“Some people falsely believe that advocates of the free market..."

“Some people falsely believe that advocates of the free market must be opponents of the environment.  We care only about economic efficiency, the argument goes, and have no regard for the consequences of pollution and other examples of environmental degradation.  But a true supporter of private property and personal responsibility cannot be indifferent to environmental damage, and should view it as a form of unjustified aggression that must be punished or enjoined, or dealt with in some other way that is mutually satisfactory to all parties.  Private business should not have the right to socialize its costs by burdening other people with the by-products of its operations.

Economist Martin Anderson puts it this way.  Dumping garbage on your neighbor’s lawn is wrong.  But pollution is really just another form of garbage.  For that reason, proposals to charge pollution fees, which get higher the greater the pollution, neglect demand for justice.  Anderson compares it to taxing thieves as a way of giving them an economic incentive not to burglarize your home.  If the practice is wrong, the law should treat it as such.  “If a firm creates pollution without first entering into an agreement, or if the parties cannot come to an agreement fixing the cost and degree of pollution, then the court system could be used to assess damages, “say economist Walter Block and Robert W. McGee. 

In fact, that’s how American law used to treat pollution. But a series of nineteenth-century nuisance cases changed that: the courts suddenly decided that a certain level of pollution could be allowed for the sake of the greater good.  The implication was that if, for example, a few farmers had their property destroyed by passing trains, that was just the price of progress.  (Easy for them to say!) These cases allowed private industry to invade the property rights of others and deprived those others of legal recourse.  I do not see this as a free-market outcome.* [*I do not claim that pollution consisting of a few undetectable particles must be prohibited, or that no airplanes would have the right to travel high above people’s homes.  These are legitimate matters for the courts, where such matters have been properly decided in the past.] “ -Pages 105 & 106 of The Revolution, A Manifesto