than the malady. Why, the whole Los Angeles area would be carless, and Angelenos are dependent on motor transportation. The same will be said about most large metropolitan areas.

But make the legal prohibitions effective several years hence—time enough for a transition from polluting to non-polluting vehicles—and watch ingenuity come to the fore in response to consumer demand. With 100 million motor vehicles requiring a nonpolluting gadget, it is naive to believe that inventors and entrepreneurs wouldn’t rise to the lure. Technologically, this is nowhere near the challenge that color TV was but a few years ago. Indeed, it is already pretty well known how this feat can be accomplished. Nothing more is needed to bring a perfected answer from obscurity than the economic incentive and prospect of a profit. We should neither overlook nor deprecate the power of a hoped-for profit; it is one of the best mothers invention ever had.

The same procedures can be applied to the other sources of air pollution: home and factory furnaces, municipal and private incinerators, DDT, nuclear fallout, and the like. No one has a moral right to poison the air of another any more than the food or the water of another. And no one should have a legal right to do so. From where I sit in the bleachers, it seems that we must apply the legal prohibitions or prepare our children to live in gas masks, an unattractive alternative.3

Assuming we are on the right track in legally restraining pollution, that theoretically this is the correct remedial procedure, we have considered only the second step without thought of the first step. For, sadly, we have only a theory as to what should be done but nothing to do it with. Lacking is an agency of society capable of putting the theory into practice. Governments, as they exist today in the U.S.A. and elsewhere, are not the kind of societal agencies that can perform this service. These governments are not “purifying” agencies: quite the contrary!

Pollution of Money Supply

Governments, the world over, are themselves the greatest polluters of all, departing as they do from their principled role of defending the lives and the private property and freedom of choice of peaceful persons, becoming instead the instruments of plunder and tyranny. Nowhere is this “pollution” more evident than in the behavior of national governments with respect to the medium of exchange.4

Money, the economic circulatory device, is essential to exchanging our specialized goods and services; our lives and livelihoods depend on exchange. The usefulness of the medium of exchange decreases as its integrity is destroyed. This is an unassailable fact demonstrated over and over again throughout history; inflation is as unworkable as counterfeiting and for precisely the same reason. Yet, today, the pollution of money is a popular panacea for the ills of mankind; the idea is on the rampage as much without as within the government. My point, however, is that we cannot expect the polluter of money to rid us of the pollution of air, water, or any other useful thing.

And here is why: Whenever any government pollutes the medium of exchange, that act in itself reveals a type of societal agency that cannot effectively perform the defensive function. For implicit in money pollution is the acceptance of government in the role of ruler or general manager of our lives and livelihoods.

To grasp the switch in roles I am trying to portray, merely imagine the local chief of police with a printing press, turning out at will the money we use and thus setting its value. This police officer would be our czar. His concentration would be on the economic management of us: his people! Reflect on how little he would or even could concentrate on defending us against thievery and other forms of violence. Invoking a common justice would be out of his field. These and other defensive employments, including pollution riddance, would be no more than annoying trivia to him.

The national government today is in this inverted role. It is now the Grand Factotum over which there is no restraint—none whatsoever—except the thinking of citizens which, currently, is more molded by it than it by them. And as Grand Factotum, the government exhibits all and even more faults than we observe in numerous private enterprises that operate as laws unto themselves—you name them!

So, what is the first step to be taken before we can rid ourselves of pollution of the air, water, money, and other necessities of life? It is nothing less than restoring government to its principled function, to that position which is its sole justification for existence in the first place: the protection of life and livelihood. Government can be turned from offender to defender only as it is confined to codifying the taboos and enforcing them, to invoking a common justice, in a word, to keeping the peace—the role of servant. Its present role as general manager of 200 million people and their economy, its assumed and irrational role as dispenser of welfare, security, and prosperity, has to be abolished.

That this is ideological revolution (reversal of the mores), an affront to those currently in the seats of power, and seemingly impossible of accomplishment is conceded. But it’s this, or pollution; it’s this, or national downfall.

However, the job isn’t as impossible as it seems. Could you personally run the nation or the world? Of course not! Then draw a perfectly obvious conclusion: Neither can anyone else. The turnabout requires little more than a general recognition of this simple fact and an understanding of how freedom works its wonders.

• 1The Royal Bank of Canada Monthly Letter, February, 1969.
• 2Even prohibiting pollution in highly polluted areas may be no solution. Pollution is becoming a problem of the whole troposphere, that is, the troposphere assuredly has containment limitations. If this view be accepted, then pollution released atop Mt. Everest could eventually wreak its havoc on Americans.
• 3But to what avail are gas masks for human beings if plant and animal life succumb to pollution?
• 4This is not to overlook or minimize the polluting effect of a thousand and one other well-known governmental interventions.