snipped: “Indeed, defining property rights allows those who wish to preserve resources to do so by purchasing them, holding them, and nurturing them. But, you have to do it yourself. You can’t go running to the government to do it, as you do now.”
I get it; we can buy shares in the rain forest and save it in its natural state, or plant a tree in israel or whatever…but i don’t know, i don’t think divvying up the world with proeprty rights is going to make us all great stewards of the earth.
If I have the right to dig a mine, I’ll dig that mine and poison the streams if necessaryt o retrieve my ore and get my drinking water elsewhere with the gold i gather, locals be damned.
If i’m BP, i could care less about the gulf ecosystem. i suppose we tree-huggers couldve taken up a collection before they started drilling and bought their drilling rights from them to save the gulf? is that what you had in mind? But we could never afford to do that, because we’d have no idea where the disaster will occur, we could never buy up all the leases, and so we can’t preserve and protect ina world where the primary goal is to suck out resources, where that is always going to be the high bid.
Property rights alone are not moral or good and using them efficiently won’t make the earth necessarily better. it might. but i think a little command control might be in order.
I don’t trust the government on many issues, but i am far more mistrustful of individuals and businesses in this critical area: maximizing personal gain and externalizing costs.
