All Posts Tagged With: "pollution"
Are People Pleased with the Efficient Amount of Pollution?
It is clear that zero pollution is not a reasonable goal once we recognize that polluting creates benefits as well as costs. Long before we reduced pollution to zero, there would be so much environmental quality and so few manufactured goods that the marginal value gained from increasing pollution would be greater than the marginal cost.
1Jun2001 | Dwight R. Lee | 1 comment | ContinuedThe Efficient Amount of Pollution
When environmentalists argue that the costs of protecting the environment should be ignored, they quickly find themselves in a box. The only way to protect environmental quality in some ways (say, reducing water pollution) is by harming it in other ways (say, increasing air pollution).
1May2001 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | ContinuedThe Problem of Environmental Protection
A common belief is that economists don’t care much about the environment because they are preoccupied with money, markets, and material wealth. And when economists do consider ways to protect the environment, they emphasize benefits and costs, trying to express all values in terms of cash.
1Apr2001 | Dwight R. Lee | 2 comments | ContinuedPolluting Production
Politicians use language differently from the rest of us. Take the expression “Big Polluters.” Big Oil produces oil. Big Pharmaceuticals produce medicines. I guess Big Polluters produce air and water pollution. What’s more, they somehow make big profits doing so. How this works I’m not sure. Who would pay for pollution? Obviously, there are no [...]
1Mar2001 | Sheldon Richman | 6 comments | ContinuedThe Cuyahoga Revisited
Stacie Thomas is an economist with the Senate Banking Committee in Washington, D.C. This is adapted from PERC Reports, June 1999. Early in the summer of 1969, the Cuyahoga River caught fire. Piles of logs, picnic benches, and other debris had collected below a railroad trestle, which impeded their movement down the river. These piles [...]
1May2000 | Stacie Thomas | 2 comments | ContinuedCleaned by Capitalism
I recently spoke in Toronto to students at a public-policy seminar sponsored by the Fraser Institute. The seminar opened with Fraser’s Laura Jones reviewing the many sound reasons why environmental alarmism is inappropriate. Ms. Jones offered superb analysis and boatloads of relevant facts. Her case that the environment is not teetering on the edge of [...]
1Feb2000 | Donald J. Boudreaux | 1 comment | ContinuedIn the Absence of Private Property Rights
We commonly benefit from things we neither understand nor appreciate. Obviously there are advantages in benefiting from a wide range of things without having to give them much thought. But the danger is that such neglect can often cause us great harm. Good health is an example. For most people, good health is easy to [...]
1Jul1999 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | ContinuedWhat Is This Thing Called Sprawl?
“Urban sprawl” is fast becoming the most important issue among so-called “land use” experts and in many state legislatures as well. If it isn’t understood correctly, laws enacted to deal with it are likely to become major threats to both liberty and economic well-being. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure, as the old saying [...]
1Oct1998 | Lawrence W. Reed | 3 comments | ContinuedHow Environmentalism Disdains the Poor
Calvin Beisner is associate professor of interdisciplinary studies at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and author of Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate (Eerdmans, 1997) The late Julian Simon and other wise thinkers have long understood that economic development is necessary to enable people to afford a safe environment. That [...]
1Aug1998 | E. Calvin Beisner | 1 comment | ContinuedCommon Sense and Common Law for the Environment: Creating Wealth in Hummingbird Economies
Peter Hill is a senior associate of the Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, and professor of economics at Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois. Surely one of the more problematic issues for people with a principled commitment to free markets is the environment. Such people generally have a deep respect for individual rights, and environmental [...]
1Aug1998 | Peter J. Hill | 1 comment | ContinuedAn Environment Without Property Rights
When Eastern Europe began to open up in the late 1980s, one of the great shocks was the severity of its environmental problems. Journalists reported on skies full of smoke from lignite and soft coal, children kept inside for much of the winter because of unsafe air, and horses that had to be moved away [...]
1Feb1997 | Richard L. Stroup | 2 comments | ContinuedThe Market Didn’t Do It
Critics of the marketplace are often both appallingly ignorant of why markets are so valuable, and anxious to believe that markets possess powers that they simply don’t possess. The marketplace is an extraordinary social institution, but if it caused as many problems as its critics claim, it would be even more extraordinary than it is. [...]
1Dec1996 | Dwight R. Lee | 0 comments | ContinuedEnvironmental Protection: The New Socialism?
Jane S. Shaw is a Senior Associate of PERC, a research center in Bozeman, Montana. In 1990, the economist Robert Heilbroner expressed genuine surprise at the collapse of socialism. Writing in The New Yorker, he recalled that in the debates over central planning in the 1930s and 1940s, socialism seemed to have won. A half [...]
1May1996 | Jane S. Shaw | 0 comments | ContinuedProsperity Without Pollution
Mr. Semmens is an economist with Laissez-Faire Institute in Chandler, Arizona. I recently had the opportunity to participate in a World Future Society “debate” on whether we could reduce pollution without also reducing our economic well-being. Mainstream thinking asserts that we must sacrifice at least some of our prosperity in order to protect the environment. [...]
1Mar1996 | John Semmens | 2 comments | ContinuedControlling Risk: Regulation or Rights?
Dr. Stroup is a Senior Associate of PERC, a research center in Bozeman, Montana, that provides market solutions to environmental problems. For many decades, Louisiana’s Gulf Coast has been a center of oil and chemical plants. The region has higher-than-average rates of death from cancer, and has even been dubbed “Cancer Alley.” Many people assume [...]
1Mar1995 | Richard L. Stroup | 1 comment | ContinuedMaking the Polluter Pay
Mr. Adler is Associate Director of Environmental Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. The experience of the past few decades indicates that “pollution control” is often a pretext by which the federal government regulates the minutiae of each and every industrial process and economic transaction. Much of this so-called pollution control is [...]
1Mar1995 | Jonathan H. Adler | 0 comments | ContinuedHuman Health and Costly Risk Reduction
With the Clinton administration’s misguided national health-care initiative dead, at least for now, it is time to consider an alternative. Let’s improve human health by eliminating or at least sharply modifying federal rules designed to reduce risk. Does this seem paradoxical? It shouldn’t. Risk reduction is a natural substitute for health-care spending. If the incidence [...]
1Mar1995 | Bruce Yandle | 0 comments | Continued-
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