Gore's War Sacrifices Both Rain Forests and Financial Freedom

By Douglas Arthur Tuma

Artificial scarcity caused by Al Gore's war against consumption escalates cost of living and resources used per person.

Of course, trade requires that assets have property rights that are clear and secure. And a world of more free markets would have more compassionate tolerance for environmental decisions by property owners and nurture for "the love of truth" to survive the "falsehoods of war." Words from Samuel Johnson and Arthur Ponsonby, respectively.

I've got new bridges to build with those who hope to save the rights, including property rights, claimed inalienable by Thomas Jefferson's vision of people with the right "...to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such a form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness." Words from the Declaration of Independence.

Perhaps I can help recover broken congressional promises with desert farmers who lost productivity when water and drainage rights were taken by the federal government to placate the whims of cataclysmists advocating terrestrial salvation ­ apparently not aware that the desert farmers' loss is a global loss of some of the most efficient and reliable crop production ­ apparently not aware that market demand by a growing population for replacement crops would likely cause loss of more valuable wildlife habitat elsewhere, cleared to accommodate more fields of less efficient and reliable production. As long as rain forests continue to be cleared for agriculture, the most valuable habitat in the world is being sacrificed.

These apparently unforeseen adverse social, economic, and ecological consequences ­ encouraged by some of the most eloquent leaders of the environmental movement's control over a multitude of government programs ­ are tragedies of human stupidity. Actually, for not being able to explain this sooner, I feel rather stupid.

And since the infinite amount of what we don't know overwhelms the finite amount of what we do, Karl Popper might have opined that we can't hope to ever be fully informed. But no doubt, some will in some ways be more informed than others. Individuals can trade with the best information they can find. And try to be as fully informed as possible despite the falsehoods of civil war.

But government command and control based on misinformed dogma still encroaches on the amount of tradable property, creating artificial scarcity, raising the cost of living, and causing more labor and associated consumption of resources and less remaining lifetime of financial independence and freedom for people than would otherwise have been provided by market sorting of resources.

It doesn't have to be this way. We can make our lives a lot easier, safer, and happier.

End Gore's war by voting Libertarian.

Fraudulent Federal Environmental Protection Hurts Humanity (continued from Position Paper 3)

Value-laden words: EDF's list

"polluted"

"adversely impacts nearly all of the wetland acreage"

"attention was riveted"

"extensive deformities and deaths"

"Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge"

"all the concern such environmental damage has focused on agricultural pollution"

"meaningful cleanup has been elusive"

"disaster at Kesterson"

"in-depth studies"

"largely solve the problem"

"broad consensus"

"this solution is the right one"

"ample authority"

"require pollution reduction"

"nearby wetlands and river are still at risk"

"Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge"

"financial and political problems"

"unusually high rates of embryonic deaths and deformities"

"deformed baby birds"

"at least one dead embryo"

"only one species of fish"

"shocking findings"

"severe effects"

"adverse effects"

"federally protected national wildlife refuge"

"documentation of actual deaths and deformities might not have oc-curred in an unprotected area"

"sublethal effects in adult birds would have been more difficult to observe"

"harmful levels"

"far more difficult to detect"

"problems of managing and disposing of contaminated agricultural drainage"

"far from solved"

"pose a continuing threat"

"Kesterson National Wildlife Refuge"

"private wetlands...as well as other public wetlands, also had been contaminated"

"contaminated drain water"

"contamination not as severe as at Kesterson"

"river has consistently exceeded selenium standards"

"damage to fish populations"

"sensitive species"

"significant risk"

"disaster at Kesterson Reservoir"

EDF's rhetoric: analysis

I picked these words as value-laden because I believe they mislead. There are so many of these implied pre-determined judgments, all consistently supporting an "environmental disaster" thesis, that I presume them to be the colorful rhetoric of a lawyer's argument without foundation. Not an impartial scientific account. This rhetoric is deliberately biased. It is fraudulent. It is a hoax.

Consider the message implied by these words.

"all the concern such environmental damage has focused on agricultural pollution"

A reader might think "all" implies a lot of "concern". But a reader might not think about how many ought to be concerned; and of those, how many actually were. A communist would think everybody he could influence. A capitalist would think nobody but the owners. I think EDF intends the former.

In this case, unfortunately, EDF is correct. The owner of both the effluent and the receiving environment is everybody. Who's responsible? No one. Government decisions are made based on non-ownership ­ communism. This is the problem. Too many cooks in one kitchen.

A reader might think "extensive deformities and deaths" in EDF's preceding sentence is "such environmental damage". EDF intends this equivalence to be believed. I find it unbelievable.

A reader might think there is nothing else besides "agricultural pollution" worth looking at since that was the "focus" of the "concern". I have studied EDF's "pollution" and find it not to be "agricultural". It is pollution of truth. It confuses substance with appearance.

Beauty and ugliness: truth and deception

For example, consider Sen. Barbara Boxer's appearance. She's had a long career in politics. By now I should think she could say something about what she has learned that is not commonly understood and should be understood to make our lives safer and happier. It looks to me she thinks she is in a beauty contest.

Is that how low our politics has sunk? Reason is subverted by superficial beauty? Disaster is judged not by increased net mortality rate or extinction, but by individual deaths by one specific cause in a world of other natural causes? Not because that specific cause increased the net mortality rate, but because it looked ugly? And certain people, who went looking in a marsh for something bad to report, used its appearance to horrify voters, telling them this is "environmental disaster"? It looks that way to me. It looks like deception. To me, deception is ugly.

Beauty is only skin deep. Ugly goes to the bone. If what is below the surface can be seen in terms of human trust, honesty or deceit determine beauty or ugliness.

Voter preference: appearance

Boxer's candidate statement in the "CA Voter Information Guide Ballot Pamphlet" reveals the substance of her philosophy ­ a laundry list of desired outcomes, all based on government decision-making. No explanation why the government's decisions would be any better than anyone else's. In essence, she is asking to be a decision-maker based on promises to favor the agendas of certain special interest groups, including EPPAs.

Yet I think people vote for that smile in her statement photograph. Just like we vote to save ourselves from horribly deformed hatchlings, basing what little reasoning we've got on appearance, not substance. It looks bad for majority rule when its federal government decision-making is based on appearance rather than substance. It looks bad for democracy.

Fascists: communist kings

Fascists want to force others to comply with their orders. They want to tell us what to do and want us to obey their command. They want to control, to be our mother. In a command and control society, chains of command lead to one mother, one dictator, one ultimate decision-maker. No opportunity to correct poor decisions except by succession of leadership, as a succession of kings. Congress, being a collection of kings, is our national commune.

I'm sad to think that so many people do what Boxer tells them to do. Which is little more than vote Democrat, giving up their rights to make individual choices to government decision-makers. There is more to life than waiting for someone to tell us what to do. We can choose what we want to do, within simple constraints. Let everyone have the same individual rights. No initial force. No fraud.

No hoaxes to win approval for government decision-making about resource management that could be done by property owners.

As self-declared parents of our society, eco-fascists tell us how we should let our government do what they want. Why? Because they think they collectively own the environment. They decide the sources of pollution and how to control the sources. And the sources are their property as long as they can keep a majority of voters hypnotized by ugly images. We sold out our freedom to decide for ourselves when we let eco-fascists decide for us. We are their hypnotized slaves, mental zombies.

Imagine riding in a car driven by a mental zombie. It happens every time I fall asleep at the wheel. Pretty scary. But no less scary than living in a nation steered by zombie majority rule. If we had less government there would be less for us mental zombies to rule. I'd like that. Those who think they are more awake, aware, and have better ideas than our majority opinions will be less constrained. They can demonstrate actual benefits. Eventually benefiting everyone.

Less government: more ownership: more safety

Less government means more property would have private ownership that is more free of government regulation. The owner of drain water would negotiate with whomever wanted to provide drainage relief service. They would sign a contract that specified conditions limiting their agreement. Through market trades, the owner of the drain water effluent and the owner of the receiving environment could become the same. The owner decides her own environmental conditions.

Owners include corporations. Shareholders decide. They vote as owners with each vote equivalent, not to each other vote, but to the magnitude of each owner's shares of the corporation. Each owner would have to buy with share ownership the power of a vote, not have it given to her just for showing up at election time.

Decisions would be made by those with the most invested. Owners would decide the best mix of resource uses that yields the greatest value. If someone else sees a greater value from a different mix, they can offer a price attractive enough for the current shareholder to willingly sell her share.

The only people not happy with owner decisions would be those not willing to buy shares of ownership. Why should they try to buy shares if it's easier to get the government to force implementation of their decisions by taking management authority out of the hands of private ownership?

On the other hand, why should we buy shares of ownership if the government is going to take away our management authority? We would be better off not working so much if we couldn't store our earnings as investments in property. We would be better off spending our income on more services to consume benefits now before the government takes away whatever surplus wealth we may accumulate. But consumption now leaves less for a safe tomorrow.

Those not willing to buy their share of decision-making are just trying to grab immediate gratification without regard to the consequent loss of long term safety. I say this is ultimately stupid.

The ultimate receiving environment for drainage is the ocean. As long as no one owns the ocean, political fights over its use will consume the fruits of our labor. The same is true for the San Francisco Bay to Delta estuary. My recommendation is to privatize it all. Let us quit fighting. Let those who want to manage these resources buy ownership shares. Then we can escape Garrett Hardin's "tragedy of the commons".

Market based environmentalism: sham

The Kesterson hoax is kept alive by EPPAs like EDF. According to the March 1994 issue of "Outside", EDF had a staff of about 150 at the time it published the above document. To be fair, we should expect that the two writers who coauthered it have individual ideas about how much to stretch the truth. But its grand illusion of tradable discharge permit (TDP) markets, covering up the government's arbitrary decisions on how much it will permit, is consistent with EDFs central organizing principle: market based environmentalism. Not to be confused with free market environmentalism ­ the kind that occurs without politics.

Terry L. Anderson and Pamela Snyder provide a good review of TDPs in their 1997 book "Water Markets, Priming the Invisible Pump", published by the Cato Institute.

"Between the common law and technologically based regulations under the CWA [Clean Water Act] are markets for tradable discharge permits. TDPs do use government control to establish the acceptable level of pollution, but they provide flexibility in achieving that level. At least this gets the incentives right on the pollution control side of the equation. Establishing markets in pollution rights, however, depends on possessing accurate data about the true state of polluted or pure water bodies and about the value of improving water quality. Apart from such information, it is difficult or impossible to measure success or failure in restoring and maintaining water quality."

I am satisfied that sufficient "accurate data about the true state of polluted or pure water bodies and about the value of improving water quality" exists for San Joaquin Valley drainage and potential receiving environments. I am not satisfied that it has been adequately displayed to people wanting to decide how the drainage should be managed. I believe EDF and other EPPAs have jumped to a hasty conclusion of "environmental disaster" and expect the voting public to accept that conclusion based on pictures of ugly baby birds. This is a hoax.

Calling for market forces to sort the best mix of uses for resources while claiming the maximum allowable load must be set low enough to safeguard against their own definition of "environmental disaster" is disingenuous if not prevarication. Finding the "environmental disaster" to be a hoax, I find EDF's proposal for TDPs to be a sham.

Kesterson hoax: property rights disaster

Decisions made in Sacramento (Water Resources Control Board) and Washington DC (Interior Secretary and Rep. Miller) broke contracts and dedications of purpose for federal property ­ land, water supply, and water drainage ­ a disaster for property values of farms and the people with investments in those farms to save waterfowl infant mortality in civil infrastructure no more suited for waterfowl nesting than an outdoor swimming pool. The dedicated drainage relief purpose of federal property and associated benefits contracted in return for construction cost repayment ­ a commitment of private property ownership rights ­ was sacrificed to mob rule, hypnotized by EPPAs.

Subsidized freedom to breed: social tragedy

If EPPAs sincerely wanted to apply brakes to a true environmental disaster ‹ slow the net rate of species extinction on earth ‹ they would withdraw support for government subsidies of infants, both human and not, and let property owners decide how to manage their own resources. Environmental protection is an ethic, debased by government enforcement, frustrated by government interference in commerce, private property management, and family planning.

Tax deductions per dependent and conception-to-grave government welfare discriminates against those who limit their progeny to no more than they can personally afford and subsidizes prolific breeding by others. Democrats, like Rep. Miller (District 7) fool their constituents into believing compassion includes forcing people with less children to pay taxes to pay for government social services for all, disproportionately benefiting those with more children, including those who could not otherwise afford to support them.

Freedom to breed is for wildlife. Humans must decide whether to be wild or civil. Who decides? Would-be parents or the government? With government subsidies, there is less incentive for individual responsibility and cautious decision-making. Perhaps the greatest government subsidy of all is the indemnification against further liability for expenses incurred by a child, given to the child's parents, if not before then certainly after her 18th birthday. All parents benefit from this subsidy. Parents and nonparents alike pay the price: a society more wild than individual caution would have allowed.

Removing responsibility from parents for the consequences of poor child training perverts individual incentive for parents to put more investment into the education of fewer offspring. No wonder the warehousing of miscreants in prisons, including public schools, is a growth industry. The apparently unforeseen consequence of Rep. Miller's 24 year congressional career of sponsoring government welfare for children has been the financial incentive for men to deny the parenting duties of fatherhood and the subsequent social tragedy of more young adults deficient in fatherly counseling.

More people: more farms

In a world dominated by socialist governments in the past century, government subsidies of irresponsible procreation presumably accelerates exponential population growth. A growth that demands more food and crop land. More crop land comes only from the sacrifice of native wildlife habitat. But native wildlife habitat is not all equal in value per acre. Nor is all crop production equal in value per acre. It is plainly clear to me that desert farms can produce more crop value per habitat value lost than farms cleared from tropical rain forests.

EPPAs: oblivious

Yet EPPAs attack any encroachment on nature, including California farms and cities sustained by Central Valley water supply projects. Apparently oblivious to comparative harm against wildlife ­ actual mass extinctions ­ in progress elsewhere on earth. Apparently oblivious to government subsidized population growth and consequent demand for more crops. Apparently oblivious to a world market that satisfies the growing demand for food and fiber by clearing more tropical rain forests. Apparently oblivious to a market stimulated increase in crop production elsewhere resulting from suppressed crop production in the desert climate of the San Joaquin Valley. Apparently oblivious to the aggravation of world-wide species extinction caused by EPPA efforts to improve aquatic habitat in the Central Valley and its natural drainage outlet to the ocean.

Vision impaired journalists like Marc Reisner and Al Gore spread the environmental litany of specious deprecations against desert agriculture and cities. Home of some of the most affluent but guilt conditioned people, with the time to learn environmental ethics from a multitude of philosophy merchants catering to this market.

The common environmental ethics lesson turns puritan guilt into worry about one's own participation in civilization's encroachment on nature, then relieves it with righteous indignation over the resource management choices of others. The simple cure is to sacrifice private property rights. Let the government take whatever property is needed to save the environment.

Thus the affluent, the politically influential, learn environmental battle cries against the infrastructure of civilization ­ dams, diversions, industrialized agriculture, drains ­ and vote for representatives who expand government by expropriating private property, changing it to public commons.

Common ground: violence rules

On common ground we are communists. On common ground comparative value is any body's guess. On common ground the values held by nonviolent civil people are overwhelmed by the values shouted by the violent. On common ground the nonviolent are coerced into slave labor to support the decisions of the ruling violent. On common ground civilization dies.

Choices: fee market: discovery

We could have choices. If we were smart we would let willing buyers and sellers trade their property in a global free market to enhance each other's benefit, thus profiting from their own discovery of the most valuable wildlife habitat and the most valuable arable land. We would know the value of each natural resource by the price for which it sells to the highest bidder among a multitude of potential buyers. Only a free market can tell us comparative values. Only a free market can identify and let people save the most valuable wildlife habitat and the most arable land.

But we are stupid. We let government bureaucrats choose the use of public resources. They are hired to make expert decisions. Instead, they inflate legislation with new laws that encroach on markets, concealing comparative resource values. We are denied the opportunity to know which wildlife habitat is more valuable than others and which arable land is more valuable than others. The opportunity to save the best of both is lost by our own stupidity.

Less farming here: more wetlands here

EPPAs have used government to idle and retire San Joaquin Valley farms ­ some of the most efficient and reliable farms in the world ­ to put more water in wetlands and rivers in California's Central Valley ­ a dubious improvement for naturally intermittent and ephemeral aquatic habitat in a desert climate. This action must have consequences, certainly unforeseen by the most stupid. But unforeseen by most people?

More farming there: less forests there

Diminished crop production in one part of a growing global market shifts crop demand elsewhere, raising the incentive to produce more crops elsewhere. Elsewhere more crop production is being harvested from the least efficient and reliable farms on the poorest soils in the world ­ the nutrient poor soil of cleared tropical rain forests ­ the most valuable habitat in the world in terms of species diversity and abundance.

Less work: more liberty

Each parcel of land or water holds values both great and small which are mutually exclusive. When the best uses of natural resources are accessible, the least work is required to reap equivalent benefits. Less work means less time to reach financial independence or retirement for everyone. Who makes the decisions for the use of natural resources ­ government bureaucrats or property owners ­ determines whether we live in comparative poverty or wealth, economic slavery or liberty.

Eco-scam crime: property rights disaster

EPPAs robbed water districts which held renewable contracts for water from the CVP by expanding environmental protection legislation in Washington DC with the support of voters fooled by fraudulent claims of "environmental disaster" at Kesterson "National Wildlife Refuge". As long as voters remain fooled by this eco-scam I will regard it as a property rights disaster and a crime against humanity.

(continued after Position Paper 1)