Filed under: Liberty and Tranny | Tags: capitalism, free market, Kennedy, Monsanto, Nestle, Pepsi, pollution
It’s just so well put, I’d like to present to you a speech entitled “For the Sake of Our Children,” by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., which was published in the Winter 2005 issue of EarthLight. All emphasis and [material in brackets] is mine.
There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism than myself. The free market spawns efficiency, and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution, so in a true free-market economy you would eliminate, as nearly as you can, pollution. In a true free-market economy you can’t make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. Polluters make themselves rich by making everybody else poor. They raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality of life for everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the free market and forcing the public to pay their production cost. You show me a polluter, I’ll show you a subsidy. Corporations are externalizing machines; they are constantly trying to figure out a way to avoid their own costs and foist it out on the public.
I’ll give you an example. When the coal companies, the utilities, discharge mercury into the air [or when gold refineries leach cyanide into the water table, or when Nestle or Pepsi suck an aquifer dry to bottle their water or soda forcing those living nearby to go without water they had been getting from their wells, or when Monsanto's GMO corn or canola contaminates a neighboring field, or when...] they are avoiding one of the costs of bringing their products to market, which is the cost of properly disposing of a dangerous processed chemical. When they avoid the costs they can out-compete their competitors, they can out-compete gas and oil and wind power. But the costs don’t disappear. They go into the fish, they make children sick, they permanently injure children’s lungs, they put people out of work, they acidify the lakes in the Adirondacks and they’ve destroyed the forest cover of the Appalachian Mountains all the way from Georgia up into Quebec. Those impacts impose costs on the rest of us that should be reflected in the price of that product. All of the federal environmental laws are meant to restore free-market capitalism in America. I don’t even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I’m a free marketeer. I go out into the marketplace, I track down the polluters and I say to them, We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way that you’re internalizing your profits. Americans have to understand that there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism which democratizes our country, that brings us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate crony capitalism which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in Nigeria.
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Monsanto is about eugenics by modifying our DNA through our food. The outcome is not pretty. Cap and trade is about MONEY. Trees need the stuff you exhale. Putting a tax on that is like cutting down trees
. Carbon taxes will help Gore get back some of the money he lost on his failed presidential race. Bush has taken the money and run. Gore hopes he can use this cap and trade non sensense to “keep up with the Bushes”.
Comment by Pentagon Patriot July 22, 2009 @ 9:23 pm[...] corporate subsidies. We’re right back to our discussion of pollution and the free market below… companies must be forced to internalize the costs of the crap they’re selling us to [...]
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