Ecology, Socialism, and Capitalism; T. Machan

Everyone thinks chiefly of his own, hardly at all of the common interest; and only when he is him self concerned as an individual. For besides other considerations, everybody is more inclined to neglect the duty which he expects another to ful fill; as in families many attendants are often less useful than a few." In our time, Ludwig von Mises advanced the same general observation in more technical and rigorous terms in his book Socialism,although he was mainly concerned with economic problems of production and allocation of resources for satisfy ingindividualpreferences. More recently,however, Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay "The Tragedy of the Commons," argued that the difficultiesfirst noticed by Aristotle plague us in the quintessential ly public realm, the ecological environment. Tibor R. Machan teachesphilosophy at Auburn Univer sity, Alabama. His most recent book, Capitalism and Individualism, was published by St. Martin's Press in October.

These various indictments of collectivism, cou pled with the few moral arguments against it, didn't dissuade many intellectuals from attempt ing to implement the system. Our own century is filled with enthusiastic, stUbborn, visionary, opportunistic, but almost always bloody efforts to realize the collectivist dream. Not until the crum pling of the Soviet attempt did it dawn on most people that collectivism is simply not going to do the job of enabling people to live a decent human social life. Although most admit that in small units-convents, kibbutzim, the family-a limit ed, temporary collectivist arrangement may be feasible, they no longer look with much hope toward transforming entire societies into collec tivist human organizations. The most recent admission of the failure of collectivismin the wake of the collapse of the Soviet-bloc economies-comes from Robert Heilbroner, one of socialism's most intelligent and loyal champions for the last several decades.

As he puts it in his recent essay, "After Commu nism," "Ludwig von Mises ... had written of the 'impossibility' of socialism, arguing that no Cen tral Planning Board could ever gather the enor mous amount of information needed to create a workable economic system It turns out, of course, that Mises was right " (The New Yorker, September 10, 1990) But, not unlike previous thinkers who have seen examples of the failure of some kind of perfection ist, idealist normative moral or political scheme, Professor Heilbroner cannot quite say goodbye to his utopia. He notes that there are two ways it may remain something of a handy concept. First, it may leave us piecemeal social objectives to strive 98 THE FREEMAN • MARCH 1991 for-but these have alwayscome in the context of essentially capitalist economic systems. Second, it may re-emerge as an adjunct of the ecological movement. As Heilbroner puts it: The ecological crisistoward which we are mov ing at a quickening pace has occasioned much scientific comment but surprisingly little eco nomic attention. [Professor Heilbroner does not follow the burgeoning literature of the New Resource Economicse.g., the works of John Baden and Richard Stroup.] Yet if there is any single problem that will have to be faced by any socioeconomic order over the coming decades it is the problem of making our eco nomic peace with the demands of the environ ment. Making that peace means insuring that the vital processes of material provisioning do not contaminate the green-blue film on which life itself depends. This imperative need will affect all social formations, but none so pro foundly as capitalism.

What is one to say about this new fear, a new problem allegedly too complicated for free men and women to handle? Heilbroner continues: "It is, perhaps, possible that some of the institutions of capitalism-markets, dual realms of power, even private ownership of some kinds of produc tionmay be adapted to that new state of ecolog ical vigilance, but, if so, they must be monitored, regulated, and contained to such a degree that it would be difficult to call the final social order capitalism." This somewhat novel but essentially old-fash ioned skepticism about capitalism needs to be addressed-if only because it is time that the tech nique it exhibits of undermining human freedom be exposed. There is no justification for any of this distrust of the market, as opposed to placing our trust in a scientificbureaucracy. If men and women acting in the marketplace, guided by the rule of law based on their natural individual rights to life, lib erty, and property, were incapable of standing up to the ecological challenges Heilbroner has in mind, there is absolutely no reason to believe that those challenges could be met better by some new statist means. Why should ecologicallymind ed bureaucrats be better motivated, more compe tent, and more virtuous than those motivated by a concern for the hungry, the unjustly treated, the poor, the artistically deprived, the uneducated masses of the world? There is no reason to attribute to any ecological politburo or central committee any more noble characteristics than to the rest who have made a try at coercing people into good behavior.

If free men and women will not manage the environment, neither will anyone else. In fact, more optimism about the market is warranted when we examine the sources of our ecological troubles. Given, especially, collectivism's record of far greater environmental mismanagement than the mixed economies we recklessly label capitalist, there is already some suggestion here that the problem is too little capitalism. What Heilbroner and friends fail to realize or reveal is that the environmental problems most people fret about are due to the tragedy of the commons, not due to the privatization of resources and the implementation of the principles that prohibit dumping and other kinds of trespassing. With more attention to protecting individual rights to life, liberty, and property, solutions to our prob lems are much more likely. The best defense of the free market rests on the realization that it is the nature of human beings to be essentially individual. In other words, the indi vidual rights approach is most natural-it most readily accommodates nature and, therefore, the environment. If there is a crisishere, it amounts to the history of human action that has been out of line with ecological well-being. But how do we knowwhat kinds of human action might have been more or less conducive to a healthy environment?

We need to know about human nature-what it is that human beings are and what this implies for their conduct within the natural world. If, as the natural rights (classicalliberal) tradition has inti mated, human beings are individuals with basic rights to life, liberty,and property, then this is how they are best fitted within the rest of nature. Envi ronmentalism must learn to trust free men and women, not the state. 0 99 TheEnd of Communism by David Glasner T he collapse of the totalitarian empire of the Soviet Union and the increasingly clear signs that the U.S.S.R. is approaching the final stages of an irreversible process of disintegra tion close one of the grizzliest chapters in human history. The debacle has come with a speed that has stunned almost everyone, especially those who believed that (with generous doses of Western aid) Mikhail Gorbachev could contain the forces of dis solution he had helped unleash. But now it is clear that Gorbachev is presiding over a system that is collapsing at its foundations, and no amount of outside aid can avoid or even postpone for much longer its ultimate demise.