My aunt in Massachusetts, who's never had much interest in politics, is now a land-rights activist. Bureaucrats hounded her for months, insisting that her small plot is a wetland "protected" under federal law, and demanding that she repent of the high crime of planting a garden on her own property. Now the swelling anti-government citizens' army has another soldier.
A gasoline-powered truck just towed an electric Ecostar out of my driveway. Built by Ford Motor Co. under pressure from the federal government, the "state-of-the-art" vehicle was loaned to me for the day. It was supposed to recharge overnight, but the lights on the panel display, flashing wildly, said it would not.
If you thought the end of the Cold War would mean the death of "defense" socialism, or even the shrinking of the massive Pentagon bureaucracy that has been choking off and diverting the productive sector of the economy since World War II, then think again.
Eco-socialists have to find some way to "Sustainable foist their ideas on the public. The term "socialism" doesn't sell anymore, but there are proxies. One is "sustainable development."
Environmental activists have recently uncovered a plot to destroy The Planet. A foreign race has managed to infiltrate our most pristine spaces with a simple but devastating scheme: to stomp, chew, and defecate The Planet into oblivion. They are perhaps the least suspect of our fellow fauna. They are The Cows.
Why must taxpayers A and B be forced to pay for natural disasters that strike C? Why can't C—and his private insurance carriers—foot the bill?
Under socialism, government builders must fulfill the central plan or else. Quality, which can't be bureaucratically quantified, means nothing; in fact, it is an impediment to turning out the ordered amount of production with the least amount of effort. The result is incredibly flimsy buildings.
It is a common myth that the near-disappearance of the whale and of various species of fish was caused by "capitalist greed," which, in a short-sighted grab for profits, despoiled the natural resources—the geese that laid the golden eggs—from which those profits used to flow. Hence, the call for government to step in and either seize the ownership of these resources, or at least to regulate strictly their use and development.
It is private enterprise, however, not government, that we can rely on to take the long and not the short view.
Succinct economic commentary by Dr. Mark Thornton, senior fellow at the Mises Institute.
