Unexpected quotes in my book, plus a few I missed
The following quotes are all relevant to sustainability. I used them all in my book, except the Adam Smith quotes, which came from a recent post.
Milton Friedman
“I’m not in favor of no government. You do need a government . . . There’s no other institution in my opinion that can provide us with protection of our life and liberty.” He knew that “the key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight.”
“Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can’t really afford to eliminate it—not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend.”
“The greatest source of inequality has been special privileges granted by government,”
“There is a real function for government in respect to pollution: to set conditions and, in particular, define property rights to make sure that the costs are borne by the parties responsible.”
“The role of government just considered is to do something that the market cannot do for itself, namely, to determine, arbitrate, and enforce the rules of the game.”
Milton Friedman called slavery, “A disgrace to this country.”
“We have no desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow, and those are quite different. I believe that the level of growth in this country ought to be whatever people want it to be. If the people at large—if each and every person separately was satisfied with where he is and didn’t want to grow, fine. I have no objection. I don’t want to impose growth on anyone. I want people to be free to pursue their own objective.” While he implied some benefits to growth, he also noted, “The bigger they are the harder they fall,” then listed corporations larger than many nations that went bankrupt.
Friedrich Hayek
“The harmful effects of deforestation or of the smoke of factories cannot be confined to the owner of the property in question . . . these tasks provide a wide and unquestioned field for state activity.” He continued, “We shall never prevent the abuse of power if we are not prepared to limit power in a way which occasionally may prevent its use for desirable purposes.”
“Once wide coercive powers are given to governmental agencies for particular purposes, such powers cannot be effectively controlled by democratic assemblies.” We enjoy the benefits that polluting and depleting allow, but he continued, “If we wish to preserve a free society, it is essential that we recognize that the desirability of a particular object is not sufficient justification for the use of coercion.”
Edmund Burke
“One of the first and most leading principles” for laws is to avoid that people “unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of “what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of a habitation.”
Russell Kirk
If men are discharged of reverence for ancient usage, they will treat this world, almost certainly, as if it were their private property, to be consumed for their sensual gratification; and thus they will destroy in their lust for enjoyment the property of future generations, of their own contemporaries, and indeed their very own capital . . . The modern spectacle of vanished forests and eroded lands, wasted petroleum and ruthless mining, national debts, recklessly increased until they are repudiated, and continual revision of positive law, is evidence of what an age without veneration does to itself and its successors.
Frederic Bastiat
If “the law takes from some persons that which belongs to them, to give to others what does not belong to them . . . [if ] the law performs, for the profit of one citizen, and, to the injury of others, an act that this citizen cannot perform without committing a crime . . . it is not merely an iniquity—it is a fertile source of iniquities, for it invites reprisals; and if you do not take care, the exceptional case will extend, multiply, and become systematic.”
He lamented that all “the consequences of such a perversion . . . would require volumes to describe,” but one of the main ones is those benefiting feeling entitled: No doubt the party benefited will exclaim loudly; he will assert his acquired rights. He will say that the State is bound to protect and encourage his industry; he will plead that it is a good thing for the State to be enriched, that it may spend the more, and thus shower down salaries upon the poor workmen.”
Is plunder too strong a term? Bastiat “regretted that there is something offensive in the word. I have sought in vain for another,” but concluded it was the best and only appropriate word.
Though Bastiat wrote of the United States, “There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain—which is, to secure to everyone his liberty and his property,” he despised slavery as “a violation, sanctioned by law, of the rights of the person.”
Ronald Reagan
“I’m proud of having been one of the first to recognize that states and the federal government have a duty to protect our natural resources from the damaging effects of pollution.”
Barry Goldwater
“I am a great believer in the free, competitive enterprise system and all that it entails, I am an even stronger believer in the right of our people to live in a clean and pollution-free environment.” He continued, “When pollution is found, it should be halted at the source, even if this requires stringent government action against important segments of our national economy.”
“Our job,” he said, “is to prevent that lush orb known as earth . . . from turning into a bleak and barren, dirty brown planet.”
“The administration is absolutely correct in cracking down on companies and corporations and municipalities that continue to pollute the nation’s air and water.”
“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”
William F. Buckley
On government regulating pollution: “Here is a legitimate concern of government—a classic example of the kind of thing that government should do, according to Lincoln’s test, because the people cannot do it as well or better themselves.”
Adam Smith
First, his Theory of Moral Sentiments describes how society depends on justice. The next quotes will clarify what he means by justice. This quote says that being beneficent and virtuous is nice, but if society is a building, the whole structure rests on justice. Without justice, everything falls apart.
“Tho’ nature, therefore, exhorts mankind to acts of beneficence, by the pleasing consciousness of deserved reward, she has not thought it necessary to guard and enforce the practice of it by the terrors of merited punishment in case it should be neglected. It is the ornament which embellishes, not the foundation which supports the building, and which it was, therefore, sufficient to recommend, but by no means necessary to impose. Justice, on the contrary, is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society, that fabric which to raise and to support seems in this world, if I may say so, to have been the peculiar and darling care of nature, must in a moment crumble into atoms. To enforce the observation of justice, therefore, nature has implanted in the human breast that consciousness of ill-desert, those terrors of merited punishment which attend upon its violation, as the great safe-guards of the association of mankind, to protect the weak, to curb the violent, and to chastize the guilty.”
In The Wealth of Nations he expands that even without promoting beneficence or anything else, a government maintaining justice (plus peace and easy taxes) is enough for a state to realize its greatest opulence. Moreover, trying to do more results in oppression and tyranny.
“Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things. All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and to support themselves are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.”
What is justice for Adam Smith? If a government needs only implement justice (plus peace and easy taxes) to reach its greatest potential, what does Smith mean by justice? He clarifies it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The violation of justice is injury. I understand him to mean that justice means preventing injury, which seems to me effectively: to protect life, liberty, and property.
“There is, however, another virtue, of which the observance is not left to the freedom of our own wills, which may be extorted by force, and of which the violation exposes to resentment, and consequently to punishment. This virtue is justice: the violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons, from motives which are naturally disapproved of. It is, therefore, the proper object of resentment, and of punishment, which is the natural consequence of resentment.”
My Conclusion
I understand Adam Smith to say, prior to everything about what a free market can achieve, that free market can only exist if government protects life, liberty, and property. Without it doing so, everything later is a building with no foundation.
How tall do you want to let a building grow without a foundation? How big a crash are you willing to see happen?
“All systems, either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which, no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the society.
According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings:
Thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works, and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual, or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.
First, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies;
Secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, Thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works, and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual, or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society.”
Julian Simon
“Adding more people causes problems. But people are also the means to solve these problems. The main fuel to speed the world’s progress is our stock of knowledge; the brakes are our lack of imagination and unsound social regulations of these activities. The ultimate resource is people—especially skilled, spirited, and hopeful young people endowed with liberty—who will exert their wills and imaginations for their own benefits, and so inevitably they will benefit the rest of us as well.”
Steven Pinker
Pinker described those crying “Code Red” as seeing using energy “as a heinous crime against nature, which will exact dreadful justice in the form of resource wars, poisoned air and water, and civilization-ending climate change. Our only salvation is to repent, repudiate technology and economic growth, and to revert to a simpler and more natural way of life.” They are a “quasi-religious ideology . . . laced with misanthropy, including an indifference to starvation, an indulgence in ghoulish fantasies of a depopulated planet, and Nazi-like comparisons of human beings to vermin, pathogens, and cancer.”
Alex Epstein
“One crucial truth is that climate is naturally volatile and dangerous. Absent a modern, developed
civilization, any climate will frequently overwhelm human beings with climate-related risks—extreme heat, extreme cold, storms, floods—or underwhelm human beings with climate-related benefits (insufficient rainfall, insufficient warmth). Primitive peoples prayed so fervently to climate gods because they were almost totally at the mercy of the naturally volatile, dangerous climate system.”
“Cheap, plentiful, reliable energy we get from fossil fuels and other forms of cheap, plentiful, reliable energy, combined with human ingenuity, gives us the ability to transform the world around us into a place that is far safer from any health hazards (man-made or natural), far safer from any climate change (man-made or natural), and far richer in resources.” If any problems arise, “we can use fossil fuels to help solve fossil fuel problems—to transform waste from a more dangerous form to a less dangerous form, or even to a benefit, by using energy and ingenuity.”
Rob Harper
“This book is a masterpiece. Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum—from bluer than Bernie to a proud Trump supporter like me—I’m sure you are concerned about the world we live in. Josh doesn’t claim to be on either side of the political spectrum. He’s living by his values. Sustainability Simplified shows how to improve the environment without having to protest or shout down others.”
Andrew Hoffman
University of Michigan professor Andrew Hoffman, writing on pollution and slavery: “The first
time these two concepts were linked for me was seven years ago, when a senior oil industry executive in London asked me a rhetorical question: ‘If it wasn’t for oil, where would we get our energy?’”
His answer, to my astonishment, was ‘slavery.’”
Robert Miller (historian)
“Indian nations and peoples impacted the formation of the current US government, the Constitution that created it, and several specific provisions in that document . . . The hundreds of years of interactions between native nations and English and American colonies, states, leaders, and the United States founding fathers shaped the political thinking of both sides and even influenced the development, drafting, and ratification of the US Constitution.”
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