People call pollution an externality—that is, a cost imposed on someone who wasn’t part of the choice.
It may be an externality, but that identification misses a bigger point. It also violates the consent of the governed, deprives people of life, liberty, and property, and violates the Declaration and Constitution in other ways.
Pollution is not just an economic issue. It’s also political and the political ramifications are much greater. Violating the Constitution is important, especially when everyone in the nation does it, the government profits from it, politicians become corrupted by it, and more.
If you don’t fix the economic problem, money gets distributed not to those who solve problems best but to those who coerce the most. You distort the economy and inhibit innovation.
Those economic effects are problems, but tiny compared to what happens if you don’t fix the political problem. Don’t enforce the Constitution and you don’t just lose economic incentives, you lose what the Constitution protects: liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security. Instead you get civil war, invasion, and tyranny, preceded by polarization, isolation, and other forms of civic breakdown familiar to anyone who reads the news.
Slaves’ unpaid labor was an externality too, but hardly the main issue. If they had been paid, it wouldn’t have solved the bigger issue: their Constitutional protections were violated without their consent. You can violate people’s Constitutional protections or you can have liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security but you can’t have both.
This point applies beyond pollution and slavery to depletion without freedom and misappropriation from nature. We’re violating the Constitution all over the place by polluting, depleting without freedom, and misappropriation from nature. What else should we expect from violating the Constitution but the loss of liberty, freedom, equality, democracy, and national security?
Should we be surprised by the onset of civil war, invasion, and tyranny, preceded by polarization, isolation, and other forms of civic breakdown familiar to anyone who reads the news?
I’m not surprised by such results, which is why I do what I do.