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Feb. 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:14
103 Environmentalism Part 1: Logical Problems
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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph.
It is 4.40 on Wednesday, the 15th of February, 2006. freedomain.blogspot.com s.m-o-l-y-n-e-u-x at rogers.com I hope you're doing well.
This is Free Domain Radio.
And we're going to launch into an exciting new series.
It's going to be gripping, let me tell you.
You will be sitting on the edge of your audio seat.
We're going to talk about environmentalism.
Now, for those who don't know and may care or may not care, I worked in the environmental field in the software industry for about seven, seven and a half years.
I was chief technical officer at a company which I co-founded and grew and sold twice.
And so I have some knowledge of the environmental field, having worked in it, the software basically, I helped North American companies, and ended up being companies in Europe and China, to maintain environmental compliance according to a variety of regulations, and it was gripping stuff, let me tell you.
So, environmentalism is a very fascinating phenomenon, and I'll just talk about it in a couple of parts, and we're going to start, as usually it's a good idea when talking about complex topics, or any topics for that matter, we're going to talk about definitions.
Now, the environment, of course, is a fascinating word because it is so all-encompassing, which is why it's so often used to expand state power.
Environmentalism is simply the world that we are in.
the world that we're in, there's no intrinsic differentiation between man-made and what is called man-made and natural within this word called environment.
So if your environment is your house, you're in your house, your house is the environment that surrounds you, then that is part of environmentalism, that is part of the environment.
And what is often portrayed or described when you start talking about things like environmentalism is things like natural equals good, man-made equals bad, to some degree.
And And so this is why a mall is considered bad, but a forest is considered good.
There's usually a bit of an artificial distinction between natural and man-made.
Now, since, and I've never really had much luck understanding this, maybe you have some more insight into it than I do, but I've never understood this distinction.
Man is part of the natural world.
Man is part of the environment that nature has, and therefore there's no such thing as artificial.
I mean, it's not artificial for a beaver to build its home out of twigs, and it's not artificial for a man to build his home out of bricks.
A mall is no more unnatural than a forest.
So I just don't really understand why some animals are allowed to have tools and other animals are not allowed to have tools.
That some animals are part of the natural world, i.e.
otters and so on, and some animals seem to not be part of the natural world, i.e.
human beings.
So let's sort of start with that as a general definition, that it's really hard for me to understand why we have this distinction between artificial and natural.
I mean, I understand the words, and it can be useful at times to distinguish between things which are man-made and things which are not man-made.
But everything is natural.
An artificial tree is part of nature, and it is composed out of components which are found within nature.
So it's perfectly natural, and it's perfectly natural for human beings to use tools to improve or change their environment, just as it is true for most other animals to use tools to improve their environment if they're capable of doing so.
So, I just sort of want to point out that this horror of the man-made or this horror of the artificial is not logical.
And that's sort of the first thing that I wanted to talk about.
Now, the second thing that I wanted to talk about is that the environment is that which sort of surrounds human beings and surrounds animals and sort of the natural world, all the atomic and biochemical and organic and inorganic structures that surround us.
And what is generally referred to in the environmental movement is a healthy environment.
We want an environment that is better for human beings, that is better for animals, that is better for life as a whole.
Now, we generally, though, would recognize and understand that there are certain problems with things that are natural and around human beings, that that's not particularly the environment that people are talking about.
So, when people talk about nature, it's important to understand that they're talking about harmless old-growth forests and Tuna.
Things like that.
Cod.
And panda bears.
And so on.
They're not talking about a hungry lion.
So, for instance, if you are in the Serengeti National Park and you're lost at night and there's a lot of growling around you, you're probably not going to feel very good that you're surrounded by everything that is natural and you'd probably want something very unnatural like a helicopter or a shotgun to be with you so that you could take steps to protect yourself.
So, the environment, sort of natural and man-made, all are subsumed by this idea, which is pretty basic to organic life, which is the desire to protect itself, to avoid pain, to pursue pleasure, to survive, and so on, that we don't really recognize as helpful the idea that we should allow and encourage an environment to grow, which is hostile to human life.
And I know that there's lots of environmentalists who would argue otherwise, that man is a cancer on the planet and blah blah blah.
But all of these things are perfectly natural.
And the idea that we should have an environment around us that is not beneficial to us is not... That would be an unnatural idea.
That would be a completely unnatural idea.
That would be like trying to make a lion into a vegetarian.
It's not part of its nature.
And the desire to surmount the predations of other living beings and to protect yourself from the food chain.
I mean, look at a porcupine.
That's exactly what it's trying to do when it develops these spikes.
It's trying to protect itself.
Look at the cactus.
So, the idea that animals do not attempt to protect themselves from predators and to master all other species would be a completely unnatural idea.
So, the fact that human beings like to, say, not have wolves around their backyards when their children are playing is perfectly natural, it's perfectly healthy, and it's exactly what nature intends.
Now, that having been said, I am fully aware that there can be situations under which short-term gains will produce long-term survival problems.
I mean, the most, sort of, simplest example of this would be That if you're a farmer you have sort of two areas of seeds, right?
You have one seed so you can eat these seeds and the others are the seed crop that you need to keep for next year so that you can plant and grow again the wheat or the barley or whatever it is you're eating.
And to have a big gorge fest in the fall when you need to eat all your seed crop is going to have you starving next year.
So I'm fully aware that when it comes to human survival and flourishment and longevity and all those good things that it is very important to understand nature and our effects on nature so that we can create and continue to sustain a planet that works for human beings in the long run.
Now, does that mean that it works to the exclusion of all other creatures?
Well, no, of course not, because an ecosystem can't survive with only one organism, so if we got rid of all other living things and it was only human beings, then it really wouldn't be a survivable situation.
So I don't want to get all sort of One World Earth Mother Gaia on everyone, but I think we all recognize that we do need a certain amount of sustainability in the natural environment to make things beneficial to human beings.
And so, the other question which then arises is, to what degree do we need beneficial ecosystems around us in order to survive and flourish?
And also, another one is, to what degree do we want aesthetically pleasing nature around us?
I mean, I like to hike, I like to be in the woods, I like natural things.
And so, the question is, to what degree are those things valuable in society?
And these are all very interesting questions to answer.
I'm sure you have some idea where I'm going with the answer to this.
But before we get to that, let's talk about the issue of protection.
Protection of nature.
The protection of nature.
And by nature, we're just going to take the artificial divide to some degree and say it's, you know, the woods and the streams and the trees and the lakes and so on.
That we want to protect these things and we want to make sure that, you know, they look good and they're pretty and so on.
But the question is to what degree do we want to do that?
And, of course, that's a very important question.
We could very quickly revert nature back to its earlier stages by simply all killing ourselves, throwing ourselves, and just dying where we stand, and then nature would overgrow what man's creations fairly quickly and everything would be back to sort of the original no man-made objects, no man around.
And that would be one approach to solving the problem of to what degree do we value nature in its original state untouched by man.
Another would be to pave over absolutely everything in the world, kill off all other species.
And so, you know, the answer is generally somewhere in the middle.
But, of course, the question is to what degree are things in the middle?
And, of course, as a rationalist, as a libertarian, as a free marketer, it's fairly obvious where I'm going to go with this, but there's some wrinkles which I'd like to iron out before we get there around the question of the protection of, the ownership, the use of Natural, non-man-made elements of our environment.
Now, the question as to why property generally gets preyed on, why is it that an entire forest gets cut down, for instance, and doesn't get replanted, why would something like the cod that is off Newfoundland and the eastern coast of Canada
Why would they have had 400 years of fabulous fishing and then in the space of sort of 20 years or 15 years they get completely wiped out to the point where they just simply don't exist anymore, barely even as a life, a group of life forms.
I mean there's a couple of car down there, not even remotely as a sustainable industry and certainly not and barely as a sort of school of fish situation.
So how did those get wiped out so quickly?
And there are all of these problems with predations in the public Amazon rainforest, and, you know, we're losing 12 acres a second kind of stuff.
So the question is sort of why does this happen?
Now, one of the questions that has come up fairly regularly in discussions of this type, and one of the questions that was delineated pretty early on, I think it was in the 19th century or could have even been slightly before that, is this problem, and it's called the problem of the commons. is this problem, and it's called the problem of the And the problem of the commons, briefly, goes thusly.
So you, I, and a couple dozen other people, we all have our farms and we're all raising sheep.
And we're all sort of in a big circle.
And in the middle of the circle is a park or a common ground.
A ground which nobody owns and which everybody has access to.
And the problem of the commons is this, that you as an individual farm owner, as an individual shepherd, you are going to get a good deal of benefit by having your sheep graze on the common land.
I will also gain a good deal of benefit by having my sheep graze on the common land because they're not going to denude my own grass and whatever.
I can use that grass for other things, I can use that land for other things like planting wheat or barley or Turnips or something like that.
Potatoes.
Mmm, potatoes.
And so we each individually gain an enormous benefit from letting our sheep roam the unowned common property because then we can use our land for other things, but
If we all do it in combination, then we all lose considerably, because our sheep will sort of immediately denude the common property of its grass or whatever, and then we will neither be able to feed our sheep, and we won't be able to have our other... the other land has been turned to other uses, so things are gonna... sheep are all gonna die, so...
What then makes sense from an individual perspective... Oh, let's turn our sheep loose on the commons so that we can have the meat there and not worry about having to reserve our own land for feeding our sheep.
Let's all turn... So what makes sense individually then turns out to not make sense collectively, to be counterproductive collectively.
So this is called the problem of the commons and it's sort of cited in a number of different texts on this.
It's sort of the standard first place.
You explain to Economics 101 students this is the problem of the commons and so on.
Now, I've never had much luck with this problem of the commons, and it could be because I'm smarter, it could be because I'm completely dense about it, but I've never really had any luck with the problem of the commons.
It seems to me that the way to get rid of the problem of the commons is to get rid of the commons.
To make everybody, instead of having a sort of donut-shaped It's the question of the predation of property that is not owned by anybody.
It's very simple to solve.
Just have somebody own it.
ownership go in like a pizza pie towards the middle, and then everybody owns their own strip of land, and there's no problem with the commons.
So it's the question of the predation of property that is not owned by anybody.
It's very simple to solve, just have somebody own it.
Because as soon as somebody owns their property, then they're going to maintain it and sustain it for the long run, and so on.
I was just talking to Christina the other day about, you know, our house is sort of coming along in terms of we've almost finished painting it and decorating it, and so on, and it's looking great.
And it's the first house I've ever lived in, so I'm quite excited about it.
Except for, I guess, I had a room in a house when I was a student, but it's the first house that I've ever sort of owned.
Owned or anything like that.
And we were sort of talking about when we first met she was living in an apartment waiting for her condo to be ready and so she hadn't decorated it and I was living in a bachelor pad that I was never planning to live in for very long so I hadn't done anything to decorate it.
And this is sort of well known.
You don't put a lot of effort into decorating an apartment unless you're going to be there forever.
But once you own something then you generally put more care and so on into maintaining it.
So, the problem of the commons is, to me, an obvious example of, well, this is exactly why you would want to make sure that you don't mess up a property by having it unowned by people in general.
And there are complications, of course.
Air pollution, water pollution, fish.
In the sea and so on and so I understand all of that I mean all of those are tricky, but not impossible to subject to property rights But this problem of the common seems to me Very easy to solve just put everything in private property, and you know lickety-split wham bam Thank you, ma'am everything solved and everybody's happy and the sheep are happy and everybody's doing dances around the main pole Which of course would be right in the center of the pizza pie However, this is not what most people come up with when they're taught this problem.
I mean, maybe they do, but this is sort of not the direction that they're led in by, hey, guess what?
State schools.
What the solution to the problem is, is to have the government To regulate, or to control, or to manage, or to allocate these resources.
So you have this thing, the problem with the commons.
Well, the commons, everybody's going to turn their sheep loose on it and everyone's going to starve to death.
How do we solve that?
Well, we create a government which regulates the use of the common land.
Now, you know, call me dumb, call me crazy, hey, call me a cab.
But what I can't figure out, for the life of me, is how people think that that's a solution.
To have a government regulate the issue of property.
And the reason that I'll sort of... I think it's pretty easy to prove.
Again, maybe I'm being presumptuous, but I think it's pretty easy to prove.
The reason that putting the government in charge of, quote, common or unowned property, The reason why it will never work is that the government itself is subject to the problem of the commons.
So, I don't really see how you solve the problem of the commons by invoking an entity that is itself subject to the problem of the commons.
So, what do I mean by that?
Well, let me go into excruciating detail.
No, I'll try to keep it brief.
What I mean by that is that if you look at something like the government, you have a lot of power and a lot of money that is passing through it, and mostly people are Transitory.
I mean, the people who are making the real decisions in that environment are transitory.
They're the politicians and some of the sort of senior level bureaucrats who can dip in and out of the government from the private sector.
And, of course, they have the ability to shift all of their cost required, the cost base to the future generations through through deficit financing, and they can raise taxes on a whim, and a politician can be in for a couple of years and get a gold-plated pension scheme, and they're only in for a couple of years and they have to face re-election, so they're going to bribe everybody.
So here you have an enormous amount of money and power That nobody actually owns, right?
I mean, if you've ever tried to figure out who's responsible for a problem that you're having with the government, then good luck, right?
You will never, ever, ever, ever, ever be able to find anybody who's responsible.
And that's because down in the murky depths violence is occurring, which has destroyed every possibility of responsibility, except maybe at the front lines of police and the military and so on.
So, given that you have an enormous amount of money and power that is not owned by anybody, then it seems to me that this money and power is in the public common area.
It is subject itself to the problem of the commons.
So, if you look at the metaphor of the grasslands area with the sheep, Well, then you have, well look, everybody has an individual incentive to let their sheep graze on the commons, but if everybody does it, everything gets stripped bare and everything collapses.
Well, is that not entirely the case with the government?
Isn't that exactly the thing that you would expect, the result that you would expect from the way that the government is set up in a democratic society, or in any society for that matter?
Well, you have everybody's individual self-interest is to get as much money out of the government as possible while putting as little money in, right?
What's that famous quote?
Government is a fiction by which everybody expects or hopes to live at the expense of everybody else.
And so everybody has this massive incentive to get as much money out of the government as possible, and politicians, because they're not spending their own money, have as much desire.
The desire is huge to just bribe everybody, and I mean, isn't it just so completely obvious that the government itself is subject to the problem of the commons?
So, I just don't see how it solves it at all.
In fact, the greater the degree of the problem of the commons, the greater the degree to which the government simply can't solve it.
If it's a tiny, tiny little problem, well then you don't really need the government, right?
Because you can just sort of lean over your fence and say, dude, don't do so much with the sheep grazing.
But, if it's a massive and catastrophic problem, then you can't really have the government at all, because the government, being subject to the same problem of the commons as the commons, won't be able to solve the problem at all.
In fact, it will make it a lot worse.
So, just as every individual incentive within the problem of the commons leads to general predation and destruction, well, every individual decision in relation to the government leads to general economic and social collapse over time.
So, I gotta tell you that the first thing that I'm sure you knew I was going to say, but perhaps you didn't know I was going to say it in such a way.
That's all I can hope for these days.
The reason that you know that the government is going to work is because the free market is the only thing that can solve this issue of the problem of the commons.
Because the problem of the commons is that a property is not owned and therefore you get use without responsibility.
You get use without custodial responsibility.
You get use without the need for renewal.
It's the reason why nobody fills up the oil in a car that they're renting, and nobody washes a car that they're renting.
If you're renting a car for a couple of days, you're not going to top up the oil, check the tires, because it's not your car.
You're just using it, and you're not going to maintain it.
That's what you're paying the car company for.
So, the first thing that you want to do in society as a whole to deal with the problem of despoilation, or predation, or destruction of property, is you want to get public ownership out of it as quickly and as hugely as possible.
This is why an anarcho-capitalist society, a free society, a private sector society, We'll take enormously great and wonderful care of the property and of the commons and of the environment.
Because you are not letting a government entity or the government subject to the problem of the commons and all of the predation and despoiling that occurs with that problem.
You're not turning to the government to quote solve the issues.
And so it really doesn't make any sense to do that.
The first thing you want to do is to make sure you get everybody to the property into private hands as quickly and as powerfully and as certainly as possible.
And to make those real.
It's a real transfer.
It's not like you're going to rent it from the government.
It's a real transfer to private hands.
So for instance, I mean one of the problems that occurred in Canada, I believe in the northwestern United States too, but in Canada for sure, one of the problems that occurred in the past was that for a sort of private logging company To make as much money as possible, what you want to do is you want to not own the land.
You want to just have the right to harvest the land and leave it clear-cut, leave it sort of bare and destroyed.
And why do you want that?
Well, because if you get to sort of jump in, pay a pittance, harvest all the trees, sell them all, then you can just retire.
But if you actually have to buy the land, then you're going to face a very different economic situation, which we'll get into in a moment.
So one of the problems that occurred in Canada was that the land is all owned by the crown.
Owned by the crown.
Isn't that wonderful?
Like a little disk of silver and gold and diamonds all pillaged from the backs of the poor.
This little disk of a crown can actually own things.
So it's not owned by Jean Chrétien or owned by some Sir John A. Macdonald.
It's not owned by Bob.
It's owned by the crown.
This is how they distort language and destroy minds.
So, everything is owned by the Crown, and so you could only get land, originally, in the sort of early 20th century, you could only get land by petitioning the Crown.
You had to ask, and you had to sort of, you got some sort of squatters' rights, but you basically had to ask the government to use land.
And so, of course, what happened?
Well, the government owns the land and, you know, can't sell it because the government owns the land.
Did I mention the government owns the land?
I think I did.
And so what happens is you get a whole bunch of logging companies who sort of slither up to the politicians and say, I tell you what, I got a great idea.
You give me the right to harvest the trees from this land that you own and I will give you a kickback of this many hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and then I will grab all the trees go and sell them and vanish into the mists of history and Everybody's gonna be really really happy.
You're gonna make a fortune.
I'm gonna make a fortune It's all gonna be just all too wonderful for words And so the politicians are happy, the loggers are happy, the people who are buying the wood are happy, because the wood is going to be artificially cheap, because you don't have to amortize the price of buying the land or anything.
So everybody's going to be happy, happy, happy.
The only problem, of course, is that you're going to completely destroy a forest and never replant anything.
But the cost of replanting and waiting for trees to grow again, that's a long-term hassle.
Who wants to get into that?
It takes another 10 years or 20 years to grow the trees.
That's no fun.
What you want to do is just clear-cut and skip to the hills with your profits.
And so, why did this occur?
Well, this only occurred, of course, because the government owned the land and had the ability to let other people come in and grab the land and not to recede it.
So, what would happen in a free market situation?
I mean, you know, we can sort of talk about... let's just say that the land is completely clear.
I mean, nobody owns anything.
I mean, we can sort of make it... it's going to be easier if we talk about land in the current situation, where it can be owned.
But...
Let's talk about the land that is completely in a state of nature.
Well, I go and grab it through whatever mechanism.
I know in Canada at the moment you have to put these claim stakes in sort of quarter kilometer squares around it.
I only know that because I worked gold panning and claim staking for a living for about a year and a half after high school.
And so let's say you go out and you grab your land.
You now have the claim to that land.
So you own this land.
It's got all these trees on it.
Well, is it going to be more profitable for you to just clear-cut all of these trees and skip out, still owning the land, or is it going to be more profitable for you to create a sustainable situation out of this wherein you can continue to get money every year by seeding intelligently and rotating the tree, culling and so on?
Well, obviously it's going to be more profitable for you rather than just stripping the whole thing bare and having land which then is completely worthless.
It is going to be much more profitable for you to plant the trees and then to harvest them and to cycle them and have a sustainable resource.
We know this because of farming.
Farmers don't just completely destroy their soil by getting as much productivity out them in one year or two years as they can and then exhaust the soil.
No, they're very careful to balance it to make it a sustainable resource.
And so, we know for sure that it's more profitable to do that.
I don't know the statistics off my head, but I'm sure it's pretty well documented about the profitability of a sustainable resource.
So, whoever grabs the land is either going to find it more profitable for them to create a sustainable harvest of trees, or if they don't feel like doing that, then they're going to sell it to somebody who will.
Now, the thing that you want to do in order to get the most protection to nature, as much protection to nature as possible, what you want to do is make the price of natural resources, of the ownership of natural resources, as high as possible.
So, for instance, let's just say that Somebody has got a magic potion.
The magic potion.
Always important in arguments from economics.
Somebody has the magic potion and this magic potion allows them to grow trees twice as fast as someone else.
Bob has a magic potion and Jane has no magic potion.
Now, let's say that I own the land and Bob and Jane are both bidding for it.
They're both bidding for the land.
Now, Bob, remember, has the magic potion.
He can grow trees twice as fast.
Well, who is going to be able to bid the most for the land?
Well, obviously, it's going to be Bob.
And the reason that Bob can bid the most for the land is he gets twice the value out of the land.
So, because he gets twice the value out of the land, he's going to be able to profitably bid higher Then Jane for the land itself.
So if Jane is only going to be able to expect to get, I don't know, $50,000 a year out of the land, but Bob is going to get $100,000 a year out of the land, then Bob is obviously going to be able to bid a lot higher than Jane.
I know the multiples in the software is like five to ten times revenue and so on, so I don't know what it is in this sort of sector.
Maybe it's Double or two and a half times revenue, but clearly whoever can use the resource in the most sustainable and most profitable manner is the one who is going to be able to bid the most for it.
So let's say that, to take the example of fishery, right?
So this is an area of the sea, and we won't get into all the complicated stuff about how this is trackable and so on, as that's a topic for another podcast, but Let's just say that you magically can track all these fish, and you know, again, we have the same situation.
I sort of own this section of the sea, and I know fish go in and out and blah blah blah, but let's just say that the fish all generally are around here certain times of year, and I want to sell the fishing rights.
Well, if Bob is a real dynamite fisherman, like, not really good, but he uses dynamite, then he's going to go in and he's going to blow up all this water, and he's going to detonate all the fish to the surface, and he's going to scoop them up, and he's going to make a fortune one year, but there's going to be no fish the next year.
So he's going to be able to bid a certain amount of money.
But let's say Jane has figured out this magic way where she can get the maximum amount of fish out of the sea, but sustain the fish population as well.
So if she took one more fish, the fish population would start to decline, let's just say.
But she's sort of figured out the magic algorithm of how many fish to take, under what circumstances, in what days, and so on.
Well, obviously she's going to be able to bid a lot more for these fishing rights than Bob is because Bob's just going to sort of dynamite the fish to the surface and then go and sort of collect them all up with a big scoop and go and sell them.
But Jane is going to be able to bid a lot more for these resources.
So the point that I'm trying to make is that the sustainability of a natural asset is going to be maximized if it's being bought and sold in the free market.
That's a very important thing to understand.
Does that mean that everybody who buys that asset is going to end up Everybody who buys that asset is going to end up stripping it off?
Well, no, of course not.
Of course not, because this all has to do with social values.
So, to talk about it in another way, very briefly, because I'm at the gym and I want to go and work out.
It's been four days.
I feel like sluggish.
So, let's look at this and say, you might say, well, I want forests.
I want to go fishing.
I don't want to just eat tuna for like five bucks a ton.
I actually want to go sport fishing and I don't want to have paper at five bucks a ton.
What I do want to have is nice woods that I can hike through and climb and take my dogs running through and all that.
And that's all good stuff, right?
I mean, it's all perfectly valid, perfectly valid propositions.
from an economic standpoint.
You know, as I've talked about in another podcast, the free market is not about the maximization of resource utilization from a let's-eat-all-the-fish-and-let's-cut-down-all-the-trees standpoint.
The free market is about the satisfaction of wants, which are as various as human beings.
So, if we look at something like this forest, right?
So, I own the forest, and don't you know that nobody wants paper anymore?
Everybody's retiring, and they all want to come and live in cottages, and they all love the woods, and we're out in BC or California where everybody's a granola head.
They just want to go walking, and they want quiet, and they want old-growth forests.
And boy, are they ever going to pay a lot of money to have inconspicuous cottages nestled under the trunks of these old-growth trees.
And boy, that's just going to be so wonderful.
They're going to pay through the nose for that, because it's very high value.
It's higher value for this population to have undisturbed forests that they can walk through or have cottages in.
That's worth more to them than cheaper paper.
Well, guess what?
What's the free market going to do?
I'm sure you can answer this by now.
The free market is somebody's going to buy that forest and they are not going to cut it down.
But instead they're going to build cottages and rent them out or sell them to people.
Because through the price mechanism, through the mechanism of price, the free market has clearly indicated that an undisturbed natural forest is worth more, is more valuable.
People want that more than they want the price of paper to go down by a couple of pennies a ton.
Maybe because otherwise you'd cut this growth down and so on.
So, that's another important thing to recognize about the free market.
If I own this section of the sea, and instead of people wanting the price of tuna to go down by a couple of pennies a ton, what they want, what everybody's lining up on the shoreline to do, is to go sport fishing.
Well, fantastic!
That's exactly what is going to happen if I can make more money.
sport fishing than I can by detonating some tuna out of the sea, then that's what I'm going to do.
That's what the free market is going to provide.
Yes, it's all about money, but remember that money is a reflection of the desires of society.
So that's something that, when it comes to how do we balance the utilization of resources, With the enjoyment of resources.
So the utilization of resources is cut down all the wood, cut down all the trees, and make lumber, and make toothpicks, and make paper, and so on.
That's the utilization of resources.
The enjoyment of resources in their original state is, boy, it would be real nice to have a trail to go through these old forests and have some cottages that are very expensive because they're private and it's all old growth and so on.
Well, the balance between these two things is decided by the desires of society.
And there's no other conceivable way to do it other than have some sort of arbitrary bureaucratic decision or to have some political fight and so on.
So that's another important thing to understand about the use of resources, that the use to which they are put is always going to be based on the desires of society.
It's always going to be based on what is the most valuable.
And this, of course, doesn't mean that it's a fixed thing, because you could actually have a huge campaign.
I mean, I just sort of make up one here that could work, right?
Let's say that you are so keen on the forests being undisturbed, that you're so keen on the forests remaining in their original state, the idea that there is going to be cottages in there is something that just makes your hair stand on edge.
You just hate the very idea.
You want it to be pure and pristine and, boy, if you could even see some dinosaurs on there, I bet you'd be really happy.
Well, that's fine.
Of course, the free market is not about the utilization of resources.
The free market is about the exercise of property rights in the pursuit of happiness.
So, if it makes people happy to know that there's a whack load of old-growth forests out there that are not touched and not ever going to be utilized or anything like that, well, guess what?
The free market is going to provide that too, because you're going to put a whole campaign out there where you're going to say, we want to bequeath this to our children, this is the last old-growth forest for whatever-whatever, and wouldn't it be nice if... and maybe you do something sort of very imaginative like,
You put webcams up there that only people who've donated can log into and have a look at the soothing sort of sights and sounds of their old growth forest or you have a lottery where people can, you know, they get guided tours every month if they win this lottery and it's free to enter if you donate money and then you can go and have a look at all these pristine wilderness and so on.
So there's all these things that you can do or you can simply just buy it yourself.
You know, if you've got the money, or you've got people together to get the money, and what's important to them is to know that they've bought land that nobody else can use, then you just buy it.
And then if your children's children realize that paper is way too expensive and they'd rather have that, then they shift the resources to that.
There's absolutely no reason why resources get utilized to the point of self-destruction.
I mean, there's no reason for that in the free market whatsoever.
And the only reason that you ever see this occurring in the world is based on this problem of the commons, the twofold problem of the commons.
One is that nobody owns the property except the government, and the second is that the government runs the property and the government itself is subject to the problem of the commons.
So we'll talk a little bit about that in the morning because I think it's very fascinating to look at one particular example that I know quite well, which is what happened to the cod stocks in Eastern Canada off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador.
A fascinating tale of what happens when you put the protection of property into the public sector and should give pause to anybody who's thinking that the government can solve these sorts of problems on its own.
So thanks so much for listening as always.
I hope you're doing well and I will talk to you soon.
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