Environmentalism

So Goes the American Dream

by Bart Frazier November 4, 2002

The American dream once was a reality. A man was free to use his resources any way he saw fit to provide for himself and his family. Whether his resources were personal skills or material in nature, he was free to use them whichever way he wanted, as long as he did not infringe ...

The Free Market and Hawks

by Bart Frazier October 29, 2002

Rosalie Barrow Edge should be considered a hero to libertarians and conservationists alike. In 1933, she founded Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Kempton, Pennsylvania. At a time in our country’s history when the economy was a shambles and socialism was hip, Edge managed to establish the first refuge for hawks in ...

Let Spontaneity Rule

by Bart Frazier August 13, 2002

As a conservationist and a libertarian, I always find it interesting to think how similar ecology and political economy are. Both are products of nature — self-sustaining phenomena resulting from the aggregate of millions of unrelated events. The Nobel-laureate economist Friedrich Hayek coined a term for ...

Enron and the Cheney List

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2002

The controversy over Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret energy-policy consultation list is amusing. Government should certainly err on the side of disclosing such things, but that’s not the point here. Those most vocal in demanding the list seem to be saying they can’t judge the Bush administration’s energy policy ...

Nature as Miser

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2001

A POPULIST IS SOMEONE WHO who believes scarcity is a capitalist plot. If only social arrangements were otherwise, he believes, mankind would enjoy a boundless cornucopia of goods and never want again. The populist thus assumes that our current economic institutions, such as the price system, are merely devices controlled by producers to withhold needed goods and to gouge ...

The Most Dangerous Substance of All

by Sheldon Richman September 1, 2001

For all our preoccupation with ridding society of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana, little thought is given to the most dangerous mind-altering substance of all: ink. Do you doubters need proof? Take Rachel Carson’s famous book, Silent Spring. In 1963 Carson wrote a book claiming that the insecticide DDT was damaging ...

Dictatorship out of Thin Air

by James Bovard May 1, 2001

FEDERAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS turn bureaucrats into dictators who need not care a whit about public health. Instead, federal agencies blindly pursue both power and publicity. The result is one absurdity after another — and scant attention for the real health threats that Americans face. On July 12, 1999, the Justice Department announced that it was suing Toyota for $58 billion ...

Beware the Conservationists

by Sheldon Richman March 1, 2001

When politicians and political activists talk about conservation, I know I am about to be mugged. New calls for conservation have come out of the power fiasco in California. The great urban legend of our time is that California’s problem resulted from deregulation of electricity. That’s a laugh. What ...

Politicians Can Pollute Too

by Sheldon Richman November 1, 2000

Politicians use language differently from the rest of us. Take the expression “Big Polluters.” Apparently there are entire industries that do nothing but pollute. Big Oil produces oil. Big Pharmaceuticals produce medicines. So Big Polluters presumably produce air and water pollution. What’s more, they somehow make big ...

Lynching

by Sheldon Richman August 1, 2000

The most refreshing reporter on television, ABC's John Stossel, is the target of nothing less than the modern equivalent of a lynching. Stossel is the popular investigative reporter who focuses on scientifically dubious consumerism and environmentalism. On a recent 20/20 segment he took up -- and debunked -- the ...

Robbery with an Environmental Badge

by James Bovard March 1, 1999

As the federal government has devoted itself to rescuing Americans from more perils, fair treatment of individuals is a luxury that the government can no longer afford. Few programs better illustrate the modern contempt for due process than Superfund. Congress enacted Superfund in 1980 to deal with the problem of abandoned hazardous waste sites. Since 1980, the Environmental Protection Agency ...

The Hot Air Emanates from Washington

by Sheldon Richman January 1, 1999

The billions of new tax dollars President Clinton wishes to spend in the new fiscal year include $4 billion to stem global warming. The Associated Press reports that Mr. Clinton wants an "aggressive, common-sense" strategy to save the planet from the man-made "greenhouse effect." The strategy calls for big ...