: The environmental problems we face are not the result of too much Capitalism. They are the result of too little Capitalism.I really doubt that there is some "capitalist" way around the tragedy of the commons. As long as people view themselves as maximizers of short-term profit, i.e. market competitors for the sake of survival within the capitalist system, and not the eco-system, there will be a tragedy of the commons -- those resources that can't be owned by a capitalist (nature and working people) will be frittered away, wasted.
: One of the fundamental rules of Capitalism is that people must pay for what they get. You're not supposed to take stuff from people without paying them the price they demand in return. But polluters take from everybody and pay nothing in return!
Exploiters of cheap labor can themselves demand the price they pay to the cheap labor. This is why Chinese companies run off of slave labor and it is why Nike pays its Vietnamese workers the equivalent of $.24 an hour. The market provides no "control" in this regard besides the way prices are set by supply and demand, and supply and demand are social forces related to the collective SOCIAL POWER of the buyers and sellers. If polluters have the requisite SOCIAL POWER to be allowed by society to pollute, then they will do so. If a greater SOCIAL POWER takes away the power of the polluters, voila, less pollution!
: We need to assign property rights to the enviroment. This way people who wanted to pollute would have to buy the right to do so from the State. If all the rights sell out, tough luck, you can't open that factory.
How are you going to assign property rights to the stratosphere, which is being polluted by CFCs which destroy the ozone layer and which will give us all skin cancer in a couple of decades? Which state is going to own all of those property rights, in a world of hundreds of different competing states, all of which must compete for the attention of multinational corporations?
And why should giving the state an option to sell rights to pollute decrease pollution? Nations themselves, today, are captives of the international flow of capital, which is the property of the capitalists (whose priorities in polluting are not set by any government price, but rather by the power they receive in industrial production) and without which most of the world's citizens are left destitute.
The REAL solution, of course, is to free the world's citizens from the power exerted by the international flow of capital, thus evening the score between the multinationals and the common people. This will not be accomplished by kiss-ass gestures to "capitalism," but rather by libertarian socialism.
: The enviroment suffers because people take a communal attitude towards it. Because everybody is free to use it up, there is no incentive to take care of it.
This assumes that we all naturally tend to "use up" the environment, rather than "taking care of it," or rather that those of us who want to "use up" the environment will win the social battle against those of us who want to "take care of it." This assumption is itself based on the assumption that capitalism is natural. No, capitalism is a social system and a historical genesis all its own.
Other social systems have created social practices that do not merely "use up" the environment, but rather use it to create sustainable systems, whereas capitalism fails in this regard not because it has failed to commodify everything in the universe, but because it fails to allow its primary actors any motive for action besides short-term profit. Sustainable agricultural systems of, for instance, the Amish of Pennsylvania or the Tlaxcaltecans of the State of Tabasco in Mexico, have existed for hundreds of years with little decrease in soil fertility, whereas capitalist agriculture, existing ENTIRELY on PRIVATELY-OWNED (and not "common") LAND, is ruinous of the soil fertility (of the landowners' land itself!) because its participants are required to compete to produce the lowest possible price for grain in the shortest amount of time.
: People take care of things they own. Ensuring that "nobody" or "everybody" owns a thing is the best way to assure it's destruction.
As the above example demonstrates, this is a fallacious assumption.
: - nat
-Sam
None.
