Fallacy - Only Government Keeps the Environment Clean

Capitalism may not be inherently wasteful, but whatever waste is produced is often dumped into rivers, lakes and marshland. Big government is therefore needed in order to protect the environment. So goes the argument of a typical left leaning environmentalist. To back up their claims, they will show before and after pictures of rivers, lakes and city air. Clearly, things have gotten better after the introduction of environmental laws and agencies.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it fails to say anything about why certain areas got polluted in the first place. What is omitted is the fact that the polluted areas were all publicly owned. No one was dumping trash in uncle Joe's potato field, or on people's doorsteps. That would have been illegal. But, for some reason, land, rivers and air under political stewardship were free for all to dump their trash.

What this illustrates is that politicians are terrible stewards of the environment, and that it is not before things get terribly out of hand that anything gets done. Politicians will then pass a bunch of laws, establish a bureaucracy, and generally grow the government in order to fix the situation. However, had the land and air in question been privately owned, things would not have gotten out of hand in the first place. The rivers, lakes and land would have been as clean as uncle Joe's farm, and the air would have been substantially less polluted.

Anyone trying to dump waste into such privately owned properties would at the very least have had to pay a hefty fee. This would have produced an incentive for all polluters to clean up their acts. Without anywhere to dump their waste for free, polluters would have had to think about waste and waste-management.

This logic holds for air pollution as well. Large polluters would soon have been sued for damages by people living in affected neighborhoods. Owners of roads and factories would have had to pay damages, or clean up. Road owners would have demanded a certain minimum standard from cars driving on their roads. Factory owners would have installed equipment to reduce pollution.

The only reason this did not happen was that government prohibited such class action lawsuits from happening, claiming that the air was publicly owned and therefore exempt from private property laws.

The history of pollution is just as much about government mismanagement of public property as it is a story of government saving the environment by growing larger. Had private property been better protected, a great deal of pollution would never have happened.

By Frank J. (Frank John) Aleksandrowicz, 1921-, Photographer (NARA record: 8452210) - U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Public Domain, Link