So it is with the Environmental Protection Agency, created by Congress and President Richard Nixon in 1970. In a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson painted the same gloomy picture that is given for creation of any federal agency: American life had become too intolerable without it. She writes:

Last month’s elections were not a vote for dirtier air or more pollution in our water. No one was sent to Congress with a mandate to increase health threats to our children or return us to the era before the EPA’s existence when, for example, nearly every meal in America contained elements of pesticides linked to nerve damage, cancer and sometimes death. In Los Angeles, smog-thick air was a daily fact of life, while in New York 21,000 tons of toxic waste awaited discovery beneath the small community of Love Canal. Six months before the EPA’s creation, flames erupted from pollution coating the surface of Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, nearly reaching high enough to destroy two rail bridges.

Coverage of the Cuyahoga River fire featured a Time Magazine photo from a 1952 fire on the river with claims it was taken during the June 1969 fire. However, as Stacie Thomas pointed out in this article, the real fire was brief, no photos were taken, and damage to the bridges was minimal.

Furthermore, notes law professor Jonathan H. Adler, the “pollution-was-progressively-becoming-worse” scenario Jackson paints is not true:

Contrary to common perceptions, many measures of environmental quality were already improving prior to the advent of federal environmental laws. The Environmental Protection Agency’s first national water quality inventory, conducted in 1973, found that there had been substantial improvement in water quality in major waterways during the decade before adoption of the federal Clean Water Act, at least for the pollutants of greatest concern at the time, organic waste and bacteria.

Unfortunately, Jackson is not satisfied with rewriting environmental history. She also commits the venerable broken-window fallacy, failing to account for what did not happen because of government intervention. She writes:

We have seen GDP grow by 207% since 1970, and America remains the proud home of storied companies that continue to create opportunities. Instead of cutting productivity, we’ve cut pollution while the number of American cars, buildings and power plants has increased. Alleged “job-killing” regulations have, according to the Commerce Department, sparked a homegrown environmental protection industry that employs more than 1.5 million Americans.

She’s also guilty of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Moreover, Jackson confuses jobs with the creation of real wealth. For example, many of the new “green jobs” are created via government subsidies, which means that the government is cannibalizing profitable entities to prop up those firms that are unprofitable. Far from creating wealth, this activity is economically destructive.

One wonders how much economic growth would have taken place had the EPA not existed. Obviously, that is a calculation no one is able to perform, but I suspect that some readers of this site who have had to deal with EPA bureaucrats can tell a few horror tales.

My only contact with the EPA came more than 30 years ago when I was a news reporter covering a story about a fertilizer plant’s discharges into Chickamauga Lake. Although Tennessee state water-quality authorities were willing to work with the firm, given there was no immediate health or aquatic hazards, the EPA was utterly rigid and the plant was shuttered. It was the bureaucratic mind at work.

Jackson wants us to believe that without the EPA we’d all be dead. I doubt that seriously, but I don’t doubt that EPA is a destructive enterprise killer. While Jackson calls for “common-sense solutions,” I submit that common sense tells us to do away with the agency.

The problem with this view is that “government” is an abstraction. In practice everything done in the name of government is done by government employees, ordinary human beings who can be, well, as fallible as anyone. To support this point we need only look at one of the cases Fahrenthold and Mui cited in buttressing their idea that government needs to protect us: the careless spraying of insecticides like DDT.

In the 1950s airplanes flew over swamps and suburbs, fields and forests, drenching everyone and everything with a rain of DDT and other insecticides. It was a triple fiasco: 1) it failed to control the target insect pests (such as the spruce budworm, the imported fire ant, and the gypsy moth, among others); 2) it cost a lot of money; and 3) the spraying slaughtered living things on a vast scale. It killed farm and domestic animals including cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, cats, and honey bees; it killed hundreds of species of beneficial insects and nematodes; and it killed wildlife, including foxes, raccoons, rabbits, fish, and, especially, birds — thus turning the affected areas into an eerie wasteland devoid of bird songs.

Who’s Responsible?

Who carried out this irresponsible madness? The culprits were identified by Rachel Carson in her celebrated 1962 book, Silent Spring. In case after case, the organizations that drenched land and wildlife with poisonous insecticides were …  government agencies! For example, in 1958 the U.S. Department of Agriculture launched a campaign to spray 20 million acres in nine southern states in an attempt to eradicate fire ants. The department won congressional approval for the program by making the unsupported assertion that fire ants were dangerous to livestock and crops, when in actuality, as Carson documented, they were no significant threat to either. The spraying did not control the fire ant, but it did cause massive kills of wildlife, especially fish and birds. The program was, said Carson, “an outstanding example of an ill-conceived, badly executed, and thoroughly detrimental experiment in the mass control of insects….”

In Montana in 1956 the U.S. Forest Service sprayed 900,000 acres of forest with DDT in an attempt to control the spruce budworm. After the sprayings, Carson wrote, along the streams biologists found a “characteristic pattern of death … an oil film on the water surface, dead trout along the shoreline.”

In New York State the U.S. Department of Agriculture joined forces with the New York Department of Agriculture and Markets in a futile attempt to eradicate the gypsy moth. In 1957, she continued, they “showered down the prescribed DDT-in-fuel-oil with impartiality. They sprayed truck gardens and dairy farms, fish ponds and salt marshes. They sprayed the quarter-acre lots of suburbia, drenching a housewife making a desperate effort to cover her garden before the roaring plane reached her…. Birds, fish, crabs, and useful insects were killed.”

In Michigan, in an attempt to control the Japanese beetle, government agencies joined forces to dust the suburbs of Detroit with aldrin, a pesticide 100 times more toxic to birds than DDT. The first offender in this debacle was the Michigan state legislature, which gave state agencies the power to spray indiscriminately, without notifying landowners or gaining their permission. The spraying was carried out by the Michigan Department of Agriculture, backed by the pesticide- tropic U.S. Department of Agriculture. When worried citizens reported dead birds and sickened humans and animals, Carson reports, government agencies stonewalled. The Federal Aviation Agency, the Detroit Department of Parks, and the Detroit police all vouched for the safety of the operation even though they had no evidence on the point.

Silent Spring — the gospel of the environmental movement — abundantly demonstrates that government can be an irresponsible, insensitive polluter. This raises an interesting question: Why has this point been forgotten? Post reporters Fahrenthold and Mui were so certain that government was the good guy in the DDT pesticide scandal that they didn’t even bother to check the point.

Watchful Eye Illusion

My explanation of this blindness is that these reporters — and environmental activists in general — are victims of the “watchful eye illusion.” Human beings have a disposition to believe in authority and to ascribe godlike wisdom and maturity to it. This orientation probably begins in childhood when parents are viewed as wise and capable. As children grow up, many transfer this faith in authority to government, producing the watchful eye illusion: the belief that government is wise and responsible. This illusion will lead people to forget about — or repress — all the evidence demonstrating that government officials are often unwise and irresponsible.

The 1950s spraying scandal hasn’t been government’s only environmental miscue. For another, look at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in the state of Washington, where the federal government’s radioactive spills are now expected to cost taxpayers $50 billion to clean up. In just one type of pollution at that site, the feds deliberately vented 725,000 curies of radioactive iodine-131. This was over 36,000 times as much radioactivity as was released in the 1979 Three Mile Island accident where naughty private interests were supposedly “taking risks in search of a payoff.”

Just as government can be an irresponsible polluter, it can also be an ineffective regulator. Many people don’t grasp this reality because, again, they are blinded by their faith in authority. With naive confidence, they propose, for example, that “government should regulate oil drilling,” thinking that this will prevent oil spills. If they could overcome the watchful eye illusion they would realize that they need to put their proposal more carefully: “Assuming that the government employees doing the regulating are alert, thoughtful, energetic, and responsible, and never lazy, complacent, uninformed, irrational, careless, corrupt, or paralyzed by red tape, government should regulate oil drilling.” Thus stripped of illusion, the idea that government can protect the environment loses much of its luster.

In the final analysis, overcoming environmental abuse is not likely to be achieved by governmental dictation. Instead, it is a process of social learning that includes everyone: friends and neighbors, reporters, pamphleteers, teachers, researchers — and companies too, as they discover how pollution hurts their image and their bottom line.

For example, a 1992 book Hollander edited, The Energy-Environment Connection, featured scientists such as Stephen Schneider, a well-known proponent of government control to slow down global warming, and John Holdren, who expressed alarm about the “folly of failing to stabilize world population.” Although it avoided inflammatory rhetoric, the book treated global warming as a severe problem and expressed pessimism about acid rain and air pollution.

Hollander has not repudiated his past work, but has shifted gears. It’s as though he sat down one day and completely rethought, without bias, the seriousness and extent of environmental problems. However it happened, he has come to the conclusion that poor people in developing countries suffer from the worst environmental problems: hunger, disease, and dangerously unsanitary water. Environmental problems in Europe and North American simply pale in comparison. “Reducing poverty throughout the world should be a top priority for environmentalists,” he writes.

The environmental crisis of poverty is the theme of the book, but another theme is inextricably entwined and almost more dominant. That is Hollander’s reassessment of the severity of environmental issues. For example, he doesn’t call global warming an imminent catastrophe. He says there are still many scientific uncertainties, and “if it turns out that human activity is adding to the natural warming, the amount will probably be small, and society can adjust to that as well, at relatively low cost or even net benefit.” In some circles, this is heresy.

Hollander is optimistic about reducing pollution from automobiles too. Already on the decline, this pollution is likely to disappear entirely, he says, as competition develops between the hybrids (electric and gasoline-powered cars) and cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. He predicts that the “worldwide deterioration of air quality that accompanied the rise of the automobile culture will be permanently reversed, and the world’s dependence on petroleum will probably be drastically reduced, as well.”

Nor does Hollander blindly support alternative energy, such as solar or wind power. He concludes that much effort to jump-start these alternatives is misplaced. The governments of such wealthy nations as the United States are subsidizing “large-scale renewable technologies for which there is little need,” yet ignoring solar applications that could help poor people in rural regions lacking electricity. He says that “poor countries have tremendous need for renewable energy sources, and a number of ingenious yet affordable technologies have been available for years.”

As these examples illustrate, Hollander has written a book that, like Bjørn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist, offers upbeat views about issues usually treated as crises. Unlike Lomborg, Hollander doesn’t seem to be challenging the establishment. He is an insider telling it the way he sees it. Perhaps his moderate stance is one reason why this book hasn’t received as much attention as has the Danish statistician’s.

Hollander has made an effort to consider literature from both the doomsday and skeptical sides. I was, however, dismayed by his selection of a passage from Dickens’s novel Hard Times to illustrate air pollution in the nineteenth century. (“It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it,” the passage begins). Dickens, a master of fictional exaggeration, is hardly a reliable authority on air pollution. I’m also a little surprised that Hollander is unaware of the growing literature (started by economists) surrounding the environmental Kuznets curve. This correlation between income and pollution shows that as countries become more wealthy their environments initially deteriorate but then become cleaner. Discussion of this would have underscored his point.

These are minor criticisms. Although it comes as no surprise to many of us that poverty is the environment’s number one enemy, at long last, thanks to Hollander, others may find it out too.

But dramatic changes in the quality of life have occurred in recent history. Global life expectancy in the last century climbed from 30 to around 60. In the United States, life expectancy has reached 76. So many of the things we take for granted—hot and cold running water, health care, and a stable food supply—were unknown to mankind throughout most of history.

Why is it that in the last couple of centuries things have changed so rapidly, when for thousands of years life remained a struggle for survival? For one thing, free-market economies emerged, based on the principles on which the United States was founded. John Locke spoke of these principles as the unalienable rights to “life, liberty, and estate.” Later Thomas Jefferson echoed these sentiments and helped make them central to the American way of life. Such basic liberties mean that we in America have the right to self-determination and the right to profit from our own ingenuity. From the onset of government based on fundamental rights, free-market economies emerged, wealth increased profoundly, and our quality of life improved by leaps and bounds.

Among the many achievements was the development of manmade chemicals, which have revolutionized how we live. They make possible such things as pharmaceuticals, safe drinking water, and pest control. Yet popular perception is that manmade chemicals are the source of every possible ill from cancer, ozone depletion, and infertility to brain damage. Ignoring that nature produces far more chemicals in far higher doses and that most chemicals are innocuous at low doses, activists capitalize on these fears. They scare the public by hyping the risks to ensure that the government passes volumes of laws and regulations all focused on the elimination of chemicals, thus jeopardizing our freedom without much regard for the tradeoffs.

Advocates of such limits say that we need to make sure every chemical is safe before exposing the public. In his recent book, Pandora’s Poison, Greenpeace’s Joe Thornton calls on society to follow the “precautionary principle,” which says we should avoid practices that have the potential to cause severe damage, even in the absence of scientific proof of harm. Thornton advocates a “zero discharge” policy, which calls for the elimination of all “bioaccumulative” chemicals. In particular, he has long called for the elimination of chlorine, about which he noted in Science magazine (July 9, 1993): “There are no known uses for chlorine which we regard as safe.” More recently, perhaps in recognition that this standard is politically untenable, he suggested that we continue using chlorine for “some pharmaceuticals” and some “water disinfection,” but only until other options become available.

Promoting such “precautionary policies” could mean halting all industrial activity, because nothing can be proven 100 percent safe. Hence, such policies carry dangerous tradeoffs. While chemicals may create new risks, they have been used to eliminate others—many of which wreaked havoc on civilization for centuries. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Fred Smith notes: “Experience demonstrates that the risks of innovation, while real, are vastly less than risks of stagnation.” Indeed, he asks, what would the world be like if we had never introduced penicillin because we could not prove it was 100 percent safe?

Essential Chemicals

While we don’t think much about it, manmade chemicals are essential to almost everything we do. They make our cars run; they clean everything from our teeth to our dishes; they reduce illnesses by disinfecting everything from our bathrooms at home to the operating rooms in our hospitals; they are used on food products such as poultry to eliminate E. coli and other deadly pathogens; and they keep our computers, televisions, and other electronic products running. Consider just a few of the critical functions they perform in making our lives better:

• Chlorination of water supplies has saved millions of lives. For example, since local engineers and industry introduced chlorination in 1880s, waterborne-related deaths in the United States have dropped from 75 to 100 per 100,000 people to fewer than 0.1 deaths per 100,000 annually in 1950.¹ Rather than curtailing the use of chlorination as Thornton suggests, we should be expanding access. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), in the developing world diarrheal diseases (such as cholera and dysentery) kill about two million children under five every year because of such things as poor sanitation and unsafe drinking water. Nearly 85 percent of pharmaceuticals that we now use require chlorine in their production.
• Thanks to chemicals used for pharmaceuticals, combination drug therapy has reduced AIDS deaths by more than 70 percent from 1994 to 1997.²
• Fifty percent of the reductions in heart-disease-related deaths between 1980 and 1990 (total death-rate decline of 30 percent) are attributable to medicines and the chemicals that compose them.³
• Chemicals called phthalates (there are several kinds) are used in PVC—vinyl used for medical tubing, blood bags, and numerous other products. While environmentalists have tried to ban these,⁴ vinyl medical devices provide many life-saving benefits. PVC is a safe, durable, sterile product that can withstand heat and pressure, and produces tubing that doesn’t kink. It’s particularly beneficial for vinyl blood bags because it stores blood twice as long as the next best alternative and doesn’t break like glass alternatives. In times of blood shortages, PVC blood bags are an essential tool in maintaining and transporting supply.
• Thanks to modern farming with chemicals, food production has outpaced population growth—providing people in both developed and developing countries with more food per person. Per capita grain supplies have grown by 27 percent since 1950, and food prices have declined in real terms by 57 percent since 1980. The use of herbicides to control weeds decreases the need for tilling soil, which in turn reduces soil erosion 50–98 percent.⁵

Disregarding such benefits, most of the key U.S. environmental regulatory statutes follow the lead of groups like Greenpeace, focusing on the elimination of chemicals without much regard to the dangers of not having these technologies. The Clean Water Act (1972), for example, made this unattainable pledge: “it is the national goal that the discharge of pollutants into the navigable waters be eliminated by 1985.” While we can meet reasonable clean-water goals, we can’t meet a zero discharge without forcibly halting industrial processes that bring us lifesaving medicines, a safe food supply packaged to resist spoilage, and even clothing.

Likewise, regulations that the EPA issued under the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974) actually set zero as the goal for certain chemical contaminants in drinking water—something that is virtually impossible and totally unnecessary for public-health purposes. With such goals, drinking-water standards for chemicals are extremely stringent. For example, one standard for a contaminant demands that drinking water not contain any more than 0.03 parts per trillion. The high costs of such onerous standards mean that financial resources are diverted from other more essential needs.

The Manmade Cancer Myth

Writing in the Journal of Clinical Oncology last year, researchers from the University of Alabama Schools of Medicine and Public Health noted that “A typical commentary blamed ‘increasing cancer rates’ on ‘exposure to industrial chemicals and run-away modern technologies whose explosive growth had clearly outpaced the ability of society to control them.’”⁶ But their research finds: “There is no denying the existence of environmental problems, but the present data show that they produced no striking increase in cancer mortality.” They conclude: “When the mortality from all smoking-related cancers is excluded, the decline in other cancer from 1950 to 1998 was 31 percent (from 109 to 75 deaths per 100,00 person years).” Hence the increase in cancer at that time was not related to the use of synthetic chemicals or pollution, but to personal lifestyle choices.

The most recent report from the National Cancer Institute confirms that: “Cancer incidence for all sites combined decreased from 1992 through 1998 among all persons in the United States, primarily because of a decline of 2.9 percent per year in white males and 3.1 percent per year in black males. Among females, cancer incidence rates increased 0.3 percent per year. Overall, cancer death rates declined 1.1 percent per year.”⁷ Cancer among women increased slightly only because of better detection, which is good news because it means doctors are finding and curing more cancers among women.

In their landmark 1981 study of the issue, Sir Richard Doll and Richard Peto set out to determine the causes of preventable cancer in the United States.⁸ According to Doll and Peto, pollution only accounts for 2 percent of all cancer cases. They do note that 80 to 90 percent of cancers are caused by “environmental factors.” But while activists often trumpet this figure as evidence that industrial society is causing cancer, Doll and Peto explain that “environmental factors” simply means factors other than genetics. It does not mean pollution alone. Environmental factors include smoking, diet, occupational exposure to chemicals, “geophysical factors” such as naturally occurring radiation, manmade radiation, medical drugs and radiation, and pollution. Tobacco use accounts for about 30 percent of all annual cancer deaths, and dietary choices account for 35 percent of annual cancer deaths.

With so few cancers caused by pollution, how many could environmental regulation eliminate? With each regulation the EPA claims to save thousands from dying from cancer. Together, these would likely add up into the millions. But scientist Michael Gough demonstrates why we should consider such EPA claims suspect.

Gough analyzed the findings of the Doll-Peto study along with estimates of cancer risks in the EPA’s report Unfinished Business. He came to conclusions similar to that of Doll and Peto. Gough noted that between 2 and 3 percent of all cancers could be associated with environmental pollution. Determining such numbers helps us understand what exactly the EPA can expect to accomplish when regulating pollutants. Gough says that EPA action could only address a small percentage of cancers: “If the EPA risk assessment techniques are accurate, and all identified carcinogens amenable to EPA regulations were completely controlled, about 6,400 cancer deaths annually (about 1.3% of the current annual total of 435,000 cancer deaths) would be prevented. When cancer risks are estimated using the more realistic method employed by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the number of regulatable cancers is smaller, about 1,400 (about 0.25%).”⁹

Faulty Rodent Tests

Given these realities, how does the EPA justify its claims? Many of the findings on
chemicals and cancer relate to faulty tests that entail administering massive amounts of chemicals to rodents bred to be highly susceptible to cancer. Then researchers extrapolate the possible effects of such chemicals on humans, who may be exposed to small amounts of the same chemical during their lives.

We should ask: Why are the impacts on rodents relevant to humans? Doll and Peto note that some chemicals found to be carcinogenic in humans have not produced cancerous tumors in rodents. In fact, for many years, cigarette smoke failed to produce malignant tumors in laboratory animals although tobacco is a leading cause of cancer in the United States. These discordant effects of chemicals in animals and humans underline the difficulty of relying on animal results to estimate human risks.

Moreover, Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold demonstrate why we need not be concerned about low-level exposure to “rodent carcinogens.”¹⁰ They found that such chemicals pose no more of a risk than that posed by many natural, unregulated substances that are common and accepted parts of a healthy diet. While 212 of 350 of the synthetic chemicals examined by various agencies were found to be carcinogenic at the massive doses given to rodents, 37 out of 77 of the natural substances tested were also found carcinogenic in rodent studies employing the same methodology. The average intake of natural rodent carcinogens in plant foods is about 1,500 mg per person each day, while the average intake of manmade pesticides is .09 mg per day.¹¹ Natural rodent carcinogens exist in apples, bananas, carrots, celery, coffee, lettuce, orange juice, peas, potatoes, and tomatoes at levels thousands of times greater than exposures found in drinking water.¹²

The free use and development of chemicals have proven a key to human progress, and ill effects on health from low-level exposures are small, if detectable at all. Continued progress demands the continuation of an unfettered marketplace in which firms can develop new products without having to meet an impossible or nearly impossible zero-risk standard. Such allegedly more “precautionary” approaches of the environmental activists actually risk a return to the world of Thomas Hobbes.

1. Michael J. LaNier, “Historical Development of Municipal Water Systems in the United States, 1776 to 1976,” Journal of the American Water Works Association, April 1976, p. 177.
2. Frank J. Palella et al., “Declining Morbidity and Mortality among Patients with Advanced HIV Infection,” The New England Journal of Medicine, March 26, 1998.
3. M.G. Hunink et al., “The Recent Decline in Mortality From Coronary Heart Disease, 1980–1990,” Journal of the American Medical Association, February 19, 1997, pp. 535–42.
4. Bill Durodie, “Poisonous Propaganda: Global Echoes of an Anti-Vinyl Agenda” (Washington, D.C.: Competitive Enterprise Institute, July 2000).
5. Dennis Avery, “Saving the Planet with Pesticides,” in Ronald Bailey, ed., The True State of the Planet (New York: Free Press, 1995), pp. 52–54.
6. Brad Rodu and Philip Cole, “The Fifty-Year Decline of Cancer in America,” Journal of Clinical Oncology, January 1, 2001, pp. 239–41.
7. Holly L. Howe et al., “Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer (1973 through 1998), Featuring Cancers with Recent Increasing Trends,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute, June 6, 2001, pp. 824–42.
8. Richard Doll and Richard Peto, “The Causes of Cancer: Quantitative Estimates of Avoidable Risks of Cancer in the United States Today,” Journal of the National Cancer Institute, June 1981.
9. Michael Gough, “How Much Cancer Can EPA Regulate Away?” Risk Analysis 10, no. 1 (1990), pp. 1–6; and Michael Gough, “Estimating Cancer Mortality,” Environmental Science and Technology 23, no. 8 (1989), pp. 925–30.
10. Bruce Ames and Lois Swirsky Gold, “Too Many Rodent Carcinogens: Mitogenesis Increases Mutagenesis,” Science,
August 31, 1990, p. 970.
11. Ibid.
12. National Research Council, Committee on Comparative Toxicology of Naturally Occurring Carcinogens, Carcinogens and Anticarcinogens in the Human Diet: A Comparison of Naturally Occurring and Synthetic Substances (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996), Appendix A.

An online dictionary defines “addiction” as “the state of being enslaved to a habit or practice or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming, as narcotics, to such an extent that its cessation causes severe trauma.”

Many commentators see oil usage in our economy in the same manner. Jim Wallis, who runs the leftist religious site Sojourners, writes:

[O]ur oil addiction is making things not work. The list of consequences is long — from critical climate changes, to the loss of jobs, to supplying money for terrorists, to sacrificing the lives of our young people in wars over oil, to watching an oil spill that nobody seems to know how to stop pour hundreds of thousands of gallons each day into the Gulf of Mexico.

At a deep level, what’s not working in the U.S. is our lifestyle — particularly the consumerist energy habits we showcase to the rest of the world. Moving toward a “clean energy economy” will require more than just a re-wiring of the energy grid; it will also take a re-wiring of ourselves — a conversion, really, of our habits of the heart. We must adjust our expectations, demands, and values.

Are we addicted to oil, or is oil a vital resource that helps advance civilization? I believe it is the latter. Furthermore, is “addiction” an appropriate way to describe the use of petroleum-based products?

It is one thing to engage in such rhetoric, but another to examine Wallis’s message: It is immoral to use petroleum-based fuels and other products. Furthermore, his “solution” of expanded State power to force us to use alternative energy forms provides a sort of “salvation” for all of us.

Much of the harm Wallis claims results from using oil (his publication Sojourners also devotes part of the current issue to the “evils” of coal) is speculative. However, I don’t believe it is a given that oil use is “changing the climate” (and always for the worse, according to Wallis), nor does he explain just how oil use leads to a “loss of jobs.” He just makes the statement, and we are supposed to accept it at face value.

However, we do know that rising standards of living also lead to longer life spans and a higher quality of life. Wallis is forever going on about poverty in the Third World (for which he blames Americans, of course), yet we forget that before entrepreneurs harnessed the power of oil and coal, Americans and Europeans were very poor.

Entrepreneurs found ways to use these resources to create products that consumers willingly purchased. From the advent of kerosene, which allowed ordinary people to have artificial light in their homes, to the development of the internal combustion engine, which helped provide the means of large-scale transportation, oil- and coal-based fuels have changed the lives of individuals.

Unfortunately, the same people who decry poverty elsewhere want the government to make us poorer. Yes, there are some side-effects to extracting and using these fuels, but consumers have made it clear they want to continue using them and are willing to pay for their continued production, for they do not want to be forced into lifestyles they find undesirable.

Markets themselves are neither moral nor immoral. Rather, they reflect our own choices and priorities. One can claim, for example, that we are addicted to food and make the same set of arguments that critics make against oil. Moreover, alternative forms of energy also have their own problems. For example, the “food for fuels” movement drives up the cost of food, which means poor people go hungry.

The critics cannot have it both ways. If they wish to reduce poverty, then oil and coal are an important part of that equation. If they want everyone to be poorer, then they have to admit that poverty has consequences.

The left sees “The personal is the political” as a kind of call to arms: Everything you do is political so you should think through the implications.  In and of itself, that’s a point that libertarians can accept, though perhaps on a narrower set of issues.

However, for those of us in the freedom movement, that same phrase takes on a very different meaning in the context of the continued expansion of government in both health care and the environment. As government’s role grows, more and more decisions that we think of as personal are becoming political – with all the problems that brings.  There are decisions that we want to be personal and not political, but when resources become socialized and goals become collective, the personal becomes the political in all kinds of unsavory ways.  Let’s look at two quick examples.

As government spends more and more on health care, the number of personal decisions second-guessed by the political authorities will expand as well.  When health care spending is private, personal decisions are not political.  If I eat poorly, I pay the price at the doctor’s office.  However, once we socialize that spending, my decision to eat fatty, salty foods could cause me to use scarce resources from the collective pot.  The guardians of that pot — the politicians and bureaucrats — will have to decide if my “needs” are important enough to justify the use of those resources. If they are not, it will be necessary to limit my choices so that they don’t draw those collective resources away from needs politically determined to be “more urgent.”  The result could be a special tax or the outright prohibition of two of my life’s great loves: Italian subs and Buffalo wings.

The evidence is all around us: Trans fats are banned; the federal government tells women in their 40s they don’t “need” mammograms; more localities attempt to use zoning and other laws to keep out fast-food restaurants.  Rather than allowing individuals to make their own judgments about the tradeoffs regarding risk, the State must substitute its judgment and enforce it with coercion.  The personal has become the political.

The second example is illustrated by the much-discussed Audi commercial shown during the Super Bowl, in which “the Green Police” arrest people for using the wrong light bulbs, preferring plastic bags to paper, throwing away rather than recycling batteries, and using Styrofoam cups.  The commercial is powerful because it portrays even the most innocuous personal choices as subject to the State’s coercion if they are not the “correct” ones – that is, the ones the State dictates.  When environmental goals become socialized and trump all others, those making the “wrong” choices will find themselves on the wrong end of a gun.

As Hayek wrote almost 70 years ago in The Road to Serfdom, once a society decides that some goals have collective priority over others, the only ways to ensure the pursuit of those goals are propaganda and/or force.

When the personal becomes the political in that sense, the loser is human freedom.

I would have been convinced by 10 or so.

FEE Timely Classic:
“Environmentalism: The Triumph of Politics” by Doug Bandow

Just wait until they start regulating all human behavior that emits carbon dioxide.

FEE Timely Classic:
“An Earlier Response to Environmental Tyranny” by Daniel F. Walker

Summary of domestic energy policy debate: Devil you know or the devil you don’t?

FEE Timely Classic:
“The Perverse Popularity of Command and Control” by Dwight R. Lee

Cash for Clunkers, of course, was the popular term for the Car Allowance Rebate System, which funded down payments of up to $4,500 for new cars if older-model cars were traded in and destroyed. The program was temporarily discontinued and then officially ended after barely a month of operation. Around 700,000 vehicles were purchased as a result of the program, according to government and industry statistics. It wound up costing $3 billion.

Talk Show Guy was right, I thought, careful not to cut myself. When you offer $3 billion in free money to people, why was anyone shocked that they went for it? And if you offer free health care to a supposedly narrow segment of the population that cannot now access it, why do economic planners create budget projections that assume healthcare demand will remain static?

But that wasn’t what caused me to move the razor from my face. That had to do with all of the talk about Cash for Clunkers being such a good program. It clearly wasn’t, or at least it shouldn’t have appeared so to anyone who remembers the basics of college economics. From this perspective, there is so much wrong that it’s hard to know where to start.

Cleaning Up Inventories, Not the Environment

First, let’s dispense with the notion that this bill had anything to do with improving the environment. Getting people into cars that get better mileage often leads them to drive more, negating any benefit from the switch. What’s more, scrapping hundreds of thousands of “clunkers” en masse while encouraging production of new cars to replace them isn’t exactly an environmental blessing either.

The real purpose of the program was to help car dealers sell off the excess supply of 2009 vehicles that consumers weren’t buying at the prices dealers preferred to charge. Giving people free money to put toward a down payment was a way for Congress to pay back a powerful lobby that produced an unsustainable level of output during the Fed-fueled boom. It’s reminiscent of those New Deal programs—like the Agricultural Adjustment Act—that also tried to thwart falling prices by destroying perfectly good and usable products that otherwise would have lowered prices. In the 1930s people rioted when the government forced farmers to pour perfectly good milk down sewer drains. No one’s rioting today because now the government is more richly compensating those who own the property being destroyed. (For a fascinating, contemporary account of the Agricultural Adjustment Act and other New Deal programs, see journalist John T. Flynn’s The Roosevelt Myth. For a more recent account, see Amity Shlaes’s The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression.)

Bootleggers and Baptists, Dealers and Greens

What we have is a situation described by Clemson University economist Bruce Yandle’s “Bootleggers and Baptists” theory for the growth of government. According to Yandle, government often grows because two otherwise opposite groups are able to join forces to pass legislation that neither would have been able to get passed individually. His example applied to groups that supported alcohol prohibition: The bootleggers benefited from the outlawing of their “legitimate” competition, and religious groups opposed liquor sales as a matter of morals. When both groups joined forces, legislation became far more likely to pass.

Applying Yandle’s theory to the clunker program, the bootleggers were car dealers who faced low consumer demand and sales revenues at current prices, while the Baptists were environmentalists who believed that older-model cars insult mother earth. The prospect of an old-car trade-in program unites both groups.

Cash for Clunkers certainly had its share of winners and losers. Car dealers who experienced summer profits surely won, as did those individuals who otherwise would have gone without cars. And let’s not forget the banks and finance companies that now have loan assets on their books. You can be sure the members of Congress who voted for this bill will remind dealers of their generosity in directing other people’s money their way in this old-fashioned shell game.

And it is a shell game, because the losers here are the poor and the lower middle class—the very groups in the most precarious economic shape 18-plus months into the Great Recession. They suffer in two ways. First, as primary consumers in the used-car market, they will see supply shrivel. Many cars that qualified for Cash for Clunkers still had long lives ahead of them.

The poor will also pay in the form of higher prices resulting from the inflation that will be required to finance the program. The government is broke, with tax revenues falling while spending soars at levels even higher than those associated with the profligate Bush administration. In terms of cost, Cash for Clunkers is at least twice as expensive as its New Deal inspiration, the Agriculture Adjustment Act. This program will be paid for, at some time, with monetary inflation furnished by our not-so-independent central bank, and we will pay for it in the form of higher prices. This is why inflation is a tax, and a regressive one at that.

Indeed, when I first read about Cash for Clunkers, I thought it should have been named the “I Hate the Poor” Act of 2009 because—you can be sure—this program sticks it to those members of society least able to manage in hard times. In the end they will find maintaining economic autonomy all the harder, making it more likely they will become dependent on government in the future. The cynic in me wonders if this might be the actual intent.

Nonetheless, Talk Show Guy thought this was a good program. He liked it! I bet he got a good deal on a new car, too. Hope he enjoys his ride.

This article first appeared at www.fee.org.