CHAPTER 21
COERCIVE RECYCLING, FORCED CONSERVATION, AND 
FREE-MARKET ALTERNATIVESCHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: TABLE OF CONTENTS
Why Do People Worry So Much About Wastes?
Lack of Understanding of How a Market Economy Works
Lack of Technical Knowledge or Imagination
The Moral Feeling About Recycling
Pros and Cons of Waste Disposal Policies
The Resource Costs of Recycling
The Cost in Coercion
Price and Value
Conservation and the Government System
Conclusio


   Some people get pleasure from recycling.  That's fine, even if 
the impulse springs from the wrongheaded belief that recycling is 
a public service.  Coercing people to recycle is something very 
different, however. 
   Bette Bao Lord's description of forced-labor 
recycling in China during the "Cultural Revolution" is 
instructive: 
One of the most frequent duties was to sort the city 
garbage dump.  The job was a big one and we were 
usually excused from school for the day.  We had to 
sort the trash into piles of paper or leather or scrap 
steel, etc., which  were in turn reprocessed for 
further manufacture.  Another frequent detail was 
cleaning the streets of used paper and other litter.  
Each student was given a stick with a nail at one end 
for spearing and a paper bag for collection.  After a 
day of this type of labor detail, I suffered from a 
backache.  When the school collected all our full bags, 
it would turn them over to the factory for making new 
paper to ease the paper shortage.  

   In poor societies, it may be worthwhile to recycle.  But in China people not only 
recycle because they are poor, they are also poor because they recycle.  The recycling 
mindset in China in the late 1950s and early 1960s was inimical to economic 
development.  The notion of making progress by forcing people to recycle, when they 
could be doing more productive things, makes societies poor.  This mistake is 
sometimes compounded by the glorification of primitive production techniques (as Mao 
tried to do with backyard steelmaking and Ghandi with household textile 
manufacturing), rather than using the same amount of effort to learn how to do the 
work more efficiently and to gradually build a more modern system.
   The recycling mindset can also be counterproductive in rich countries. People 
praise saving trees by recycling newspapers, and they condemn those who cut down 
trees.  But they do not cheer those who grow the trees in the first place--trees 
deliberately planted and grown to make paper.  This is like praising people for 
"saving" a field of wheat by not eating bread, while ignoring the farmers who grow our 
food.  It acts to suppress the creative impulse.  (There is a further perversity in 
thinking here.  People are focusing only on harvesting and death, not on planting and 
growth.  It is much the same with respect to population growth - wringing of hands 
over someone who may die prematurely or unnecessarily, but no cheering of those who 
create and nurture new life.)
   This is not to say that all recycling is misguided.  Recycling is one thing when it 
is economically worthwhile for the person who is doing the recycling, but another 
thing when it is done purely for symbolic purposes, as now mostly in the United 
States.  Please reflect on the fact that in our kitchens we voluntarily recycle 
ceramic plates but not paper plates.  Would it make sense to require households to 
recycle paper plates and cups by washing and reusing them?  It would make no economic 
sense whatever (and it's doubtful that the paper could survive washing), though for 
some it might make symbolic sense - and those people are entitled, of course, to their 
private rituals.
   The logic is the same with community recycling.  People voluntarily recycle 
valuable resources and throw away less valuable items that take more effort to recycle 
than they are worth.  Coercive recycling is actually more wasteful than throwing 
things away.  It wastes valuable labor and materials that could be put to better use - 
creating new life, new resources, a cleaner environment. 

            WHY DO PEOPLE WORRY SO MUCH ABOUT WASTES?
   Why do so many people worry so greatly about what seems to be such an easy problem 
to handle, given time and resources?  My best guess is simply that the worriers 1) 
lack understanding of how an economic system responds to an increased shortage of some 
resource,  2) lack technical and economic imagination, together, and 3) harbor a moral 
impulse that says recycling is inherently good, and we should be willing to suffer a 
bit for it.  Let's touch briefly on all three. 

Lack of understanding of how a market economy works

   Persons who are not economists - and perhaps especially those persons such as 
biologists who work with entities other than human beings - may underestimate the 
likelihood that people and organizations will make characteristically-human 
adjustments to daily life and society.  Such persons may then have too little faith in 
the adjustment capacities of human beings.  Concepts that are appropriate for non-
human organisms -- niche, carrying capacity, etc. -- are inappropriate for the 
creative aspect of human beings which is the central element in long-run economic 
activity.  The 1960's and 1970's generalization of the work of Calhoun on Norwegian 
rats to policy recommendations for human society (see chapter 24) has been a classic 
example of this muddle. 
   For example, in regard to the possibility of fusion energy, Paul Ehrlich recycled 
his quote about energy in general by saying that cheap, inexhaustible power from 
fusion is "like giving a machine gun to an idiot child."  Presumably the pronouncer of 
such pronouncements arrogates to him/herself greater wisdom than the people being 
pronounced about.  Garrett Hardin says, "People often ask me, well don't you have 
faith in anything?  And I always have the same answer... I have an unshakable [belief] 
in the unreliability of man.  I know that no matter what we do, some damn fool will 
make a mess of it."   This sort of thinking blinds one to the possibility that 
spontaneously-coordinated market responses will deal with the wastes our society 
generates.  

Lack of technical knowledge or imagination

   Many people who do not already know a technical answer to a given problem do not 
try to discover possible solutions, and they do not even imagine that others can dream 
up solutions.  For example, when trains came along, some worried about the problem of 
providing toilets; where would the wastes go?  Then when long-distance buses came 
along, people again worried, because they knew that the ship and train solution - dump 
over the side or from the bottom - was not possible on the roads.  Then some worried 
about the same problem in planes.  Then when the problem was solved for airplanes, the 
problem seemed insuperable in spacecraft.  Yet in all these cases the problem simply 
required some diligent thought and engineering skill.  And so it is with just about 
every other waste-disposal problem. 
   "But you are depending on a technical fix," some say.  Yes, and why not?  A 
"technical fix" is the entire story of civilization.  Yet our solutions are not 
limited to the physical-technical; new economic-political arrangements can solve 
problems.  How can a community reduce the amount of garbage that people put out?  
Charge households and businesses by the pound or the liter of waste collected.  So it 
is for other waste problems, too.  Imagination and economic-organizational skill are 
necessary.  But there is every reason to believe that once we direct those skills to a 
waste problem, solutions will be forthcoming.
   The combination of technical imagination plus a free-enterprise system constitutes 
the crucial mechanism for dealing with waste - turning something of negative value 
into something of positive value.  Slag from steel plants was long thought of as a 
nuisance.  Then there arose entrepreneurs who saw the slag as "man-made igneous rock, 
harvested from blast furnaces," which could be used to provide excellent traction in 
road surfaces such as the Indianapolis 500.   And old railroad ties are not just 
clumsy chunks of wood to be burned, but now decorate retaining walls for lawns.  

The Moral Feeling About Recycling

   In a hearing on taxing disposable diapers, California State Senator Boatright 
pointed to the committee members and said that they "all raised our kids with cloth 
diapers.  And you know, it didn't kill 'em at all...Got your hands a little dirty, 
maybe, but it didn't kill 'em.  It's a hell of a lot more convenient to use disposable 
diapers, but you know what - you save a lot of money when you use cloth diapers."   
Like a fraternity initiation - I suffered, why shouldn't you?  
   When I tell my neighbor that I don't want to wash bottles and cans in order to 
recycle them, he tells me that "it takes practically no time at all".  But when I ask 
him, in light of his assessment, if he would regularly do the job for me, he demurs.

            PROS AND CONS OF WASTE DISPOSAL POLICIES     
   There are three ways society can organize waste disposal:  a) commanding, b) 
guiding by tax and subsidy, and c) leaving it to the individual and the market.  The 
appropriate method depends on the characteristics of the situation, and depends to a 
considerable extent on whether there are difficult "externalities" - effects that go 
beyond the individuals involved and that cannot be "internalized" (a rare situation).
   Almost all solid household waste is a perfect case for untrammeled free enterprise.  
Garbage is one of the easiest of waste disposal problems for society to deal with 
because there are no externalities that are difficult to deal with. 
   In Urbana, Illinois, we had the best and cheapest garbage collection I have ever 
heard of, each homeowner contracting with any one of the private haulers who worked in 
the area.  They gauged their charges according to how much garbage you put out, the 
standard rate being augmented by special charges for special hauling.  If the service 
was sloppy or unpunctual, you changed haulers at the end of the month.  The hauler in 
turn made a deal with a private landfill operator.  The community could be neutral and 
inactive, and there were no significant externalities.  There is no sound reason why 
such a system cannot operate almost anywhere.
   Problems arise when the community gets involved, either through contracting with a 
single hauler, or the municipality paying the hauler, or the municipality providing 
the service directly.  There is then no incentive for homeowners to reduce the amount 
of waste they create, which leads to high waste output.  And the community becomes 
subject to voters who have ideological views about waste and recycling, which distorts 
the best economic choice.  And as a result of individuals' political values, together 
with their ignorance of the facts stated above, communities turn to recycling.          
   There are two drawbacks to recycling.  The first is that it costs the taxpayers 
more money, as noted below.  The second drawback is that it usually injects an element 
of coercion which is antagonistic both to basic American values as well as to the 
efficient working of a free-market system.  Both will now be discussed.

The Resource Costs of Recycling

   Unnecessary recycling and conservation cannot simply be dismissed as a harmless 
symbolic amusement.  There is a major cost in other activities that are foregone.  
People could be building instead of recycling -- building roads, public buildings, 
parks, even improving their own private shelters and spaces.
   People's value for building may have been affected by the role of government.  In 
the eight years that I have lived in a suburb of Washington, D.C., we have had scores 
of people come to the door soliciting funds.  Never once has anyone solicited funds 
for a building project -- never for trees to be planted, a cathedral to be built, or a 
concert to be given.  Almost every solicitation has been for funds to lobby government 
to do something.  And in most cases a large proportion of the funds collected goes 
toward soliciting more funds to do the same thing.  In decades past it was not so.  
People solicited funds to build private hospitals, and religious and cultural 
institutions, and other great works for the benefit of the public.  But now people 
expect the government to perform those activities.  Hence, funds are solicited mainly 
to bend the government's will to support people's private interests.
   If government did a better job in building and administering, perhaps there would 
be no grounds for complaint.  But we know from much solid evidence that government 
performs these activities very poorly -- at high cost, and with poor service.  These 
are part of the costs of a conservation mentality -- of saving whales and Chesapeake 
Bay.     
   Another unreckoned cost is the coerced time of private persons.  When a town 
calculates the cost of a recycling program, it ignores the minutes spent by 
householders in separating types of trash, putting them in separate places, and 
stocking separate containers, and learning where and when the various kinds of trash 
must be placed for pick-up.  These are non-trivial costs. 
The Cost in Coercion

   As of 1988, six states had mandated household separation of types of waste, and as 
of 1991, 28 states have recycling or waste reduction "quotas."  As of 1990, the 
District of Columbia - like a large proportion of the 2700 communities that have 
recycling programs  - requires recycling of newspapers, glass, and metals in all 
apartment buildings.  Not only does this law require individuals and firms to do what 
they would not do voluntarily, with fines for offenders, but it invites some of the 
practices of a totalitarian society wherein people are invited to meddle in their 
neighbors' lives.  The Washington Post, one of the three national and international 
newspapers of the U. S., recommends that apartment dwellers first "Try peer pressure" 
and then "Complain to authorities" if the landlord does not recycle according to law.  
And there is provision "to report scofflaws to the city's `trash police', a team of 10 
inspectors hired to search through trash and identify culprits".   Not only are such 
practices odious (at least to me), but police expenditures are a high cost that surely 
are not included when an account is made of the total burden of recycling.
   Zurich, Switzerland has such a system in place.  
"Inspectors will track down people who don't use the 
spiffy new sacks and hit them with fines."
Collectors have instructions to search through any old 
bags left in the street for evidence that will identify 
offenders. "An envelope with an address, for example", 
says Rudolph Walder, the city's garbage-disposal czar.  
"Then we will hit them with a 100-franc ($67) fine.  
And if they keep on doing it, we'll inform the police."

   Involvement of the government also opens the door to bureaucrats working to protect 
their own interests against those of the public.  For example, "In Loudoun County, 
Virginia...local officials have gone to great lengths to stop one businessman from 
composting some of the community's yard wastes (decaying them into a rich soil for 
forming).  Public officials have opposed the operation - with regulations, and even by 
'sending local government landfill representatives to block the entrance' to the site 
- on the grounds that it threatened the local government's landfill revenues."   One 
of the sins committed by this operation is that it charges only $10 a ton to take in 
garbage, whereas landfilling costs $50 a ton. 
   On a larger scale, the state of Rhode Island prevented a hauler from taking waste 
out of the state to dumps in Maine and Massachusetts.   The state-owned Central 
Landfill is now the only licensed facility in the state, and its monopoly prices are 
higher than elsewhere.  The state prevented the hauler from going elsewhere so that it 
would not lose the revenue. If a private firm were to somehow maneuver itself into a 
similar monopoly position, it could not use the law to keep customers from going 
elsewhere.  Furthermore, the Federal Trade Commission would break up its monopoly.  
But government can get away with abuses that private enterprises cannot.  
   The problem of junked abandoned cars is not well handled by the market, however. 
One knows in principle what should be done:  Create proper rules that will compel 
producers of the waste to pay appropriate compensation to those who suffer from the 
pollution, either as individuals or as groups, so as to "internalize the negative 
externalities", as we say in economistese.  But crafting and legislating such rules is 
not easy; Friedrich Hayek asserts that this is the most difficult of intellectual 
tasks, and the most important.  And there often are strong private interests that 
militate against remedial actions. The outcome of this sort of pollution, then, 
depends largely on the social will and on political power, as well as upon our wisdom. 

                         PRICE AND VALUE

   The most complex and confusing conservation issues are those that are dollars-and-
cents questions to some people, but to other people are matters of aesthetics and 
basic values. Consider saving old newspapers in this connection. (The waste-disposal 
aspect of newspapers is discussed in Chapter 19.)  In some cases it makes sense to 
save and recycle paper because the sales revenue makes the effort profitable. In World 
War II the price of waste paper rose high enough to make the effort worthwhile for 
many householders. And where shredded newspapers are used as insulation after 
treatment with fire-retardant chemicals, paper collection can be a fund-raising device 
for community groups such as Boy Scout troops. But nowadays, in most communities the 
cost of recycling less the sales price of paper seems greater than the cost of 
landfill disposal or incineration.  (Indeed, the price is now negative; by 1989 the 
amount of recycled paper had grown so large that communities had to pay $5-25 per ton 
to have paper brokers take the stuff.
   Here we must consider, What is the economic meaning of the market price of waste 
paper? That price will roughly equal the price of new paper less the recycling cost of 
making the old paper like new.  In turn, the price of new paper is the sum of what it 
costs to grow a tree, cut the tree, and then transport and convert the wood to paper. 
If the cost of growing new trees rises, so will the prices of new and used paper. But 
if the cost of growing trees goes down, or if good substitutes for trees are 
developed, the price of used and of new paper, and of wood, will fall. (An increase in 
recycling also drives the price down.) And that is what has been happening. The total 
quantity of growing trees has been increasing and their price falling,  and the 
newspapers report the successful development of kenaf as a substitute for paper. So 
why bother to recycle newspapers?
   Conservationists, however, feel that there is more to be said on this matter. They 
feel that trees should be saved for reasons other than the dollars-and-cents value of 
pulp or lumber. They argue that it is inherently right to try to avoid cutting down a 
tree "unnecessarily."  This argument is based on aesthetic or even religious values. 
The conservationists believe that stands of trees are unique national or international 
treasures just as Westminster Abbey is for Englishmen and as the Mosque of the Golden 
Dome is for Muslims. Perhaps we can express this by saying that in these cases even 
the believer who does not directly use the treasure is willing to pay, in money or in 
effort, so that other people - now and in the future - can enjoy the good without 
paying the full price of creating it. (Additionally, there is the argument that, even 
if future generations will be willing to pay the price, they will be unable to do so 
if we don't preserve it for them.) Some people even impute feelings to nature, to 
trees or to animals, and they aim to prevent pain to those feelings.
   There is no economic argument against a person holding these points of view.  But 
neither is one person's aesthetic taste or religious belief an economic warrant for 
levying taxes on other people to pay for those preferences.  
   If one is willing to urge that the community pay in order to recycle, it is useful 
to know the price that has to be paid. The state of Florida has promised to subsidize 
firms to produce products out of recycled material and then sell them to the state, 
which will guarantee to buy the goods.  Florida is just one among thirty states that 
are willing to buy recycled products (mainly paper) that cost 5 percent to 10 percent 
more than comparable non-recycled products.   For perspective, perhaps 3 to 5 years of 
economic growth are necessary to make up that much of a reversal in progress by way of 
cost increase and productivity reduction.  The governor of Florida calls this a "no-
brainer for companies" because it is so easy for them to decide that a guaranteed 
market makes sense.  Sometimes an argument is made for conservation on the grounds of 
national security and international bargaining. It may well make sense for a country 
to stockpile enough oil and other strategically sensitive resources for months or even 
years of consumption. But these political matters are beyond the scope of this chapter 
and of the usual discussions of conservation.

CONSERVATION AND THE GOVERNMENT SYSTEM
   Do our treasured resources fare better in a private-enterprise system or a 
socialist centrally-planned system?

   There is no evidence that public officials are better stewards of any class of 
property - including wilderness and parks - than are private owners. (Witness the 
state of upkeep of public and private housing.)  Consider the private (not-for-profit) 
case of Ravenna Park in Seattle, Washington, which was a public treasure from 1887 to 
1925, selling admission to see the giant Douglas firs at very modest prices. Then the 
city took it over by legal action.  The park fell victim to corrupt tree-cutting for 
the sale of firewood. 
   Government ownership permits over-use of resources not onlybecause of common 
ownership but also because of incompetent management.  For example, government often 
sets the prices too low for such resources as boating use fees, and timber and grazing 
rights. And as I am writing this I read in the Washington Post that "Concessionaires 
at national parks gross millions of dollars using government-owned buildings, from 
hotels to boat houses.  But the U.S. Treasury earns hardly a penny because it charges 
little or no rent."  Low prices encourage heavy use of a government-controlled 
resource.  The private market would not "fail" to charge and collect appropriately-
high prices for access to grazing lands, timber, and so on. 
   I cannot prove that a combination of academics and politicians will never design a 
social-political economic system that will better conserve nature and produce an 
esthetic environment than will an undesigned system that relies upon people's 
spontaneous impulses and a market system governed only by very general rules.  (If any 
sentence in this book will be widely quoted, it probably will be that one - ungainly 
and dull as it is.)  I cannot even assert that each and every ecological feature would 
be better served in an undesigned system.  It may be that if governments were not to 
preserve the giant pandas in zoos, the animals would die out.  Indeed, no private firm 
now exhibits pandas for profit (though P. T. Barnum's great museum did this sort of 
thing).   It might well be, however, that if government were not to do so, interested 
individuals might take steps to preserve the pandas through voluntary organizations.  
   In the 19th century, when hawks were being shot as predators and were in danger of 
extinction, private individuals created a preserve that is now Hawk Mountain Sanctuary 
in Pennsylvania, which eventually became not only a preserve but also a center for 
research on raptors.   Nature lovers should not underestimate the likelihood that, in 
the absence of government action, others like them will act spontaneously to protect 
the values they hold dear.  (Indeed, that was the original nature of such 
organizations as the Audubon Society before they turned much of their effort to 
attempting to increase government intervention.)  But government activity often drives 
out private activity, as government intervention in the provision of hospital services 
has reduced the role of religious organizations that built and maintained hospitals in 
earlier years in the U.S. 
   The best evidence I can find is the data mentioned in chapter 17, which shows that 
when the government completely controls (by ownership) the emission of pollution, the 
pollution is much greater than when the ownership is private, albeit with greater or 
lesser regulation.  
   Now follows the general vision which does not promise that every particular aspect 
of ecology will fare better than a planned system, but which does promise that - 
taking everything together - humans will prefer the overall outcome to the overall 
outcome of a system where officials plan and dictate how resources will be treated.

   Those who seek to plan our ecology argue that while markets may successfully bring 
us autos and tennis matches, markets "fail" with respect to wilderness, plant and 
animal species, and esthetics of the landscape.   In support of their vision of a 
designed system they point to the slaughter of the buffalo and the passenger pigeon, 
the befouling of our rivers and lakes for many decades, and ugliness of some 
inexpensive housing developments.  And they argue than humanity changes the planet 
further and further away from the pure pristine world that they imagine existed before 
humans became many.

   In rebuttal, the free-market environmentalists analyze such regrettable events and 
argue that the source of the destruction usually is a system lacking property rights 
that would prevent such events.  And they point to countervailing examples - beef 
cattle preserved by individual ownership, facilitated by the branding system and the 
barbed wire invented to resolve the problem of common grazing;  the growth of elephant 
herds in Zimbabwe (see chapter 20); the improvement over time in housing quality in 
most neighborhoods, even those like Levittown that were originally thought "tacky"; 
the habitat preservation on farms where owners sell the rights to hunt;  the beauty of 
fishing streams in Great Britain which are privately owned or which clubs own fishing 
rights to;  and the well-stocked fish ponds that sell fishing rights in old "borrow 
pits" by the sides of highways in Illinois, dug by the highway builders to get 
building materials.  
   Free-market environmentalists also cite the insults to human dignity and 
constraints upon individual freedom that planned conservation brings about - "trash 
police," "water cops," farmers being fined and going to jail for making their farms 
more productive at the expense of migratory ducks; neighbors and people's own children 
bringing pressure on homeowners to separate types of trash.  
   These examples (and the theory behind them, to be discussed below) are compelling, 
in my view.  But as the designed-system advocates offer counter-examples, the issue 
must also be discussed at the level of the overall vision, and the test is the 
analogous comparative experience of planned versus free-enterprise economies.
   "Common sense" argues that specific planning for particular kinds of outcomes 
results in a better general outcome than an undesigned system.  Yet the evidence is 
incontrovertible that with respect to ordinary economic matters, an undesigned free-
enterprise system does much better than does a planned socialist system.  
Investigations of the performance of socialist economies, and the breakup of communism 
in the 1980s and 1990s entirely vindicate the theoretical visions of David Hume, Adam 
Smith, Karl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich Hayek.  And even worse than the 
economic effects of a planned system are the effects upon human welfare in non-
economic aspects - liberty and health, for example. (See chapters 17 and 22.)
   Telling evidence is found in the economic comparison of North and South Korea, and 
of East and West Germany, and also of Taiwan and China, discussed in more detail in 
chapter 00.  The communist countries use(d) much more energy and produce(d) much 
greater amounts of pollution both per person and per dollar of GNP.  One might say 
that this is because the communist countries are poorer.  But this relative poverty is 
itself part of the story:  centrally controlled economies do less well economically, 
which is part of the reason they pollute more per unit of GNP, and even per capita.  
The same sort of result would undoubtedly hold if the investigation were widened to 
include all countries, as Scully (1988) has done for the effect of state system on per 
person income. 
   Before the 1980s there was only anecdotal evidence for the comparative success of 
market-based decentralized systems versus centrally-planned systems, just as there is 
today with respect to conservation and pollution of the environment. And the same 
kinds of common-sensical arguments for the advantage of a "rationally" planned system 
were given in favor of communism - economies of scale, avoidance of duplication, 
control by the cleverest intellectuals instead of less-educated "ordinary" persons, 
and so on.  But the transformation of countries to a planned command-and-control 
system based upon this theorizing was demonstrably the greatest human blunder of all 
time.  This is the same vision that leads to such an "activist" command-and-control 
approach as this suggestion for the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge: "You drive a stake in the 
ground and say, `You don't cross the Canning River.'" 
   It must be said, however, that if one wants a planet the way it was 20,000 years 
ago - not just "stop the world I want to get off," but "reverse the world to the way 
it used to be" - a free society will not move in that direction.  The only way to 
obtain that result is to kill off almost all of humanity, and destroy all libraries so 
that the few remaining humans cannot quickly learn how to rebuild what we now have.  
If someone wishes this sort of "conservation", no arguments are relevant.
   Some ecologists urge on us a "mixed" system where government only does what is 
"necessary".  It is impossible to disagree with this in principle - the panda being a 
case in point.  But those persons should be aware that in the analogous situation of 
the "mixed" economy, almost all the activities that were regarded as "necessary"  - 
government-owned steel mills and mines and telephone systems, for example - turned out 
not to have the desirable properties that in advance they were touted to have. The 
"mixed system" is mainly a mirage and an intellectual illusion, and sometimes a Trojan 
horse for wider planning.  And the idea that government can manipulate prices to 
simulate a well-working market has in Eastern Europe been shown conclusively to be a 
figment of unsound theorizing.
   When the first edition was written in the late 1970s, the theoretical ideas 
discussed in chapter 15 and above, in this chapter, had not yet been adopted by the 
federal government, and indeed, were anathema to environmental activists. (See the 
afternote to chapter 15 on ecologists' criticisms of standard economics.)  And the 
first recourse of policymakers is still to command-and-control systems. For example, 
the state of Maryland plans to reduce air pollution by coercing people to drive less. 
The mechanism is to require all employers of more than 100 persons to provide "free 
farecards, grants to buy bicycles, subsidized car pools, flexible work hours or 
greater opportunities to work at home", along the lines of the 1990 Clean Air Act, and 
of programs in Southern California, Seattle, Phoenix, and other cities.   
   Since the 1980s, however, there has been growing recognition, even among non-
economists, that direct controls are usually inferior to market-based economic 
incentives as ways to manage pollution.  For example, the law now makes provision for 
firms such as electrical utilities to buy and sell rights to emit quantities of 
pollutants.  The Chicago Board of Trade even has laid the groundwork for a public 
market in "smog futures" along the lines of commodity and securities markets, and 
environmental organizations have approved. 
   In the 1980s, these economic ideas were refined into a body of applied work.  The 
free market environmentalist writers  emphasize the concepts of property rights, and 
of allowing price rather than command-and-control devices to allocate goods. They 
discuss "non-market government failures" as a counterpart to the "market failures"  
that many see at the root of pollution problems.
   The free-market environmentalists point to the successes of market systems in the 
cases of conservation mentioned earlier in the chapter.  Proven successes with market 
systems for controlling pollution are less conspicuous.  But such conservation cases 
as private fishing streams may be seen as the opposite side of the coin from the issue 
of pollution in streams and rivers, where privatization of rights has been shown to be 
effective.

CONCLUSION

   If you want society to force you to waste effort and money because sacrifice is 
good for you, mandatory recycling fills the bill.  But if you want people to have the 
best chance to live their lives in the ways that they wish, without imposing waste 
costs on others, then allowing private persons to deal with their private problems 
privately should be your choice.
   The key question for social decisions is how to get the optimal level of recycling 
and waste disposal, pollution, and environmental preservation with a minimum of 
constraint upon individuals and economic activity.  Economic incentives working in 
free markets often are a better system than command-and-control.  Aside from the 
economic costs of inefficient controls, there is usually excessive, overzealous 
coercion - as in the regulations that eventuated in King Edward executing the man who 
polluted the air with sea coal mentioned in chapter 17, or the milder coercion of 
recycling zealots today.
   (Additional discussion of this topic may be found in chapter 30 - "Are People an 
Environmental Pollution?") 

page #  \ultres\ tchar21 October 3, 1995