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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (37668)	4/3/2004 2:20:03 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 794460

Societies tend to lower pollution as they move up the economic level. Yeah, but they do it mostly via regulation. That's the only real tool in the toolkit. Industries cannot afford to voluntarily establish environmental standards suitable for a society at our level any more than they can afford to run their call centers in the US. Since it is, as you say, a commons problem and since much of it is anonymous, they will get away with whatever they can because competition won't allow them to do otherwise. Inherent to commons issues are a shortfall in scruples and the easy shirking of responsibility due to the limited risk of being successfully sued. There is negligible natural inhibition to polluting the commons. So we need the regulation tool to achieve the environmental standards of a society like ours more so than other standards. Toy manufacturers will voluntarily avoid producing toys that maim kids out of morality and out of fear of lawsuits. Those natural brakes don't exist for industries with hazardous byproducts. But we are in the clutches of a environmental religious movement that borders on the inquisition. I won't dispute that feature of true believers. But the anti-regulators are just as bad. Without regulation we would have goop coming out of pipes and smokestacks. We need smarter, more effective, more natural regulation, not pollution free-for-alls.