Blagnet.net

Coercion, not persuasion or enterprise, is the answer

for environmentalists, claims Ann Pettifor on the BBC website.

Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being, writes that “there are over one - maybe even two - million organisations (worldwide) working toward ecological sustainability and social justice”.

And yet… and yet… there is no real climate change movement. There is no organised effort leading society towards a legislative framework that would urgently drive down greenhouse gas emissions across the board, and begin to sequester carbon dioxide.

Not in the UK, or in the US, or internationally. The “movement” that Hawken refers to is, he notes, “atomised” and “largely ignored”.
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The reason is that green organisations focus on individual (”change your lightbulbs”) or community (”recycle, reuse, reduce, localise”) action.

They fail to highlight the need for the kind of structural change that can only be brought about by governmental action.

Governments helpfully collude in this atomisation and fragmentation of action and reaction.

Throughout history, social movements have focused on the need for government action.

The anti-slavery movement sought to change laws that permitted slavery.

The suffragette movement only ensured votes for women once discriminatory laws had been displaced; the anti-apartheid movement was only successful once apartheid laws had been removed.

In the US, the black civil rights movement campaigned from 1947 until the introduction of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act to end discrimination in certain spheres.

As I wrote regarding Michael Young of Reason’s Hit and Run, State action most certainly is the preferred method of effecting change in society here in the West in the 21st century. Every national political campaign consists largely of politicians prescribing State solutions to State-caused problems and assuring the voters that they have the better tax-funded State plan to fix everything that ails them: housing crisis, gas prices, health care, education, homeland security, pollution, inflation, the recession, energy sustainability. This is what the voters want to hear, what they base their vote on, how they evaluate the success of a politician after his term has ended, and it’s exactly what the politicians keep feeding them.

It is difficult to comprehend how a professional activist can claim, with a straight face, that “governmental action is unpopular and out of fashion” and “minimal government is now ideologically dominant.”

What Ann Pettifor advocates is coercion, a greater expenditure of tax money, a greater intrusion into the functions of private businesses, and a great reduction in the quality of life of Westerners, with no real decrease in global temperatures or pollution. I think Ludwig von Mises was right when he said,

Government interference always means either violent action or the threat of such action. Government is in the last resort the employment of armed men, of policemen, gendarmes, soldiers, prison guards, and hangmen. The essential feature of government is the enforcement of its decrees by beating, killing, and imprisoning. Those who are asking for more government interference are asking ultimately for more compulsion and less freedom.

The way to improve the state of the environment is to get rid of layers and layers of bureaucratic inefficiency and special exemptions that result in large companies being unaccountable for the air and water they pollute, where such polluted air and water are used by other people, who have a right for their property not to be polluted (damaged) by others. A private-property-rights and homesteading framework could solve environmental problems better than a framework based on legislative and judicial fiat.

I wonder if all environmentalists imagine exactly how much violence, impoverishment, and debasing of values would be inherent in the enforcement of the environmentalist policies they advocate.

Ann Pettifor mentions suffrage and slavery as issues that spawned large-scale movements, much larger and more organized than the environmentalist movement. She herself says that issues such as those had to be remedied by repealing laws that permitted them. Exactly: the monopolistic governments in charge of the several states and the federal government explicitly enabled those injustices. Policies of the State had to be removed, not added to, for justice to emerge. Libertarians argue, quite convincingly, that environmental law enables private property rights to be aggressed against legally, and that the State’s ownership of so much land and water contributes to their deterioration more than if all land and water were privately owned. The government does, after all, ruin everything it touches.

I am disturbed by the mindset that for any issue you think is important, you and your political allies should band together to influence and/or control a large enough portion of the violent, deadly police power of the State that you can force others to behave as you wish. There is little or no defense of rights or protection of property involved in environmentalist activism. It all just seems like using State coercion to control others and prevent business and industry from progressing the way they naturally would.