Book Reviews

$22.95 Reviewed by Jim Russell I confess that my mind was too closed to political rhetoric, and my wallet too thinned by involuntary taxation to fork over nearly twenty-three dollars to a then member of the wealthiest club in America the U.S. Senate-for a book. My daughter, however, a recently crowned lawyer, pur chased Al Gore's Earth in the Balance with the reckless abandon of the nouveau riche, and gave it to me for my birthday, along with a comment that the author was a man of brilliant intellect, and a pointed remark that "Not all things are subject to economic analysis. " I rightly deduced from that remark what was in store for me, but I read the book anyway because I dearly love my daughter. (She is, regardless of weird ideas on political economy acquired at expensive schools that don't teach classical economics, the best daughter ever entrusted to the blundering care of an unworthy father.) I only read Gore's book because my darling Jenny gave it to me, but I'm glad now that I did.

If I could have but two books to read the rest of my life,' one would be the Bible and the other would be Austrian economist Lud wig von Mises' magnus opus, Human Ac tion. I'd choose the Bible to enlighten me on spiritual matters ; Human Action on matters economic. Together, these two books can save me from brilliant intellects. Gore professes to be a Christian. "I am a Baptist," he says. But thanks to Matthew, Mark, and Mises, I am not deceived by Al Gore. I deduce from his book and his voting record in the United States Senate that Vice President Gore is a devout practitioner of statolatry . "The state," wrote Mises, who coined statolatry, "[that] new deity of the dawning age of statolatry, [that] eternal and superhuman institution beyond the reach of human frailties." Jesus said, "Be on your guard against false prophets. . . . You will know them by their deeds" (Matthew 7: 15 16).

Gore's votes in the Senate, his deeds, so to speak, by which Jesus said we could know him, reveal much. This is a man who never met a government spending initiative he couldn't approve. The National Taxpay ers Union has ranked Senator Gore as the Senate's leading tax-and-spender for the last two years. Although the author laboriously denies it, Earth in the Balance is a cunning warrant for the establishment of the equivalent of world government through" a framework of global agreements that obligate all nations to act in concert." Gore proposes a "Global Mar shall Plan" incorporating broad governmen tal powers to save the environment, forcibly taxing and regulating people's lives and restraining individual liberty in the process. A clever polemicist, Gore never refers to the unique attribute of government that imparts to it the illusion of being beyond human frailties: its monopoly on the use of force.

Mises, on the other hand, bluntly depicts the state as "the social apparatus of coer cion and compulsion" whose role is "to beat people into submission" to its dictates. Jesus of Nazareth preached the futility of relying on force in the conduct of human affairs, and he taught us how to do without it. Gore disarmingly argues that resolving the "global ecological crisis" caused by "humankind's assault on the earth" is es sentially a spiritual challenge. Whether his moralizing on man's spiritual inadequa cies is sincere or sanctimonious, the recom~ mendations embodied in his Global Mar shall Plan are entirely material and amenable to economic analysis. Gore establishes the reality of a crisis primarily by the rhetorical devices of inces sant incantation and vivid metaphor. He repetitiously refers to a "grave crisis," "environmental crisis," "ungodly crisis," "deep crisis," "population explosion,"

"catastrophe at hand," "catastrophe in the making," "crumbling ecological system," "ravenous civilization," "destruction of the earth's surface," "garbage imperial ism," "destructive cycle," "rapidlyemerg ing dilemma," and "ecological holocaust. " Gore's Earth in the Balance indicts clas sical economics and laissez-faire capitalism for the problem of environmental degrada tion. Why? Because if classical economics can be discredited, environmentalists can safely ignore the economists who warn that their utopian plans won't work. Gore pledges to reform his insatiable spending habit. But his sincerity is suspect, for he renounces only one ecologically di sastrous government program among the multitude he has long supported. "I my self," he confesses, "have supported sugar price supports and-until now-have al ways voted for them without appreciating the full consequence [in damage to the environment] of my vote. . . . I have fol lowed the general rule that I will vote for the established farm programs of others in farm states . . . in return for their votes on behalf of the ones important to my state. . . . But change is possible: I, for one, have decided as I write this book that I can no longer vote in favor of sugarcane subsidies." Hallelu jah! A vote-trading, tax-and-spendjunkie is willing to skip one little agricultural fix in order to overdose on a kilo of environmen tally correct spending.

Although Gore pays lip service to the contributions of economics and praises lais sez-faire capitalism faintly, their demise is his ultimate objective. He endorses' 'mod ified free--markets." Of course a slave is a person whose freedom has been modified merely by the addition of shackles. As classical economist Frederic Bastiat pointed out, one cannot be both free and not free at the same time. Throughout Earth in the Balance, Gore confuses economics (a science) with capi talism (a social system), statistics, and ac counting. His problems with semantics are not inconsequential and should not neces sarily be attributed to ignorance. Mises warned us in Human Action that faulty 365 nomenclature becomes understandable if we realize that pseudo-economists and the politicians who apply it want to prevent people from knowing what the market econ omy really is. They want to make people believe that all the repulsive manifestations of restrictive government policies are pro duced by "capitalism." Blaming economics for environmental degradation, is akin to blaming mathematics for the size of the federal deficit.

In Human Action Mises identified two primary causes of environmental degrada tion; namely, the failure of legislators to fully implement private-property rights; and the propensity of government to limit the liability and indemnification that would oth erwise be imposed by the common law on the owners of property. If there is a "global ecological crisis," and if it is the product of "humankind's assault on the earth," the science of human action is the only branch of human knowledge capable of understand ing the problem, which is a prerequisite to avoiding an "ecological holocaust." Years before Rachel Carson launched the modern environmental movement with the publication of Silent Spring in 1962, Ludwig von Mises had considered the problem of mankind's abuse of his environment, iden tified the etiology of environmental degra dation, and prescribed the only practical defense against "humankind's assault on the earth." If Al Gore sincerely cared about the environment he would repudiate his plan to spend vast sums of other people's money and embrace classical economics and lais sez-faire capitalism as the keys to environ mental salvation.

Preservation of Earth cannot be entrusted to any government-not the U.S., not the U.N., nor to any supranational coalition. To put the matter in perspective: Would you trust the people who gave you the post office, the House Bank scandal, the savings and loan debacle, and the national debt with the survival of the human race? If Earth is in the balance, let us not entrust it to the wisdom of governments. D Jim Russell is a freelance writer living in Ohio.

366 THE FREEMAN. SEPTEMBER 1993 Environmental Politics: Public Costs, Private Rewards Edited by Michael S. Greve and Fred L. Smith, Jr. Praeger Publishers, 1992 • 212 pages. $19.95 Reviewed by Brian Doherty T he old rationales for central control of the economy have suffered a crippling blow at the hands of history and economic logic. Socialism has proven neither more rational, more efficient, nor more humane than the free market. But could it be more environmentally sound? This book is edited by Michael S. Greve, the founder and executive director of the Center for Individual Rights, a public inter est law firm, and Fred L. Smith, Jr., the founder and president of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a free market think tank. It attempts to lay the ground work for a scholarly and accessible litera ture that makes the case that environmental command-and-control policies, even when planned with the best of intentions, are still just a road to serfdom, only paved with green bricks, to use Smith's apposite phrase.

The book's contributors include Jonathan H. Adler and Christopher L. Culp of CEI, Marc K. Landy and Mary Hague of Boston College, Daniel F. McInnis of Georgetown University, R. Shep Melnick of Brandeis University, and David Vogel of the Univer sity of California at Berkeley. The writers are not all sympathetic to a totally free market approach, but all of them are keen analysts of the problems associated with centralized environmental planning. There are legal hurdles in the way of sane environmental policy as well as political ones, even though all of its authors don't seem to grasp the most sensible and fair solution. The chapter by political scientists Marc Landy and Mary Hague examines the workings ofSuperfund , a program designed to clean up abandoned waste dumps. The cost was supposed to be borne by the polluter, which seems sensible and just. Unfortunately, the Superfund "polluter pays" principle, in which liability is "strict, joint and several, and retroactive" has led to runaway tort problems where anyone with deep pockets who has any sort of connec tion, however tenuous, to a site (including "prior owners, users, bankers, insurers, waste generators, and transporters") can be held liable for the entire cleanup cost, even if the site adhered to all legal and known scientific standards at the time. So Super fund cleanup attempts are generally kept tied up in court for years as any party held liable tries to drag as many other associated parties as possible into the liability process.

This leads Landy and Hague to the mistaken conclusion that "clearly, it would be fairer and more efficient to simply pay for cleanup from public funds. " But political and legal interference with free markets is not the only problem with the current state of environmental policy. When attempting to regulate "the environment," there are often no markets to corrupt. You can have a market only when there is property to be bought and sold, and air and water pollution involve invasive actions on individuals being performed through an "unowned" medium, a "public good." The book's final chapter by Fred Smith shines an exploratory light toward an intel lectual and political revolution in environ mental law that would extend markets and private, voluntary arrangements to even the trickiest of pollution problems. Smith admits the existence of problems with "tort law which ... has been almost completely socialized," where "courts of ten award compensation to parties who have suffered no demonstrable damages while imposing liability on parties who have caused no harm. " But the solution lies in the innovations that property rights and mar kets give incentive to create, not central governmental management. Smith points out that such innovations as fences, locks, fingerprinting, and burglar alarms only de veloped because of private property rights, and he hypothesizes the development of technologies that would make applying the property paradigm to currently' 'unowned"

resources like endangered species, air, and water possible. Particularly intriguing is his notion of "chemical fingerprinting, which could identify the culprits responsible for oil spills and toxic dumping." Neither Smith nor the reader is able to imagine beforehand all the various mecha nisms and benefits that would develop spon taneously if we were to try to extend prop erty rights over the current "public" goods of the environment. But Environmental Pol itics: Public Costs, Private Rewards makes clear that ceding all attempts at ending environmental degradation and managing environmental concerns to the government leads to private gain at public expense, and, too often, at the expense of environmental quality. 0 Brian Doherty is assistant editor of Regulation magazine. The Heated Debate: Greenhouse Predictions vs. Climate Reality by Robert C. Balling Pacific Research Institute, 177 Post S1., San Francisco, CA 94108 • 1992 • 250 pages • $21.95 cloth, $14.95 paper Reviewed by John Semmens I ndustrialization has allegedly led to in creased levels of carbon dioxide (C0 2) from combustion of fossil fuels. Higher amounts of CO2 have purportedly raised global temperatures. Warmer weather could generate significant changes in our climate.

The perception that those changes would be a disaster for the planet has inspired de mands for drastic remedies. An example is Vice President Albert Gore's call for a phaseout of the internal combustion engine over the next few decades. Even more desperate are demands that the Industrial Revolution be reversed and mankind re turned to a pre-industrial agricultural mode of life. The author of this book suggests that the call for drastic action is at best premature. Without challenging the premise that CO2 BOOKS 367 will double during the next century, he attempts to investigate dispassionately the likely effects. These effects appear to be of a smaller magnitude than many headline grabbing visions of apocalypse have im plied. Further, it is not at all clear that the impacts would, on balance, be negative. For starters, the global warming experi enced since the beginnings of industrializa tion is less than would have been predicted by the same models that are now being used to predict future disaster. This suggests that the link between CO2 and climate is more complex than many doomsayers ac knowledge. Taking this historical record into account, the most probable increase in global temperature over the next century is less than two degrees Fahrenheit. This will not be sufficient to melt polar ice caps and inundate coastal cities as many have feared.

Most of the temperature rise will occur at night, during the winter, and at higher lati tudes. In many ways, this pattern of warm ing would actually be beneficial. The in crease in nighttime temperatures will reduce the spread between daily high and low temperatures. This decreases thermal stress on vegetation. Plants would be more likely to survive and thrive under such conditions. This would mean a longer frost-free growing season in many locations. A correspond ingly larger agricultural output could be expected. This would lower the cost of food and fiber, mitigating poverty for large seg ments of the world's population. It seems more likely that further eco nomic progress would hold forth more hope for averting environmental disaster. It is progress that has improved energy effi ciency. It is progress that is enabling im proved communication of information. If the economic growth that naturally flows from economic freedom can continue to fuel technology, the next couple of gen erations of human beings will probably have many more attractive options for dealing with the world they inherit. D John Semmens has been a frequent contributor to The Freeman.

If there's moral validity to free-market economics, why do so many clergy fro" fail to understand it? .,~~~ Mail this coupon or call us at (616) 454-3080 THE ACTON INSTITUTE For the study ofReligion & Liberty Send or call for more information and a free copy of our bi-monthly publication: Religion & Liberty. A.study of theological and seminary faculty conducted by the Roper Center in 1982 revealed that 37% of the respondents felt "the United States would be better off if it moved toward socialism." Nearly half of them favored the redistribution of wealth (as opposed to its creation) as a better way to meet the needs of the poor. These are the people who are teaching our future religious leaders. Is it any wonder so many of our mainstream ministries promote such a disturbing hostility toward the entrepreneur and free enterprise? The Acton Institute, named after Lord Acton, is working to change these attitudes by familiarizing the ecumenical religious community with the moral and ethical dimensions of capitalism in a social arrangement that is both free and virtuous.

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