Hey pea brain...what you just created all by your little lonesome is 3rd world America...congrats you ******* ignorant authoritarian moron...
I have done nothing of the sort. I have pointed out precisely WHY we have more expensive culture than those nations. We have a ******* wedding cake of regulations and laws and zoning that provide services and laws for a lifestyle that is many orders of magnitude more expensive than India.
Look again at those pictures. Look close and realize that WAS America Circa 19OO when progressive scion TR was in charge. It's one of the few things I'm in agreement with TR. It's shit like this that makes me know there's a reason for a certain level of civil structure to prevent this level of filth from being permitted in society.
HOW did Teddy Roosevelt and the progressives create 'a certain level of civil structure to prevent this level of filth from being permitted in society'?
By implementing what you call 'a ******* wedding cake of regulations and laws and zoning that provide services and laws for a lifestyle that is many orders of magnitude more expensive than India.'
Pollution is the perfect example of unregulated capitalism. It is not free market, it is corporate polluters that circumvent the rules of a free market. It is externalizing THEIR costs on to We, the People. They increase their profits because they are burdening society with the costs of their waste.
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I believe that the free market is the most efficient and democratic way to distribute the goods of the land, and that the best thing that could happen to the environment is if we had true free market-capitalism in this country, because the free market promotes efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste, and pollution of course is waste. The free market also would encourage us to properly value our natural resources, and it’s the undervaluation of those resources that causes us to use them wastefully. But in a true free-market economy, you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community.
But what polluters do is they make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by evading the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter; I’ll show you a subsidy. I’ll show you a fat cat using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market and force the public to pay his production costs. That’s what all pollution is. It’s always a subsidy. It’s always a guy trying to cheat the free market.
Corporations are externalizing machines. They’re constantly figuring out ways to get somebody else to pay their costs of production. That’s their nature. One of the best ways to do that, and the most common way for a polluter, is through pollution. When those coal-burning power plants put mercury into the atmosphere that comes down from the Ohio Valley and it comes down on my state New York, I buy a fishing license for $30 every year, but I can’t go fishing and eat the fish anymore because they stole the fish from me. They liquidated a public asset, my asset, they liquidated a pubic asset, my asset. The rule is the commons are owned by all of us. They’re not owned by the governor or the legislator or the coal companies and the utility. Everybody has a right to use them.
Nobody has a right to abuse them. Nobody has a right to use them in a way that will diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others. But they’ve stolen that entire resource from the people of New York State. When they put the acid rain in the air, it destroys our forest, and it destroys the lakes that we use for recreation or outfitting or tourism or wealth generation. When they put the mercury in the air, the mercury poisons our children’s brains, and that imposes a cost on us. The ozone in particular has caused a million asthma attacks a year, kills 18,000 people, hundreds of thousands of lost work days. All of those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should in a true free-market economy be reflected in the price of that company’s product when it makes it to the marketplace.
What those companies and all polluters do is use political clout to escape the discipline in the free market and force the public to pay their costs. All of the federal environmental laws, every one of the 28 major environmental laws, all of them were designed to restore free-market capitalism in America by forcing actors in the marketplace to pay the true cost of bringing their product to market.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
