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12/31/2004: "Anarcho-Capitalism and Environmental Overreach"

Relevant to the issues of what happened in Easter Island and Greenland, I had a series of interactions with a radical libertarian book publisher several years ago. His point was that the system set up by the founding fathers did not provide for a strong federal government and that the growth of federal power over the last several centuries has been an abomination. In particular, the Constitution, when properly interpreted, prohibits limiting a person or a state for the benefit of another person or state. He based this on certain opinions certain founding fathers expressed in certain letters. While this sounds like a pretty extreme position, it is shared by many on the extreme right wing, including a number of Bush Administration candidates for the federal judiciary. Among legal theorists, this idea is called the “Constitution in Exile.” Their notion is that the New Deal represents a gross misreading that needs to be remedied AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!!!! Anyway, I had a good exchange going with the publisher, even suggesting some books that explored the implications of the political system he was suggesting. There’s actually a name for it: “anarcho-capitalism,” the belief that capitalist markets are the proper home for all the functions of society, at the expense of big government or even any government at all! My reply was that any letters the founding fathers wrote reflected the reality of the day. Settlement of North America represented a thin shell along the extreme eastern shore of a vast, empty land. Their major challenge at that point was to get started on getting the wilderness populated. From their perspective, the continent’s resources looked absolutely limitless. The key point was that one person’s consumption of these resources could easily be accomplished without a significant impact on others or on the general viability of the ecosystem That situation has clearly changed over the last two centuries. As the country has become increasingly populated, the ability of commercial enterprises to significantly impact the lives of citizens and the general livability of the country has increased exponentially. In other words, the country is encountering the limits of uncontrolled growth. It cannot be disputed that uncontrolled growth cannot be sustained forever as long as we remain constrained to a single planet with finite carrying capacity. The question is how close we are to the breaking point, not whether there is a breaking point. Maybe someday humanity will be again faced with a bounty of resources, but in the meantime we need to act responsibly. The stakes are too high to assume that every individual will voluntarily constrain their consumption of resources such that consumption by all individuals is sustainable. Thus, government power is absolutely essential if humanity is to remain within the carrying capacity of the planet. The bottom line, then, is that those who seek to hamstring the ability of government to preserve the long-run viability of society are on the wrong side of history and are indeed placing our society and the prospects of our descendants at grave risk. (BTW, in case you were wondering, the publisher stopped corresponding at that point, an illustration of the denial that is the universal response of Dittoheads to the cold realities of finiteness.