[sagar]

Well, theoritically your position is right. But, in practice, just because a person owns the property, it doesn't necessarily mean he will maintain it or use it wisely. Take an analogy of animal welfare services. Just because people own pets doesn't mean the all pets are treated well and not abused.

There has to be some kind of agency to control the abuses and punish the abusers.

[okie01]

Well, theoritically your position is right. But, in practice, just because a person owns the property, it doesn't necessarily mean he will maintain it or use it wisely.

Quite true. But the true test of whether regulation is an improvement is whether you will see more abuse without regulation than with it.

In this sense, property is being ill-maintained and abused today because of the regulations. I refer specifically to the Wetlands Protection Act -- where property that would have been maintained and kept productive has been forced to revert to...a bog, a quagmire, a fetid swamp.

My sis is a social worker, specializing in "dysfunctional families". We have this argument all the time. She tells me of families who have been beaten and/or abandoned their children, turning them over to her and, thence, the state.

In return, I ask her, if she and her services had not been available to take the children, how many of these families would have worked out their problems -- rather than taken the easy way out.

There would still be some children who were abandoned...or worse. But, without the "safety net", perhaps there would have been fewer "dysfunctional families". Social work has a tendency to create its own market.

Nobody's perfect. But regulation and government intervention often makes things worse, not better. And it will always add costs -- mostly paid by the people who are doing the right thing in the first place.

At bottom, virtually every pollutant represents a waste of a potential by-product...