The Greatest Waste; P.L. Poirot

THE GREA TEST WASTE THERE is much concern today about waste of natural re sources. The land area of this earth is limited, and much of it is being put to wasteful use. Soil erosion is a serious problem. Forests are being denuded, timber supplies threatened. Scarce minerals and metals and coal and oil and gas reserves are being consumed. Many communities face serious water shortages. Wild life is jeopardized, on land and in the sea. The fear is that people are multiply ing out of proportion to known resources, and that future generations will be unable to survive. There's no disputing the importance of the survival of the species; our lives may depend on it. But it is strange that people seem most concerned about this prob lem at the very time v\Then they are surviving in better condition and greater numbers than ever before. It would almost appear that mankind thrives by wasting resources; though the better he thrives, the more he worries at the waste of it all.

In a primitive foraging society where each person is primarily a consumer like every other, it doubtless would Dr. Poirot is Managing Editor of The Freeman and a member of the staff of the Foundation for Economic Education. 58 THE GREATEST WASTE 59 be true that the greater the number of persons, the fewer would be the resources available to each-and growth might mean death. But civilized, specialized, trading man is a factor of production as well as a consumer. And a growing population might well mean a higher level of living for each person, as men find new uses and new sources of materials previously unknown. It should be obvious to anyone living in the United States today that the much-feared depletion of natural resources in no way explains how or why 191 million persons now exist in comparative luxury and ease in a land that barely supported a million persons at a primi tive subsistence level before the arrival of the first white settlers a few centuries ago. The mere presence of peo ple does not tell the full story, of course; witness the teeming millions living today near starvation levels in much of the world. Yet the economic miracle of America does testify that 191 persons can live in comparative lux ury where one lived sparingly before, relying on the same basic resources, but multiplied by the creative energies of individuals when each is relatively free to develop in his own best interest the potentialities of his being.

Vital HU1nan Resources The point is that hun~an resources are at least as vital to economic well-being as are such natural resources as land, minerals, fuel, water, and the like. And by far the most important lesson in the history of men and nations is the long sad story of the waste of human effort and hu60 PAUL L. POIROT man life, simply because some persons have taken it up on themselves to enslave and regulate and control and deny others the freedom of choice and the responsibility for their own well-being. Almost everyone in the world today is concerned about whether the reserves of petroleum are sufficient to meet the fantastic and growing demands for the product. And some contend that this valuable natural resource is being wasted. They overlook how many human lives were wasted during the centuries before men learned of the vital properties and potential uses of petroleum. To some at the time, it might have seemed that candles and midnight oil were being wantonly wasted by Thomas Edison and the numerous others, perhaps unknown to one another, whose inventive minds offered electric light ing to mankind. But perhaps the real waste could better be visualized in terms of the human lives lost over the centuries through ignorance of the qualities and uses of electrical energy.

Who knows how many potential geniuses failed to be born, or died in infancy, for lack of the wonder drugs and other miracles of medical science that are taken for granted today? There might be more standing timber and fewer "pulp" magazines in our time if printing presses had never been devised. But how many lives were wasted in the centuries before men learned to write or read or com municate freely through the press? How much timber had to be "wasted" to clear land for farming, or to pave the the way to discovery of steel rails and beams and other THE GREATEST WASTE 61 forms to displace wooden structures, these in turn to give way to aluminum, or glass, or plastic? Intervention Is Waste Perhaps it is time to spell out more clearly here what we mean by "waste"; To the extent that any person or group interferes with another's peaceful purpose~ con trary to his wishes~ that is waste. Many readers will see at once the implications in this definition, for they might define "liberty" in similar terms: To the extent that no person or group interferes with another's peaceful pur pose~ contrary to his wishes~ that is liberty. All we have said, then, is that waste occurs when there is anynega tion of liberty. Well, that's not bad for a start!

Unless one holds the view that he, himself, is God, he should be prepared· to concede to every peaceful person as much liberty or freedom of choice as he claims for his own. Human beings are fit neither to rule, nor to be ruled by, one another. Just as each person's best hope for his own emergence is through his own choice and respon sibility, so the best hope for human progress is through liberty for every peaceful person. This is not to imply that we have learned to resist violence without fighting back, or that we can foresee a society without need for government as an organized defensive force against in dividual and collective criminal activities. We merely contend that the· best hope for self-emergence and for hu man progress is through liberty for every peaceful person. Any deviation from that is waste.

62 PAUL L. POIROT When waste is thus defined as any negation of liberty, it scarcely makes sense to speak of the waste of coal or iron or land or timber in such broad general categories. If liberty is a strictly human condition, then so is waste; the terms have no applicability to things or to lower animals. The waste, if any, is imposed by man on man. Man, of course, is a complex being, and a part of each of us in this world is the property he owns-the resources he has appropriated to his own purpose and use without infringement upon the just claims of any other person. Now, some others, of course, may think that an owner is using his property unwisely or even wastefully, just as some persons may think that another is wasting his own time or his own life. But if we concede that liberty af fords the best hope for human progress, we thereby agree not to try to live others' lives for them; and one person cannot know or say for certain that someone else is wast ing his life in peacefully doing as he pleases. Nor can one say that another is wasting his own property so long as he uses it without injury to other peaceful persons. For all others know, he may be inventing a wheel, or a printing press, or an electric light, or some other potential boon to mankind. If each person is free to judge and decide how best to use his life, his time, his property, the safest presumption is that he will not deliberately waste them.

Govern1nenl Controls People Does the foregoing analysis mean, then, that by defini tion we have ruled out all possibility of waste in the traTHE GREATEST WASTE 63 ditional sense of the word? Far from it; we are merely looking at the long-neglected other side of the coin. What we are suggesting is that resources are wasted whenever the private property of any peaceful person is taken with out his consent for redistribution or use by others who have done nothing to earn it. We are not referring here to taxes properly levied and collected to support the gov ernment in its limited role of defending life and prop erty. We are referring to taxes improperly taken to finance all kinds of government intervention at home and abroad that violate, rather than defend, the lives and property of peaceful persons: that is waste. Involved in such government-actuated waste may be the timberland a man owns, or tillable farm land, or the mineral rights or the air rights to his property, or water rights, or other privately earned and owned resources. To take such property without the owner's approval is to deny its use for the purpose he had intended-thus, to that extent diminishing his life. In the final analysis, it is human life and liberty that matter, and it is human life that is wasted when liberty is violated.

As Dean Russell has ,veIl observed, "Price control is people control,"l and so is rent control, wage control, rationing, tariff and protectionist legislation of all kinds, immigration control, interest and money and banking regulation, exchange control, airways and airwave con trol, postal regulation, managed news and censorship, and countless other aspects of intervention. This is waste, 1 See The Freeman, October, 1961, page 25.

64 PAUL L. POIROT originating in the authoritarian acts of men, the real cost of which is measurable in human lives. Life without lib erty is sheer waste. Faith Must Be Strong To Rely on Freedom It is not expected that this brief analysis will allay the fears of all who are concerned about the depletion of natural resources-those, for instance, who are firmly con vinced that the government ought to intervene and set aside vast tracts of timberland lest private interests strip them bare and leave future generations without forest products. We have merely tried to point out that such conservationists, who are determined to live and control the lives of their contemporaries on behalf of posterity, are presuming to be wiser than God. Instead of devoting their own lives and their own prop erty to reforestation, which they allege to be of first im portance, their time and effort are devoted to wasting the lives and denying the individual goals of fellow human beings. They presume that had they been in charge of planning in the past, the resulting progress for all man kind would have been greater than man has known when each was free to try. They reject the entire history of civilization, and say, in effect, that compulsory collectiv ism affords a better hope than liberty. They know for sure that rocks and trees are more important than liberty and human life-that God had no business allowing individ uals minds of their own! Leave reforestation to the volun tary efforts of individuals? Not on your life!

THE GREATEST WASTE 65 Nor is this analysis expected to refute the faith of those who see no way to live without government highways and government schools and government waterworks and thousands of other government projects over and beyond the strict police function. Surely, they will contend, not all of these can be counted as sheer waste; human lives would be devoted to those _projects even if the govern ment took no hand in them at all! Probably true; but all we have tried to point out here is that, if they are right if men would have done these things voluntarily anyway then it was sheer waste to resort to coercive measures to force some persons to do what others would have liked to do and undoubtedly could have done better. Our point stands: to the ex tent that any person or group interferes with another's peaceful purpose) contrary to his wishes) that is waste. And the only alternative is liberty.