The Environment

The Governor's supposed solution to the energy fiasco promotes the fiction that government solves problems that private businesses create.

So the regulations have begun. Two towns, so far, have passed laws banning the use of cellular phones while driving. In Illinois, the giant cellular telephone provider Verizon said it would lobby for a state law prohibiting anything but "hands-free" cellular phone use by drivers.

You've heard that government policies can cause unanticipated bad effects? This view is confirmed many times over when you consider the current forest-fire fiasco. Government is the cause of the fires that raged out of control across the West this summer, just as surely as if the Forest Service had spread the fuel and lit the match.

Some recent court decisions strengthen private property rights. But they do not go far enough.  

Peter Huber's critique of environmentalism has all the right people very upset. 

When one thinks of "death by government," either those killed by armed members of the state or the millions who have perished in the vast gulags and prisons run by governmental agents usually come to mind. However, government has demonstrated far more creativity in eliminating people than just by shooting or starving them to death. It also has successfully drowned them while destroying property to the tune of billions of dollars. Here are a couple of horror stories.

Contrary to the propaganda, the EPA has done little or nothing to improve the quality of life and much to diminish it. 

In a fine case study of interventionism, regulators finally give in and reversed their previous mandates that led to an environmental mess.

Once again, the federal government is scrambling to make good on its own past mistakes. And private industries are facing massive costs, and potentially massive lawsuits, because of their attempt to keep up with federal regulators' changing whims. The controversy over Methyl tert-Butyl Ether (MTBE) shows once again that government's heavy-handed approach to environmental problems guarantees not solutions, but a continuing mess for which government will again posit itself as a solution-a clear example of Ludwig von Mises's theory of intervention.

Garet Garrett wrote in 1932, "Mass delusions are not rare. They salt the human story." Indeed, mass delusions are no more apparent than in the realm of public policy and especially in the faith people have in their government to carry out functions designed to promote the public good. How else to describe the persistent belief that government is a good steward of resources of any kind?