Earth Day: Conservation from a Libertarian perspective

Happy Earth Day to one and all. Enjoy the day and enjoy our home.

Conservation and ecological awareness means different things to different people. For some, it means a fight against global warming. Other people discount global warming as just a bunch of hooey. For others, it means protecting wildlife. For still others it means fighting to curb pollution in general (not just air pollution). And for many others, it means nothing at all.

Note: I am not going to enter the global warming debate here. You make your own decisions about whether or not you think it's a real problem. I am not a climate expert. Go talk to somebody who is.

While I can't speak for all Libertarians regarding eco-conservation (and who can?), I can speak for myself and for others who put their faith in the free market.

I don't believe in big government, and that includes big government regulation when it comes to the environment and conservation. Government regulation doesn't do any good. If it did, then our planet should be pristine today. Goodness knows there has been enough government regulation that it should have been cleaned up by now.

Why doesn't government regulation work? Because it is always flawed. There are always loopholes and exceptions. Somebody invariably finds the loophole and then the levee breaks with a flood of followers. Government regulation also takes the power of choice away from the citizens and puts it in the hands of legislators and lobbyists. And when that happens, the money always wins. Always.

Instead, I believe in a limited government. The Constitution says nothing about the U.S. government having to regulate or subsidize energy consumption and ecological stewardship.

It's up to us, individually.

I believe that many of the government programs should become privatized. If left to the free market, ecological balance would occur, and quicker than the government can regulate it into happening.

For example - sanitation. Make it all private. No more municipal trash pickup. And no government regulation on what fee the trash service can charge.

In that situation, here's what could happen:

XYZ Trash Company starts to charge its customers on a consumption basis, perhaps on a fee-per-pound of trash.

Consumers notice a significant rise in trash collection fees. They appeal to the city council. City council says, "Sorry, this isn't something we deal with. You'll have to talk to XYZ Trash Co."

XYZ Trash Co. says that the price they charge is fair because of all the costs they have to offset - gasoline and maintenance for their trash trucks, paying workers, disposing of the trash, buying or renting land for a landfill, and sorting trash into recyclables for resale.

(XYZ "trash" company already knows that it can resell scrap metal, recyclable paper, and recyclable plastic for reuse, plus compost organic materials for resale as commercial compost, mulch and topsoil - so XYZ is making double profits from your trash.)

XYZ Trash Co. executives realize that if they ask their customers to recycle on the front end, it would save XYZ the expense of having to sort through the trash for recyclables. XYZ decides to introduce a recycling program to its customers and even offer them an incentive - a discount or offset of its trash collection fee for every pound of recyclables a customer turns in.

Customers, eager to take advantage of the savings, are more than happy to pre-sort their trash and start recycling.

The consumers benefit through cost savings (and maybe even a profit, if they're really diligent about recycling), the trash company profits, and the earth benefits.

Of course, in the above scenario, there will be people who will balk at the privatized trash collection and resort to illegally dumping their trash. Here's where the government steps in to assume its lawful and constitutional role. The government, at this point, would enforce the public's dumping and litter laws... and hopefully enforce those laws to the fullest extent. The offender would be prosecuted and forced to pay hefty fines for illegal dumping.

The landowner upon whose property the illegal dumping was taking place, or the adjacent landowner who is now getting all the toxic runoff as a result of the illegal dumping, also has a right - the right to seek restitution. Through the court system, the victim landowner can sue the lawbreaker and seek payment for the pollution damage that has been done and reimbursement for the cleanup.

When citizens' pocketbooks are affected, they tend to comply. Don't believe me? Think back to last September when Knoxvillians were faced with astronomical gas prices during Hurricane Ike. People carpooled. They used mass transit. They walked. They biked. They inadvertantly conserved.

And look at the switch to cell phones. Regular landline phone users were taxed and hit with fee upon fee. They switched to flat-rate cell phones with unlimited use. Now, over 20% of Tennesseans don't even have a land line anymore - just a cell phone. It's cheaper.

The point is, we get better, more lasting results when the government is out of the picture. When left to deal with it ourselves, the common sense wins out.

And so it can be with the environment. It starts the same as any other journey - one step at a time.