Drowning in a sea of dogma
Being a libertarian environmentalist can be frustrating. Take the most obvious issue, global warming. Many of my favorite Libertarian personalities (like Ian Bernard of Free Talk Live) insist that global warming is either a myth, not anthropogenic, or not a problem. Many environmentalists scream about the need for more government intervention. In reality, they're both being dogmatic. I believe that the market is the best solution to environmental problems, not government or ignorance.
It's the statist environmentalists that are pissing me off now. A Sioux Falls, SD company has genetically engineered cattle that almost certainly cannot be infected with BSE, otherwise known as mad cow disease. Average beef-eaters would say "Awesome, now I can eat beef without worrying about slowly dying from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease."
But it's easy to imagine what would happen if this company tried to bring the cows to market. People wearing funny costumes would protest, the FDA would be required to go through a multi-year process to ensure the safety of something that almost certainly carries zero risk. I have a better solution than regulation: let those of us who feel the risk of vCJD is worse than the risk of something going wrong with the cows eat them, and let those other people eat "natural" cows.
It's the statist environmentalists that are pissing me off now. A Sioux Falls, SD company has genetically engineered cattle that almost certainly cannot be infected with BSE, otherwise known as mad cow disease. Average beef-eaters would say "Awesome, now I can eat beef without worrying about slowly dying from variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease."
But it's easy to imagine what would happen if this company tried to bring the cows to market. People wearing funny costumes would protest, the FDA would be required to go through a multi-year process to ensure the safety of something that almost certainly carries zero risk. I have a better solution than regulation: let those of us who feel the risk of vCJD is worse than the risk of something going wrong with the cows eat them, and let those other people eat "natural" cows.
Labels: coercion, environment, mad cow disease, morons, regulation
1 Comments:
I am surprised to see right wing libertarians holding such enlightened views. However, as an anarchist-communist / libertarian socialist truly i fail to see how you fit these great ideas of personal freedom around unrestrained capitalism, which (if im not mistaken) acts as the core of right-libertarianism.
The very motive force of capitalism is profit. Everything else is merely a secondary concern in a good corporation or good business. For the individual and society to be totally free of this nihilism and the environment protected, this system would need to be totally destroyed! There are alternative motive forces that have been demonstated to work (mutualism - this is a school of economics), and with this we can be freed from both state coercion and capitalistic exploitation.
I just thought it interesting that i list off the similarities our two worldviews share:
- i agree with your anti-state perspective
- i am an environmentalist
- i also advocate the relaxing of narcotics laws.
The colours you are using on this blog (red & black) are the traditional colours of the anti-capitalist/anti-authoritarian movement, and the name (Libertarian Youth) was that of an anarchist youth organisation active in the Spanish Revolution of 1936.
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