To: Hawkmoon who wrote (67 ) 8/24/2000 11:46:23 AM From: Hawkmoon Read Replies (2) | Respond to I just had to excerpt some of that Worldnet article. It's a classic example of the battle between public and private market failure:worldnetdaily.com "The damage having been done, there is only one reasonable course: permit logging companies to henceforth thin the forests. Granted, huge swaths of this government-owned land is covered with diseased and decaying trees that are useless for the logging industry. That's also thanks to government regulations. But permitting loggers to start the thinning process would at least get us on the right track. Not private logging but a huge new government program that will put the government in charge of thinning forests at a cost of hundreds of millions to the taxpayer! Instead of permitting private enterprise to make money to clean up the government's disaster, the Clinton administration proposes to steal our money to thin out the forest themselves. And no doubt the government will botch the job as it botches everything. Nearly 1 billion per year, and that's only the first round of estimates. Count on it being five and ten times as much. We are talking about a full-scale, Soviet-style centralized industrial plan to do what loggers would gladly do at a profit. Third, they are captured by environmentalists whose strange religion exalts nature above man. (do we know anyone on this discussion thread who resembles this description?) For example, the Flagstaff, Ariz., effort to permit limited logging for purposes of thinning has come under heavy criticism from people who see it as a veil to permit a capitalist ravaging of mother nature."
