The late, great Dr. Petr Beckmann was editor of the great journal Access to Energy, founder of the dissident physics journal Galilean Electrodynamics (brochures and further Beckmann info here; further dissident physics links), author of The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (Amazon; PDF version) and the pamphlets The Non-Problem of Nuclear Waste and Why “Soft” Technology Will Not Be America’s Energy Salvation. (See also my post Access to Energy, and this post.)
I just came across another favorite piece of his and have scanned it in: Economics as if Some People Mattered (review of Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher), first published in Reason (October 1978), and reprinted in Free Minds & Free Markets: Twenty-Five Years of Reason (1993). Those (including some libertarians and fellow travelers) who also have a thing for “smallness” and bucolic pastoralism should give this a read. Some excerpts:
Small is Beautiful is the title of a book by E.F. Schumacher. It is also a slogan describing a state of mind in which people clamor for the rural idyll that (they think) comes with primitive energy sources, small-scale production, and small communities. Yet much–perhaps most–of their clamor is not really for what they consider small and beautiful; it is for the destruction of what they consider big and ugly.
… The free market does not, of course, eradicate human greed, but it directs it into channels that the consumer the maximum benefit, for it is he who benefits from the competition of”profit-greedy” businessmen. The idea that the free market is highly popular among businessmen is one that is widespread, but not among sound economists. It was not very popular in 1776, when Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was pulished, and it has not become terribly popular with all of them since–which is not surprising, for the free market benefits the consumer but disciplines the businessman.
If the free market is so popular with business, what are all those business lobbies doing in Washington? The shipping lobby wants favors for U.S. ships; the airlines yell rape and robbery when deregulation from the governmental CAB cartel threatens; the farmers’ lobby clamors for more subsidies. Whatall these lobbies are after is not a freer market but a bigger nipple on the federal sow.
And also Lew Rockwell’s Rockwell’s Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto, George Reisman’s The Toxicity of Environmentalism and Environmentalism Refuted, and Robert James Bidinotto’s Environmentalism or Individualism?, and other piece mentioned in my post Environmentalists Are a Cancer on the Earth.
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As a fan of nuclear energy, I’d like to thank you for posting this.
On the other hand, why don’t Libertarians favour lower population? Regulations go hand-in-hand with population density. The country has always been laissez-faire relative to the city because the country is less populated. “Doing what you want until you hurt others” is always going to be more difficult with greater population density.
Gil
Because libertarians believe in principles, even if it might be easier to use force to make our way easier.
Who said anything about force? Besides don’t Libertarians romanticise about rural settings where people have a great amount of personal freedom and not inner-city settings?
How can you talk about population levels without force entering the discussion? Libertarians believe that the size of someones family is their own business, not any of our business. We take the existence or nonexistence of other people as a given in our world. After all, people are ends in and of themselves, not a means to our ends.
As far as romanticising rural settings, I seem to remember Murray Rothbard complaining at 2:00 am after hours of spirited discussion that it was barbaric that there was not a Denny’s within walking distance. Some libertarians prefer cities.
Thank you for the links Stephan. I especially enjoyed the Anti-Environmentalist Manifesto.
Of course, freedom solves the Malthusian problem in a very simple way. The more crowded it gets, the more expensive it is per child to reproduce.
Might wanna make sure abortion is available for this to work, heh.
No, I romanticise about huge cities. People can interact peacefully and beneficially without 2 miles between each house.
And I agree with Rothbard, a Dennys not being within walking distance is barbaric.
Although being able to sit on your porch and shoot cans off the fence is indeed a lovely idea.
Please, get over it already.
Pollution is bad, natural resources are not inexhaustible, AGW is probably true (and needless cruelty to animals is despicable, but this is a moral judgment rather than a hard fact).
And nothing of this has any relevance to economics or libertarianism; nothing of this justifies State interventionism or even its existence. So, some/many/most environmentalists are socialists in disguise? then by all means don’t implicitly agree with them by celebrating pollution and animal torture as if they were the essence of libertarianism. This is an annoyingly frequent strategy I see in mises.org that I would like you all to reconsider.
You may or may not think that animals have rights, but this has nothing to do with whether you are a statist or a libertarian. How so? Because the intellectual battlefield of those two camps assumes two kinds of entities; actors (people) and inanimate objects. Depending on how you feel about non-human animals, you may include them in the first group (as some animal-rigthists do) in the second group (as Cartesians do) or in a third, new group (as most people do to some degree nowadays). Once you’ve decided about where animals belong, the statist-libertarian debate can go on as usual. The fact that some individuals are neither people nor inanimate objects is a source of ethical disagreements among libertarians and statists alike, just like the abortion debate. By the way, despite some strong connections, the animal rights movement at its core is not really a part of the environmental movement (as explained by Peter Singer in his thought-provoking book “Animal Liberation”).
I’ve read all of Reisman’s arguments against environmentalism and, frankly, let’s say I don’t think they are the best part of his book Capitalism. Of course, for something to be a resource you have to know how to exploit it, but for a given technological level there are only so many ways to do that, and so, the amount is always limited. It’s like saying you don’t need a fridge because you can always come up with a way to un-rot the rotten food; it’s all matter and energy, you know.
Oh, and I must say that, in my opinion, “disident physics” really looks like crackpot science.
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