Why do socialists states pollute so much more than capitalist ones? Sent from my SM-G935V using Grasscity Forum mobile app
Winner winner chicken dinner. Wow a better answer could not be formulated by Thomas DiLorenzo lol. Sent from my SM-G935V using Grasscity Forum mobile app
"Corporations are often accused of despoiling the environment in their quest for profit. Free enterprise is supposedly incompatible with environmental preservation, so that government regulation is required. Such thinking is the basis for current proposals to expand environmental regulation greatly. So many new controls have been proposed and enacted that the late economic journalist Warren Brookes once forecast that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could well become "the most powerful government agency on earth, involved in massive levels of economic, social, scientific, and political spending and interference. But if the profit motive is the primary cause of pollution, one would not expect to find so much pollution in socialist countries, such as the former Soviet Union, China, and in the former Communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe. That is, in theory. In reality exactly the opposite is true: The socialist world suffers from the worst pollution on earth. Could it be that free enterprise is not so incompatible with environmental protection after all? I. Socialist Pollution The Soviet Union In the Soviet Union there was a vast body of environmental law and regulation that purportedly protected the public interest, but these constraints have had no perceivable benefit. The Soviet Union, like all socialist countries, suffered from a massive "tragedy of the commons," to borrow the term used by biologist Garrett Hardin in his classic 1968 article. Where property is communally or governmentally owned and treated as a free resource, resources will inevitably be overused with little regard for future consequences. The Soviet government’s imperatives for economic growth, combined with communal ownership of virtually all property and resources, caused tremendous environmental damage. According to economist Marshall Goldman, who studied and traveled extensively in the Soviet Union, "The attitude that nature is there to be exploited by man is the very essence of the Soviet production ethic." A typical example of the environmental damage caused by the Soviet economic system is the exploitation of the Black Sea. To comply with five-year plans for housing and building construction, gravel, sand, and trees around the beaches were used for decades as construction materials. Because there is no private property, "no value is attached to the gravel along the seashore. Since, in effect, it is free, the contractors haul it away. This practice caused massive beach erosion which reduced the Black Sea coast by 50 percent between 1920 and 1960. Eventually, hotels, hospitals, and of all things, a military sanitarium collapsed into the sea as the shoreline gave way. Frequent landslides–as many as 300 per year–have been reported. II. United States: Public Sector Pollution The last refuge of those who advocate socialistic solutions to environmental pollution is the claim that it is the lack of democratic processes that prevents the Communist nations from truly serving the public interest. If this theory is correct, then the public sector of an established democracy such as the United States should be one of the best examples of environmental responsibility. But U.S. government agencies are among the most cavalier when it comes to environmental stewardship. There is much evidence to dispute the theory that only private businesses pollute. In the United States, we need look no further than our own government agencies. These public sector institutions, such as the Department of Defense (DOD), are among the worst offenders. DOD now generates more than 400,000 tons of hazardous waste a year — more than is produced by the five largest chemical companies combined. To make matters worse, the Environmental Protection Agency lacks the enforcement power over the public sector that it possesses over the private sector. The lax situation uncovered by the General Accounting Office (GAO) at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma is typical of the way in which many Federal agencies respond to the EPA’s directives. "Although DOD policy calls for the military services to … implement EPA’s hazardous waste management regulations, we found that Tinker has been selling…waste oil, fuels, and solvents rather than recycling," reported the GAO. One of the world’s most poisonous spots lies about 10 miles northeast of Denver in the Army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal. Nerve gas, mustard shells, the anti-crop spray TX, and incendiary devices have been dumped into pits there over the past 40 years. Dealing with only one "basin" of this dump cost $40 million. Six hundred thousand cubic yards of contaminated soil and sludge had to be scraped and entombed in a 16-acre, double-lined waste pile. There are plenty of other examples of Defense Department facilities that need major cleanup. In fact, total costs of along-term Pentagon cleanup are hard to get a handle on. Some officials have conceded that the price tag could eventually exceed $20 billion. Government-owned power plants are another example of public-sector pollution. These plants are a large source of sulfur dioxide emissions. The federal government’s Tennessee Valley Authority operates 59 coal-fired power plants in the Southeast, where it has had major legal confrontations with state governments who want the Federal agency to comply with state governments who want the Federal agency to comply with state environmental regulations. The TVA has fought the state governments for years over compliance with their clean air standards. It won a major Supreme Court victory when the Court ruled that, as a federal government enterprise, it could be exempt from environmental regulations with which private sector and local government power plants must comply. Federal agricultural policy also has been a large source of pollution, in the past encouraging over utilization of land subject to erosion. Powerful farm lobbies have protected "non-point" sources of pollution from the heavy hand of regulation places on other private industries. III. Policy Implications These examples of environmental degradation throughout the world suggest some valuable lessons. First, it is not free enterprise per se that causes environmental harm; if so, the socialist world would be environmentally pristine. The heart of the problem lies with the failure of our legal institutions, not the free enterprise system. Specifically, American laws were weakened more than a century ago by Progressive Era courts that believed economic progress was in the public interest and should therefore supersede individual rights. The English common law tradition of the protection of private property rights — including the right to be free from pollution — was slowly overturned. In other words, many environmental problems are not caused by "market failure" but by government’s failure to enforce property rights. It is a travesty of justice when downstream residents, for example, cannot hold an upstream polluter responsible for damaging their properties. The common law tradition must be revived if we are to enjoy a healthy market economy and a cleaner environment. Potential polluters must know in advance that they will be held responsible for their actions. The second lesson is that the plundering of the environment in the socialist world is a grand example of the tragedy of the commons. Under communal property ownership, where no one owns or is responsible for a natural resource, the inclination is for each individual to abuse or deplete the resource before someone else does. Common examples of this "tragedy" are how people litter public streets and parks much more than their own yards; private housing is much better maintained than public lands but maintain lush pastures on their own property; the national forests are carelessly over-logged, but private forests are carefully managed and reforested by lumber companies with "super trees"; and game fish are habitually overfished in public waterways but thrive in private lakes and streams. The tragedy of the commons is a lesson for those who believe that further nationalization and governmental control of natural resources is a solution to our environmental problems. These two pillars of free enterprise — sound liability laws that hold people responsible for actions and the enforcement of private property rights — are important stepping stones to environmental protection. Why Socialism Causes Pollution Sent from my SM-G935V using Grasscity Forum mobile app
Even if humans are speeding up climate change, great. I won't miss winter one bit and the polar I've melt, if we're, lucky will drown California. Sent from my Moto E (4) using Grasscity Forum mobile app
Hey did anyone see on CNN, NBC, ABC and CBS the story this week where another lying cunt admitted she made up the sex story about Kavenau ??? Me neither. Now when a woman really gets sexually assaulted people will dismiss it. THATS the part that feminist leaders should be screaming about. But it’s not part of their playbook.
Yeah...that bit is alarming on an anthropological level. By all means, lets annihilate actual rapists, but the fact that modern day "feminists" and leftists don't seem to have a problem with annihilating the wrongly accused as well, is an issue worth discussing. Anyone who looks to discard due process is an enemy to humanity.
Lol p are you trolling? I understand most socialists dont want to believe this phenomenon but you I would have guessed were not so ignorant, especially considering your distaste for war. [https://truthout] MENU NEWS ANALYSIS War and the True Tragedy of the Commons BYH Patricia Hynes, TruthoutPUBLISHEDJuly 28, 2011 SHARE [https://truthout] (Image: Lance Page /Truthout; Adapted: Dave Clarke, Expert Infantry) The “Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin's 1968 controversial essay published in Science, essentially targeted overpopulation (read: poor women) as the prime threat to sustainable life on our finite earth. Hardin, and many who consumed this thesis, failed to single out the very small, but politically powerful, population responsible for a mammoth environmental impact – the military. Per capita, the military complex (read: powerful men) is the most polluting human population. A well-glued solidarity between the military, national security advisors, civilian defense contractors, and elites of government has cloaked the extraordinary debt of pollution, destruction of land, and use of finite resources in the paternalistic mantle of national security. Since the origins of recorded history, war chroniclers have told of tactical environmental destruction: destroying crops, forest, and infrastructure; polluting water supply and breaching dikes to flood enemy troops and fields; salting enemies' fields; catapulting infected blankets into enemy garrisons, and so on. During the American Civil War, a handful of Confederates attempted to burn down New York City and plotted both to poison the city's drinking water supply reservoir and to spread yellow fever throughout Washington, DC.[1] The Chinese government committed perhaps the single most destructive wartime act in history during Japan's 1937-1945 war against China. To deter the Japanese advance, the Chinese dynamited a dike near Chengchow, releasing impounded Yellow River water. Not only did the floodwaters drown the several thousand advancing Japanese soldiers, they also destroyed 4,000 villages, 11 cities, and several million hectares of farmland and killed several hundred thousand Chinese civilians.[2] War breeds environmental destruction, and just as war victims and war tactics have changed in recent times, so also has the scale of environmental destruction from war. The casualties of war in the late 20th and early 21st centuries have shifted from combatant soldiers to innocent civilians, with an estimated nine civilian deaths for every soldier death. The locus of war has moved from battlefields to urban and rural population centers, causing massive numbers of residents to flee and imminent health crises of contaminated water, poor sanitation, inadequate health care, malnourishment, overcrowding, and sexual predation in refugee camps. Nearly half of the world's refugees – 4.73 million Afghanis and Iraqis – are fleeing US-led wars and ensuing civil conflicts in their countries. Read other articles in the series by author Patricia Hynes on the environmental impact of US militarism. Widespread conflict in populated rural areas jeopardizes vital public health campaigns. The North-South Sudanese conflict threatened the village-based public health campaign to eliminate the human parasite guinea worm because “war and neglect have made south Sudan the worm's last stronghold.” All the villages where people caught guinea worm in 2010 were suffering armed conflicts; public health campaign staff and residents fled the fighting. With the conflict ending, the government hopes to eradicate guinea worm – “the peace dividend we can give the world,” says the health minister responsible for the eradication program. Likewise, modern war and militarism have a staggering impact on nature and our lived environment – by the kinds of weapons used (long-lived concealed explosives, toxic chemicals, and radiation); the “shock and awe” intensity of industrial warfare; and the massive exploitation of natural resources and fossil fuels to support militarism. By 1990, researchers estimated that the world's military accounted for 5-10 percent of global air pollution, including carbon dioxide, ozone-depletion, smog and acid-forming chemicals. The Research Institute for Peace Policy in Starnberg, Germany calculated that 20 percent of all global environmental degradation was due to military and related activities.[3] Larger, more powerful weapons systems, naval ships, and fighter planes usurp and contaminate huge swaths of land, habitat, groundwater, and soil. A World War II fighter plane “required a maneuvering radius of about 9 kilometers, compared with 75 kilometers in 1990 and a projected 150-185 kilometers for the next generation of jets.”[4] The amount of land and airspace mandated by armed forces for war games, including bombing and shooting ranges, has increased by at least 20 times since World War II. Up to half of US airspace is used for military purposes. Millions of acres of US territory are consigned to military use, resulting in “a scorched-earth policy against an imaginary foe.”[5] As for scorched earth against real “foes,” one Vietnam veteran described the rain of death in the Vietnam War – with bombs, mortars, napalm and other chemical warfare pouring out of the sky – as a war against the environment, creating 20 million bomb craters and “reducing the Earth to ashes.” War between nations has intensified militarily and, thus, magnified natural resource exploitation and ecological devastation. In the early 1980's, the Center for Disarmament estimated that global military operations used more aluminum, copper, nickel and platinum than the entire Third World did for development. US military use of various metals ranges from 5 to 40 percent of civilian use.[6] During the six-week air war in the 1991 Persian Gulf war and the 100-hour ground war, “more weapons were reportedly used than during the protracted Vietnam War.”[7] By US Army estimates, the first three weeks of war in Iraq in 2003 consumed 40 million gallons of fuel – the amount that 80,000 Americans would use for a year's worth of driving.[8] In the same war, the United States employed more than 20 weapons systems that contain depleted uranium (DU), in ranges from 300 grams to 7 tons. Some estimate “that over 1,000 tons of depleted uranium” were deployed, although the Pentagon is tight-lipped about amounts of DU used in recent wars. The environment has been described as “the silent casualty” of war; one could also call it “the invisible casualty” of war. Governments at war honor the fallen and give lip service to the “collateral damage” of civilians injured and killed, while they treat military pollution as the necessary cost of waging war and disdain any responsibility for remediating environmental contamination. As the muscled-up Pentagon sees it, environmental protection laws hamstring their military training and war readiness and, thus, jeopardize national security. In retort, Karen Wayland, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, has turned their “necessity for national defense” argument on its head: “The Pentagon's push for blanket exemptions from federal health and pollution cleanup safeguards makes a mockery of national defense. Using national security to sacrifice our nation's environmental security will endanger our health, leaving us less safe.” If, as many contend, the principal threat to world security in the 21st century is environmental degradation (through climate change, pollution, soil erosion, habitat loss and species extinction), then challenging the destruction and damage to the environment and the massive exploitation of oil and metal resources for the military-industrial war machine must become paramount in the work for peace. The series of articles to follow – on military hazardous waste, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, bioweapons research, nuclear weapons toxic waste, landmines and cluster bombs, and military use of fossil fuels – will provide an overview of modern military pollution and use of natural resources, with a central focus on the US military superpower, a power without precedent or competitor. The Pentagon maintains nearly 1,000 military bases worldwide, and its core budget equals that of the rest of the world's military combined. Thus, the documented environmental hazards of grievously polluted US military sites, as well as of other sites polluted from US-led wars and war-related activities, serve as the “worst-case” example of global military pollution – the true tragedy of our commons. Sent from my SM-G935V using Grasscity Forum mobile app
15 years ago Thomas DiLorenzo penned a concise piece detailing severals reasons and examples as to why socialism was not only unable to prevent pollution, but how it is the prime culprit in many cases. The latest edition of the Top 10 "World's Worst Polluted Places" was released this past week. And unsurprisingly all ten are in regions of the world where property rights are either non-existent or not respected. This is not to say that private firms would never or have never polluted, but rather, it illustrates the abuse land can take in the absence of incentives and accountability. Arguably, if the land had been owned by private companies capable of suing for restitution or damages, the dumping/toxifying would probably never have occurred in the first place. In addition, for-profit companies have an incentive not to destroy or pollute their own land. For instance, deforestation would never occur on a privately owned plantation — in order to stay solvent, the owner has the inherent incentive to perpetually replant and nurture the inventory (i.e., you can't sell it if you don't have any of it). In other words, businesses must satisfy consumer demand to stave off bankruptcy; governments do not. Sent from my SM-G935V using Grasscity Forum mobile app
No ignorance, that theory has been debunked many times. American libertarians cling to it like a baby blanket but attempting to point the finger at Socialism is silly. As for the Chinese carrying out the most damaging attack in wartime history? Hiroshima? Nagasaki?
Not pointing the finger at socialism, just merely stating that socialism leads to squandered resources and a bigger environmental impact because of this undeniable phenomenon. Im also not saying it doesn't exist in a democracy, or any form of government. I am saying private property and free markets are 1000x better in this regard and protecting against it, but at the same time it is far from perfect. Just less shitty, and by a lot.