Posted by Daniel Greenfield @ the Sultan Knish blog
We utilize systems to achieve goals whether it's defending the country or fighting poverty or making the trains run in time or achieving political change.
Modem systems are systematic creatures that aim to achieve goals by maximizing control over all the subsidiary elements of the problem.
So if you set out to solve poverty, you need control over all the social and economic elements that either cause poverty or could be used to ameliorate poverty. Those elements include the sum amount of national wealth for the purposes of wealth redistribution, the rate of unwed teen pregnancies and any forms of racial discrimination... and that's just for starters. Even poverty, which would seem like a rather simple phenomenon becomes a system which takes into account tools like abortion, progressive taxation and discrimination laws.
The scope of each social problem becomes so limitless that all social problems must merge into a Holistic Socialism of piano wire in which every string touched spreads vibrations everywhere. Solving even the most minor problem requires solving all the problems and the only solution is the absolute power of the system.
Socialism relies on systems as means to achieve social ends. The systems develop policies that control as a means to achieve those ends.
When the ends are not achieved then the system responds by intensifying the depth and scope of the control. Increasing control is the only solution of the system to failure.
And so the system changes from pursuing control as a means to pursuing control as an end.
Socialism, like most systems of government derived from it, has enshrined control as an end in and of itself.
As O'Brien said in 1984, the purpose of power is power. And control is just another word for power.
Systems may be formed to achieve moral ends but they are no more moral in and of themselves than a hammer. The longer a system exists, the more it comes to exist for itself and its power becomes its own end.
A hammer exists to hammer. A hammer in the hands of a man is a tool, but a hammer that exists for its own sake is a destructive force. A bureaucracy exists to regulate to achieve a specific end, but a bureaucracy that exists for its own sake is tyranny. It seeks to control for the sake of control. It wields power for the sake of power.
It insists that its ends are moral, but as they are not achieved, the true end of control is revealed.
Socialism begins with control to achieve social ends only for control to become the end. And that leads to the end of freedom.
An institution vested with power becomes an institution of power. The response of the left to this inevitable fact of human history is to insist that granting unlimited power to their institutions will have different results because their purposes are moral. But moral purposes can only be vested in people, not institutions. Ideology can take control of institutions but once control is achieved then the ideology comes to exist for the sake of the institution. That is how the grand ambitions of the left died in China and Russia. That is how it may die in Europe and America.
As a system becomes its own purpose, it uses the purposes of others as camouflage. It promises to solve problems that it has no intention of solving as means of extracting resources from those who want the problem solved.
Initially the system may be run by those who do want to solve the problem and see the system as the only way to do so but as the system grows and spreads their motives become mixed.
Bureaucracy is the essence of the system and exists to keep track of and implement its many rules. The rules are the tools of control and their purpose is to make the unpredictable into the predictable.
The rules start life as the means but as with all means of tyranny they become the ends by which the bureaucracy exercises its power.
Rules in a bureaucracy operate on different levels. On one level they are meant to achieve a socially responsible end, but on another they benefit the allies of the bureaucracy. On a third level they exist to justify the expansion of the bureaucracy and to allow it to wield its power. On a fourth level they define status within the bureaucracy.
So for example an environmental initiative may be intended to lessen pollution levels on the surface but also rewards environmental groups and consultancies whose lobbying enhances the power and funding of the EPA. On a third level, the EPA now uses the initiative to expand the scope of its authority and request more funding to hire more people in the D.C. pecking order between government agencies. On a fourth level, this influences the pecking order within the organization.
The EPA is an environmental organization but it's an organization and in the long run when the institutional long marches have been completed, it is the organizational part that will matter more,
The left provides tyranny with the social motive to come into being, but in the long run the left Is only the midwife of tyranny. Its ideology and activists dismantle democracies and burgeoning democracies and replace them with tyrannies.
Whether it's Islam or a conventional oligarchy or a cult of personality tyrant, the left's role is to act as the virus that kills the host and then allows it to be fed on by predators in the hopes of infecting them in turn.
The left injects bureaucratic collectivism into a healthy state to control it, but in the long run the bureaucratic collectivism will outlive it as it becomes the end for which the left was only the means.
For the past hundreds of years in the United States, England and before that the Roman Empire, regulation of the use of privately owned property was governed by the maxim: “sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas — each one must so use his own as not to injure his neighbor. The limits of government’s authority to regulate the use of private property was the prevention of substantial injury to public health, safety (or morals.) This limitation was a reserved individual right and the authority to regulate beyond that was never delegated to local, state or federal government.
http://famguardian.org/Publications/PropertyRights/tableoc4.html
Through the signature of the United States on the Migratory Bird Treaty and other treaties, private ownership became somehow subject to regulation for the protection of endangered species habitat, etc. Suddenly, private property became burdened with public trust and the idea that the people at large owned all the natural resources and individual use was simply a conditional privilege.
For instance a requirement in the new suction dredge mining regs was that the miner prove he was not harming fish in order to mine. This turns the whole foundation of regulation on its head.
CA now embraces “Total Resources Management”: “A planning and decision making process that coordinates resource use so that the long term sustainable benefits are optimized and conflicts among users are minimized. IRM [Integrated Resource Management] brings together all resource groups rather than each working in isolation to balance the economic, environmental, and social requirements of society.”
Governments, agencies, appointed boards are now considered the “resource managers,” rather than the land owner.
The 2010 State Action Plan indicates that old laws and policies were created when natural resources were considered abundant and resilient. “Climate change, growth, and increased competition for these resources require a new era of strategic thinking, leadership, and unifying policies and actions designed to preserve and restore our natural resources for long-term sustainability and for the benefits of all citizens.
The components of an ecosystem (hydrology, biology, geology and social systems) interact to create “ecosystem services.” These include: clean air and water; reducing the severity of floods, droughts, winds and waves; detoxification and decomposition of wastes; soil and soil fertility; pollination; control of agricultural pests; dispersal of seed; nutrient cycling; biodiversity; protection from ultraviolet rays; stabilization of climate change; moderation of temperature extremes; diverse human cultures; beauty and spiritual sustenance. Ecosystems must be managed for diversity and resilience to allow them to respond to change and continue to provide ecosystem services to humans and other populations over the long term.
The new management approach will have greater public involvement, emphasize “inclusiveness” and integrate federal, state, tribal, regional and local goals. Integration of management efforts will incrementally become more commonly used as “traditional methods fail to achieve anticipated results” causing a collapse of the old management system. Further work will be done to define specific ecosystem services of benefit to the public and to determine the management strategies that need to be in place to sustainably produce those services.
Control over use constitutes one of the fundamental values of property. Every property owner has been losing control over their property ever since. To sell off mitigations as services, places control in another’s hands.
State agencies are also touting the True Cost Pricing approach promoted by Ecotrust.
“When prices for socially and environmentally destructive products do not reflect the externalities created during their production, they send false market signals. When pollution of air, water, and soil is essentially free, products that pollute heavily will be over-consumed relative to cleaner products. When poor labor practices are essentially free, products that employ them will be over-consumed relative to those produced fairly. Ignoring externalities leads to systemic problems — environmental contamination, unsafe neighborhoods, urban sprawl, degradation of forests, fisheries, and farmland, etc. — because each individual has pursued the cheapest prices rather than minimizing the actual cost to society.
“True Cost Pricing greatly favors the products and services of reliable prosperity. By imposing green taxes on the degradation of nature, incentives for resource efficiency, renewable energy, and better materials cycles are generated. Gradually reducing existing subsidizes for dams, water-extravagant agriculture, highways, mining, and grazing would create additional incentives.”
I believe the whole environmental scheme smacks of socialism and undermines our basic individual right to own private property.
For the past hundreds of years in the United States, England and before that the Roman Empire, regulation of the use of privately owned property was governed by the maxim: “sic utere tuo ut alienum non laedas — each one must so use his own as not to injure his neighbor. The limits of government’s authority to regulate the use of private property was the prevention of substantial injury to public health, safety (or morals.) This limitation was a reserved individual right and the authority to regulate beyond that was never delegated to local, state or federal government. http://famguardian.org/Publications/PropertyRights/tableoc4.html Your proffered multi-century continuity in the tenor of property law was in fact in intense flux during the 19th Century, both substantive and procedural, as amply described in Nelson’s The Americanization of the Common Law (read the Amazon review before you repost, as Nelson’s work is considered the definitive source on the topic; there is a separate critique of the book here). At the time of drafting of the Constitution, many local property use regulations were more communitarian in nature, whether in matters related to everything from church ownership to alcohol licenses. After the turn of the 19th Century, the system’s emphasis drifted unevenly toward the individual and is now drifting back to the appearance of communitarianism (in fact a mercantilism effected at a far more remote level of government, even global among the covey of secretariats at the UN).
During the early 19th Century, the preponderancy in law of either of these tendencies, communitarian or individual, was due largely to spatially distinct social and economic circumstances. The urban east coast, having long been settled and with industry developing at a much earlier date than the frontier, was far more likely to have cases brought over competing claims over land use and its consequences; whereas legal decisions regarding land use in the vast and largely unsettled areas to the west were more likely to respect the interests of individuals insofar as land use was concerned. As time went on, industry moved west, and immensely wealthy railroads bought the politicians to construct laws to deal with conflicts that arose among individuals, communities, and corporate interests. Lincoln himself made his name doing eminent domain deals for barge companies and railroads. Travesties like Kelo are not a recent invention.
Yet there is a more fundamental difference between today and “hundreds” of years ago when common law legal principles were applied to address increasingly complex land use issues: When the only “steel mill” was a local blacksmith, the damage that facility could do to an entire community would be little more than an annoyance and certainly not fatal to anybody... unless it was to light that community on fire. And what do you know but even then, blacksmith shops were not in the middle of town because of the hazards and liabilities. Nor were the mechanics of human fecal pollution contaminating water sources common knowledge; instead they were a common problem. Advancing technology has made it possible for a single enterprise to do far more damage to individuals and land than in the nascence of the industrial revolution. A steel mill or oil refinery covers square miles. The chemistries of modern agriculture or plastics have the potential to kill thousands, never mind what a biotech company, nuclear reactor, or major dam failure could do. The computer on which you are reading this requires enough toxic gases for chip fabrication to kill an entire city block.
From the late 19th to the mid 20th Century, one could certainly have argued that the victims of such industrial pollution had been both denied use of their property and subjected to a health and safety hazard, yet few were able to obtain recourse via civil action because of the legal power possessed by the perpetrators. The situation was effectively, ‘Don’t like it, sue me. You have no say in how I use my property.’ That is where you apparently still stand, a position so politically and logically untenable given the scale of modern technical hazards that few would ever take it seriously today.
The remote likelihood of an injured party being able to afford to win a lawsuit against a large corporation was a big part of the reason the public sought and bought the unconstitutional political powers that were ultimately employed to constrain these “capitalists” (in fact enjoying a huge subsidy in the protection afforded by the structure and cost of the civil courts process). Unfortunately, by invoking said powers, the public ended up playing into the hands of those against whom they were seeking damages.
The modern racket of NGOs as supported by the heirs of those who used to play said “sue me” game now operates in collusion with the very bureaucrats the public expects to deliver upon said “environmental protection.” Instead of fighting it locally, the fat cat shuts down his domestic competition and moves overseas, where “sue me” remains the rule of the day. The resulting domestic bag-holders then get to pay for a wasteful and/or ineffective cleanup, “restoration,” or whatever other racket the complicit bureaucrats have in mind as long as it keeps them in clover until retirement.
For the record: I do not believe that ANY level of government should be in the public health and safety management business. Even septic and sewage control has become too much of an impenetrable racket for the public to hold their representatives accountable (as I documented in Natural Process with an extensive discussion of nonpoint TMDL regulations being used as a means to manipulate property value to the benefit of specific developers). Yet beside the fact that regulation is so often corrupt, it is also functionally destructive. Centralized liquid sewage treatment, particularly near estuaries where cities are common, has been shown to have grievous consequences for aquatic life.
The power to regulate is simply too much power with which to control markets while making point sources so large that safe and effective treatment is very costly and seldom totally effective. The urban preference favors those with the power to purchase market advantage via political favors and it fails to deliver upon its promise, regardless of the premise. Socialism was and is a creation of and for the extremely wealthy, as is the legal game. What needs to be done is to institute a civil alternative that is both more affordable and effective. That is a matter of market structure, effectively a system design problem I addressed in Natural Process.
Hence, I believe that the blacksmith should be able to build wherever he wants as long as he'll foot the resulting insurance bill or mitigation package covering damages due to everything from fire to noise and mineral dust. Accordingly, it would be CHEAPER for him to locate outside of town because the cost of managing those risks would be lower. That's how it works in the real world. If he fails to do take appropriate measures and the insurer doesn't take action, there should be criminal penalties for fraud.
Throw them both in jail.
Through the signature of the United States on the Migratory Bird Treaty and other treaties, private ownership became somehow subject to regulation for the protection of endangered species habitat, etc. Suddenly, private property became burdened with public trust and the idea that the people at large owned all the natural resources and individual use was simply a conditional privilege.
Given that I’m the guy who discovered the manner of adoption of the Convention on Nature Protection and Wild Life Preservation in the Western Hemisphere fourteen years ago, you thought I needed to hear that? Gad.
Earth to marsh2: There is most of a chapter of Natural Process devoted to that topic published twelve years ago.
Further, I’ve written at least two articles on the origins of the treaty power in the Constitution that were well received here on FR revealing that the true purpose of the treaty power as drafted and implemented was to subvert the constraints of limited government. Hamilton’s case for the treaty power as drafted in Federalist 75 was a spin job at best, and to my mind a pack of lies. In other words, for a decade I have been teaching on this forum that the current system of international law was intended and instituted over two hundred years ago and you feel the need to tell me that treaties are underlie these laws.
Really?
For instance a requirement in the new suction dredge mining regs was that the miner prove he was not harming fish in order to mine. This turns the whole foundation of regulation on its head.
You’re not telling me anything here. In fact, I am well aware of how that suction dredge on the Scott River saved the salmon run (I’ve met the guy). Further, I regard the “foundation of regulation” as both constitutionally and historically bogus, a twisting of language so severe as to have turned the term “regulation” itself on its head. What the constitution originally intended by “regulate” was to assure that the good remained unimpeded and usual; i.e., “regular.” It was the same term as applied to full time “regulars” as soldiers as they had frequent drill and battle experience. It was the same implication in “well regulated militia.”
CA now embraces “Total Resources Management”: “A planning and decision making process that coordinates resource use so that the long term sustainable benefits are optimized and conflicts among users are minimized. IRM [Integrated Resource Management] brings together all resource groups rather than each working in isolation to balance the economic, environmental, and social requirements of society.”
So? I’ve been fighting that process for well over twenty years. What does citing the threat have to do with ANYTHING I have advocated? Your association is so strained that it is as if driving on the right side of the road is just as bad as being on the left because both involve cars. Simply because I believe privatizing environmental management on an objective basis will return a profit to landowners for superior management of currently socialized assets, you believe that the proposal is socialism because I believe taking care of habitat is important. You have it exactly backwards. To equate the operations of the greens and anything I’ve proposed is such a stretch as to be effectively either clueless or dishonest.
Henry Lamb said it would take fifty years for people to get to where I was coming from, and he may have been right.
Governments, agencies, appointed boards are now considered the “resource managers,” rather than the land owner.
Sadly, very few landowners want to be in that business instead of government agencies and NGOs. The reluctance exists because the motivational architecture in which they operate makes it hazardous for them to invest in improving habitat. The result is almost guaranteed to have them in a position of standing accused of harm because EVERY biological system is competitive in nature. There are winners and losers at every stage of every successional system.
The 2010 State Action Plan indicates that old laws and policies were created when natural resources were considered abundant and resilient. “Climate change, growth, and increased competition for these resources require a new era of strategic thinking, leadership, and unifying policies and actions designed to preserve and restore our natural resources for long-term sustainability and for the benefits of all citizens.
Again, this has nothing to do with anything I have proposed. Given that customers will pay for use of a hill on which to ski and buy special cars with heated seats to get there, or lay down thousands for gobs of backpacking equipment or hunting gear they use but once a year, it is proven that the public desires an array of recreational land use services. Lacking our socialized alternative they would pay for maintenance of the scenery to go with it. The problems arise because, with but few elite exceptions, government owns an armed monopoly in the land entertainment business, supposedly providing land management products and services but in fact doing a very poor job of it. If the public knew how bad the condition of many national parks really is, they’d be outraged.
The components of an ecosystem (hydrology, biology, geology and social systems) interact to create “ecosystem services.” These include: clean air and water; reducing the severity of floods, droughts, winds and waves; detoxification and decomposition of wastes; soil and soil fertility; pollination; control of agricultural pests; dispersal of seed; nutrient cycling; biodiversity; protection from ultraviolet rays; stabilization of climate change; moderation of temperature extremes; diverse human cultures; beauty and spiritual sustenance. Ecosystems must be managed for diversity and resilience to allow them to respond to change and continue to provide ecosystem services to humans and other populations over the long term.
In principle, landowners have the wherewithal to manage their property in such a way that it does provide “ecosystem services” that offset risks that would otherwise make congregating into cities hazardous, or not, depending upon whether or not it is profitable to do so. Witness the San Bernardino Fire. The National Forest (aka the taxpayer) owns the risk of no management at all. Under the existing system, if that area was private land the public would demand the owner provide those fuel management services for free. The assumption that preserving the land as “nature” will be as effective at delivering those benefits is false (the “no action alternative”). Hence, to perform those functions, the land does need management and that costs money. Under my system, the public’s insurance agents would have good reason to pay for private fuel management, after all, goats can do wonders with heavy brush and supply a product at the same time. So to me, what is at issue is who is best qualified to deliver those services at minimum cost to the consumer: government or landowners? I side with the free market.
If you call that system socialism, then you are out to lunch.
The new management approach will have greater public involvement, emphasize “inclusiveness” and integrate federal, state, tribal, regional and local goals.
Horse pucky. They’ll maintain the appearance of involvement but in fact the system will be geared to political corruption, just as it is now.
Integration of management efforts will incrementally become more commonly used as “traditional methods fail to achieve anticipated results” causing a collapse of the old management system. Further work will be done to define specific ecosystem services of benefit to the public and to determine the management strategies that need to be in place to sustainably produce those services.
“Market failure” (as cited in the ESA by the way) is the classical excuse for socializing control of land use in the name of “protecting” a socialized asset (animals, water, whatever). In reality, the hidden agenda in almost every case is to control these assets for purposes of market manipulation. In some respects, the observations underlying the premises are correct in that many a landowner knows better than to risk capital in improving conditions for wildlife because of the risk of having that asset stolen. Once that species is protected, the landowner has every reason to rid the property of its habitat. Effectively, government has created very the conditions which are the cause of the problems they purport to fix (and there are even some bureaucrats who understand that). Yet they simultaneously have every motive to assure that the problem remains unsolved in perpetuity because that gives them a cushy job with power for sale. That is what is so destructive about the power to socialize a commons.
Control over use constitutes one of the fundamental values of property. Every property owner has been losing control over their property ever since. To sell off mitigations as services, places control in another’s hands.
We agree there, except I would add that the landowner also owns the processes in the time domain that transform the state of said commons, just as they own mineral or water rights (no, I don’t think you ever read Natural Process carefully). You are criticizing the system I proposed because of what you are afraid it MIGHT be without having invested the time and energy to understand what it actually is. Frankly, from your posting, it appears you have fallen so deeply for your half of the Hegelian dialectic that you can’t see in any other terms than "us v. them."
State agencies are also touting the True Cost Pricing approach promoted by Ecotrust.
Ecotrust has very little to do with how the design of my system works. There is no government involvement in its pricing mechanics. In fact, its goal is to put the government agencies and NGOs working with Ecotrust out of business, or at least start by forcing them to compete. In my system, there are no university professors making a fast buck telling everybody else what the cost of risk management is worth. Simply because I have observed that there ARE costs attendant to risks associated with land management and that they are substantial, you ignorantly lumped my system in with the likes of Ecotrust or Gretchen Daley, just as I said you had.
You see, not only are there actual costs associated with poor land management inflicted upon others, there really are tangible BENEFITS associated with land management directed to mitigate specific risks to others (such as floods or fires), for which the landowner should be PAID. Together, these benefits should render habitat management more PROFITABLE as a service. Those who are good at it should get rich and those who are bad at it should go out of business. Apparently you have a problem with that.
The benefits of this crooked mitigation “market” of course so far have been illusory, principally because there is little accountability for performance to contract, and also because of the celebrated cases of immensely corrupt payments to the politically connected.
“When prices for socially and environmentally destructive products do not reflect the externalities created during their production, they send false market signals. When pollution of air, water, and soil is essentially free, products that pollute heavily will be over-consumed relative to cleaner products. When poor labor practices are essentially free, products that employ them will be over-consumed relative to those produced fairly. Ignoring externalities leads to systemic problems — environmental contamination, unsafe neighborhoods, urban sprawl, degradation of forests, fisheries, and farmland, etc. — because each individual has pursued the cheapest prices rather than minimizing the actual cost to society.”
Do you dispute the truth of that observation? Well I do. It is a single-sided half-truth, in that while there are costs there are also benefits, which they conveniently neglect to mention. All the quote is saying is that there is sometimes a cost borne by someone other than the transactors for a good indicating a need to measure the impact accurately and internalize it in the cost of purchase.
The public has repeatedly endorsed spending their money to address the need. The problem is with the “solutions” these Marxists propose. A corrupt socialized “market” under the control of bureaucrats and university consultants without any validation for performance is NOT the answer to that need. Nor have I ever proposed as much. Quite the contrary, I don’t want ANY public parks, zoning laws, or sanitary districts. I’m even averse to public roads. You call my proposals “socialist”? Your paranoia has blinded you completely.
My proposals do include using existing environmental laws to go after these crooks as a short-term tactical means, because I believe that it can be proven that private enterprise can do a better job of managing both risks and benefits to habitat, soils, whatever than government agencies. Those tactics do use the leverage already in the law citing “market failure” by saying that the market wants the job; effectively, there is a presumption in the law that government must get out of the way. So, if the customer wants fish, I think one can make money using cows to make things better for fish. Cows can break up spawning gravels, they can feed bugs, they can help keep the forest from blowing up, and they can improve infiltration of rainwater for late season release... Those are services for which the landowner should be compensated for the marginal increase in the productivity of fish, particularly because some of those activities take time and money or might reduce outputs of a competing land use. Now, of course, the effectiveness of those services would need to be verified. That takes a private third party with a financial stake in the both accuracy and efficiency of their accounting, not an agency.
Now, the greenies have proposed third party systems too, yet every one of those systems turn certification companies into enforcers of existing government rules and regulations, many of which are counterproductive toward delivering upon their justification, and for a very good reason: There is no power for sale if the asset at risk recovers, just as there are no agency jobs if the asset at risk recovers.
In the InsCert system I invented, said third party would be effectively no different in function than hiring an accountant to verify that the books are accurate, somebody to help keep track of how things are working or not so that information represented to customers and investors is accurate. Else, there would be no way to detect fraudulent performance to a management service contract on private property and one would be forced to seek discovery in the courts for contract verification and enforcement, which is both expensive and adversarial where no such needs need exist. At least in a free market such services would have to compete in cost effective delivery.
“True Cost Pricing greatly favors the products and services of reliable prosperity. By imposing green taxes on the degradation of nature, incentives for resource efficiency, renewable energy, and better materials cycles are generated. Gradually reducing existing subsidizes for dams, water-extravagant agriculture, highways, mining, and grazing would create additional incentives.”
While I advocate incorporating both positive and negative externalities into the sale price of a product, I dispute the effectiveness, justice, and efficiency typical of “True Cost Pricing” schemes primarily because THEY FOCUSE ONLY ON COSTS AND DO NOT INTERNALIZE BENEFITS. Being politically driven, they are also incapable of objective assessment of the balance between risks and benefits among competing land uses. In fact, I believe that type of system functions as a destructive force (as intended), simply because the priorities and pricing are determined under intense political influence. Their pricing mechanics are substantially different from what I’ve proposed, which works exactly the same way insurance and validation services work to account for risk in many private manufacturing industries today. Validation services are why we have Underwriters’ Laboratories today, as well as the IEEE, ASTM, and a host of others.
I believe the whole environmental scheme smacks of socialism and undermines our basic individual right to own private property.
You appear to regard any public advocacy of the need to maintain a healthy and productive planet as a covert threat to private property ownership. If so, then you are so obsessed with a well-justified hatred for the greens that you can’t see how what I have proposed is radically different from what you rightly fear. As a result, your position in opposition to an obvious, legitimate, and existing market demand while pretending that 18th Century statutes alone are adequate has effectively abetted the socialist takeover and the degradation of private ownership, not to mention probably having defamed me personally. Yet you simultaneously fail to recognize that the body of law of which you are so fond was designed to perpetuate and enrich the agents of mercantilist corporations from which the founders of this country sought to free themselves. It is the height of irony that what the Founders did in adopting the Common Law in America was to assure the eventual emergence of a domestic variant of the same mercantilist tyranny: the corporate fascism we see sponsoring the environmental move-mint today.
I am a scientist and a student of history, not a lawyer. I was trained to recognize both features and flaws in system design. The Common Law has both aplenty. Among the flaws in its current form is its emphasis upon stare decisis at the expense of true and capable judgment by one’s actual technical peers. Yet its chief dysfunction in the instance of private property is a systematic failure to recognize, bound, and characterize the behavior of biophysical processes that transform the state of mobile assets in the time domain as property. In my opinion, such are patentable findings in a manner similar to a mine, to include nutrients and therapies. Ownership renders control of said processes a transactable service. As things are now, such contractual relationships are, for the most part, an unaffordable overhead insofar as incorporating them into daily operations is concerned, but that’s nothing automation can’t cure. Meanwhile, there are definitely some “low-hanging fruit” opportunities that could be used to develop the infrastructure of a true civil alternative.
So, here I am proposing a new way for property owners to broaden the opportunities for use of their land. It returns to them control of the assets which your beloved Common Law took without compensation upon the single-sided assessment of “harm” only. These are “problems” that currently function as assets providing the cash flow basis of a criminal socialist enterprise, yet they are also opportunities for services that will truly minimize the hazards both to humans and G_d’s Creation.
Yet you deem me a threat to private property. Unbelievable.
I seriously doubt you fully understand the consequences of these distinctions, because they exist outside the Hegelian dialectic within which you are apparently entrapped. Maybe someday you’ll come to your senses, but frankly, I doubt it.
Modem systems are systematic creatures that aim to achieve goals by maximizing control over all the subsidiary elements of the problem.
The EPA is an environmental organization but it's an organization and in the long run when the institutional long marches have been completed, it is the organizational part that will matter more,