Russia&China: These are becoming more mkt-driven, but yeah, the baseline is too short to judge. But what of Brazil? (soiling its nest? Just look at the way they use mercury to pan for gold. Scary.) That's a rich frontier society that's in the hands of the captains of industry. They don't get paid by not clearing forest. And the little guy braves the mercury shakes to get that extra ounce of yellow money.
I respectfully suggest that the trend between "mkt freedom" and environmentally clean practice is not causal. There's Brazil. There's tropical Asia and Africa, laying waste to old rain forest at an alarming rate. Species loss all overAfrica&Asia is really bad. Don't ask me for statistics; I don't have them and even then I couldn't vouch for their goodness.
I don't advocate international welfare. I do advocate economic disincentive to environmentally unsound practice. Stop buying rainforest timber; see if you can talk our wealthy neighbors on the Pacific Rim to support us in that venture. Illegalizing ivory is a symbolic act but it sends a message: we will choke your market.
Think twice anout buying rice or selling corn to a country which manufactures&exports first-generation agrochemicals like DDT.
And I really do believe the USA has a moral obligation to pull its collective head out of the sand on the global warming issue. While we can disagree on whether the issue is real, I believe it's not easily dismissed. It doesn't help if we as a society tell the world: We won't pay to head off a controversial ecological crisis.
Our industry became clean because the voting public forced it. No corporation is gonna charge the taxpayers for good housekeeping which costs now and doesn't pay back for 50 years. Auto companies had conniptions when energy-related mkt forces (together with gov't policy - hard to separate the two) forced a major retooling from Galaxies to Pintos. I don't believe a market left to itself gives a hoot about long (10-100yrs) term costs, like losing all the old-growth lumber stands. It's just not in our nature.
At the philosophical level, I'll suggest that libertarianism taken to its logical end is as impractical as communism. Seeking max. freedom leads to a decay of a sense of large-scale responsibility. Given a choice, I will select the good of my clan over the good of my state. When everybody gets those kinds of choices, a feudal mindset emerges. Freedom needs to be balanced against a sense of duty imposed from without. The continued dialog -and conflict - of rights vs. rules can never be frozen into a perfect balance. It needs to be incessantly redefined, renegotiated by the community of citizens as the economic and social terrain changes.
I despair of finding a simple formuls for a good society. Too much central authority, and the flexibility and capacity for ethical self-review of a society suffers. Too little authority, and organized crime and tribalism grow ascendant to turn any society into a quiltwork of armed camps. Look at you, and me, and FT, and Christine. Imagine that we're a nation of four. What sort of legislative framework would receive unanimous passage by the citizenry? Now that's a poser, and that in a nutshell is the Herculean task of any large nation which identifies itself as pluralistic.
Alex |
