Tuesday, July 21, 2015

How the Free Market Can Heal the Environment part 1

The advancing industrial and commercial interests in the natural places of the earth is a widespread source of alarm. Polar bears on floating icecaps, whales harpooned and dragging behind menacing ships, seagulls bathing in black oil, are the images used in the attempts to protect the environment from the evil, mechanized hand of mankind. The propaganda element of these images aside, they do illustrate robust arguments. While these arguments very from "man is a monster" to "moral man should protect the wild" to "man needs the earth", they do not always provide viable solutions. While there are solutions as radical as genocide; or proselytization solutions where slogans are plastered all over the media and on boxtops; or big, highly regulatory, bureaucratic government seizes and maintains millions of acres of land, none of these arguments and solutions are equipped to solve the problem the way that it could and should be solved. If there is any force on the planet capable of restoring icecaps, growing whale populations, and cleaning up oil spills, that force would be the free market.

Perhaps arguing that the free market is the solution to reinvigorating the environment is crossing over to many political lines: one can't simply mash the Democrat's sympathy for the environment with the Republican's sympathy for the free market, such a position is civic blasphemy, after all. Wrong. A degraded environment is as bad for blue, as it is for red. Likewise is genocide, propaganda campaigns, and oppressive government equally bad for all parties. Therefore, it is far from inconceivable that some mutual, beneficial solution could be found by letting the free market have it's whirl in public policy and the environment.

Objections batter the argument from all quarters, before even, the case is made for letting the free market have it's way. Dogmatic pseudo-empiricists decry that if the free market has it's way then there will exist an oligarchy in the bases sense. Marxists and anyone who uses the word "inequality" on a daily basis slander the free market as the progenitor of the mr. Scrooges, the Artful Dodgers, and the Ralph Nicklebys of the world. Keynsians shout that the free market is the cause of all economic woes and depression. All of these objection's like caption Kidd's ship, the leaky and worm-eaten Adventure Galley, be retired to the flames.

In order of appearance comes the dogmatic pseudo-empiricists. In simplified terms a dogmatic pseudo-empiricist is a person who blindly believes that the only way the truth of something can be known is through direct observation by the five senses and claims that it's scientific, or, a blind wannabe seer. Because empiricists only believe what is tangible fact, it is impossible for them to understand the intangible and the logical. The free market, being a theory, becomes cannon fodder for many empiricists because of this fact. Therefore, the only way for an empiricist to experiment on the free market is to either conquer and control the market, or to look at historical data and conduct a statistical experiment. Empiricists then look at history only to discover that when trade is free, then the few seem to accumulate all the wealth, these few then control the governments thus producing oligarchy.

This however is logically fallacious. Although in an historical and empirical context it makes sense, when examined by rationalism and logic, it is "leaky and worm ridden." This objection to the free market is logically unacceptable because it presumes that the perceived relationship between the free market and oligarchy means that one caused the other, which is not true. In reality economics dose not cause oligarchy, ignorant and fiscally irresponsible people cause oligarchy. While an empiricist can look through the history books and prove this to be true, pseudo-empiricists can still draw the conclusion that free markets causes oligarchy, because these so called empiricists do not understand theory.

This seems to be very similar to what the "Marxists and anyone who uses the word "inequality" on a daily basis" people tout. Their main argument is that the free market encourages greed. For an in-depth refutation of greed in the free market, please refer to another article on this blog "The Straw Man of Capitalism." (http://thelibertascreed.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-straw-man-of-capitalism.html) In short, the argument that the free market encourages greed dose not hold up because the free market is about people choosing, not necessarily choosing to be greedy.

Lastly the Keynsians. The Keynsian school of economic thought believes in a mixed economy, A.K.A, an economy that is not free. Keynsians claim that the free market, if implemented will cause economic woes. This counterargument to the free market is also leaky because the reason people would suffer if the free market is only because they'd be coming off the sugar-high that the Keynsians have been pumping QE, market bubbles, and unbacked currency into nations like a nurse uses an IV pump. While technically their argument is true, going back to a free market would hurt, the only reason it would is because of the Keynsians. Thus three big objections against the free market are dispatched and sent packing and we can focus on how the free market can cure environmental ills.




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