Cleaned by Capitalism

[Toro]

Cleaned by Capitalism
Thoughts on Freedom by Donald Boudreaux
Donald Boudreaux is president of FEE

I recently spoke in Toronto to students at a public-policy seminar sponsored by the Fraser Institute. The seminar opened with Fraser’s Laura Jones reviewing the many sound reasons why environmental alarmism is inappropriate. Ms. Jones offered superb analysis and boatloads of relevant facts. Her case that the environment is not teetering on the edge of disaster was unassailableor so I thought.

During both the question-and-answer period and the group discussions that followed, the students vigorously assailed Ms. Jones’s case against command-and-control environmental regulation. These assaults all sprang either from mistaken notions about environmental facts or from a lack of historical perspective.

As I listened to student after student lament the horrible filthiness of modern industrial society, my mind turnedas it often doesto the late Julian Simon. I remembered a point he made in the introduction to his encyclopedic 1995 book, The State of Humanity: almost all of the pollutants that have been most dangerous to humanity throughout history are today either totally eliminated or dramatically reduced. Here are Simon’s wise words:

When considering the state of the environment, we should think first of the terrible pollutants that were banished in the past century or sothe typhoid that polluted such rivers as the Hudson, smallpox that humanity finally pursued to the ends of the earth and just about eradicated, the dysentery that distressed and killed people all over the world.

Indeed so.

The fact that people today wring their hands with concern over the likes of global warming and species loss is itself a marvelous testament to the cleanliness of industrial society. People dying of smallpox or dysentery have far more pressing worries than what’s happening to the trend in the earth’s temperature. Truly, we today are lucky to be able to worry about the things that we worry about.

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http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/boudreaux/articles/2000/capitalism.html