Book Reviews – August 2006

• Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WW II Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan
  by A. C. Grayling
  Reviewed by Richard M. Ebeling

• How Progressives Rewrote the Constitution
  
  by Richard A. Epstein Reviewed
  by George C. Leef

• Saving Our Environment from Washington

  by David Schoenbrod Reviewed by Jane S. Shaw

• The Quotable Mises

  Edited by Mark Thornton Reviewed by William H. Peterson

The Irrational Precautionary Principle

Jim Peron is editor of Free Exchange, a monthly newsletter, and the owner of Aristotle’s Books in Auckland, New Zealand.
Chlorine is a common chemical. It’s estimated to be used in the production of 80 percent of all pharmaceuticals. But like most chemicals it can cause problems depending on the dose, what it is mixed with, [...]

Washington’s Centrally Planned Heating and Cooling

While the Clinton administration had eight years to “save the environment,” it waited until the final days to push through a flurry of questionable environmental regulations. Among these was the regulation that would require increasing the efficiency of central air conditioners and heat pumps by 30 percent. In the arcane language of the energy business, [...]

The Scapegoat Utility Vehicle

Sam Kazman is general counsel of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (www.cei.org), a Washington-based free-market advocacy organization.
First sin, then treason, and finally, reckless idiocy. For owners of sports utility vehicles (SUVs), that pretty much sums up the last holiday season. They went into Thanksgiving under fire from the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign. Then the [...]

Saving the Environment for a Profit, Victorian-Style

Pierre Desrochers is research director at the Montreal Economic Institute (www.iedm.org).
In the mind of the 21st-century environmentalist, Victorian cities and towns evoke images of black coal smoke and unsanitary conditions. For most people of the time though, they were one of humanity’s supreme achievements. Not as clean as the countryside, no doubt, but thriving places [...]

The World Is Dying, So Tax the Rich? It Just Aint So!

In a September 2, 2002, op-ed in the Washington Post, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan sets out what he believes should be the world’s agenda for the next century. He says we face “the twin challenges of poverty and pollution,” and that if we are to end the “wanton acts of destruction and the blithe [...]

The Impossibility of Harming the Environment

“The ‘polluter pays principle’ states that whoever is responsible for damage to the environment should bear the costs associated with it.”
—United Nations Environmental Programme1
The “polluter pays principle” appeals to our sense of justice. People should be held responsible for their actions, and polluters who cause damage to others should “pay” for that damage. Furthermore, forcing [...]

Hard Green: Saving the Environment from the Environmentalists: A Conservative Manifesto by Peter Huber

Basic Books • 2000 • 288 pages • $25.00 hardcover; $15.00 paperback
Peter Huber’s new book will delight as well as infuriate people who seek a consistent free-market approach to environmental issues. He delivers a devastating blow to the views of environmentalists who are antitechnology and antimarket, and does so with great vigor and wit. But [...]

Regulatory Extortion

Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola College in Baltimore, Maryland. This article is based on a presentation prepared for the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s conference, “Austrian Economics and the Financial Markets,” last September in Toronto.
In 1978 Michael Jensen and William Meckling, writing in the Financial Analysts Journal, offered an extraordinarily gloomy prediction [...]