Cafe Hayek praises capitalism as the “anti-pollutant”:

A principal cause of our good fortune is the fact that capitalism makes our daily lives so clean, sanitary, and healthy — and, generally, wealthy — that we can afford to stew in concern about environmental problems that are more speculative and far more distant than were the environmental problems that plagued our ancestors — problems such as houses with thatched, bug-infested roofs and no indoor plumbing or hard flooring.

I call capitalism the great anti-pollutant. Our lives truly and thoroughly are cleaned by capitalism. This realization first hit me several years ago as I stood at an automatic-flush urinal in LaGuardia airport. “I don’t have to touch this thing to flush it; how wonderfully sanitary!” I marveled.

Aside from auto-flush toilets, capitalism has produced much in this world. But let’s not go so far as to say that we capitalists are the first to enjoy the “luxury” of worrying about our environments. Our ancestors, starting with hunters and gatherers understood that their livelihood depended upon not having too great an impact over their environment. Ancient horticulturalists rotated productive plots for this reason, and hunting bands understood that they needed to allow game in a given area to replenish.

Humans have always had to consider their effects on their environments as part of their survival strategy - those who didn’t perished(just ask the Maya).

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 15th, 2007 at 1:04 pm and is filed under Environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.