The American Spectator

YET LIBERALS DON’T always demand coercive regulations in the name of environmental protection, if it doesn’t suit them. For example, today, synthetic estrogen is adversely affecting river and lake fish populations.

Synthetic estrogen comes from birth control pills in vast amounts, yet is ignored by activists who instead call for controls on chemicals present in much smaller amounts that have much less effect. Why? One environmental activist called it a “personal freedom issue” — as if liberals never call for restrictions on those.

These days, many liberals prefer to call themselves “progressives.” Yet, ironically — or possibly fittingly — a potential solution to many of America’s environmental problems was derailed during the Progressive era. By closing off the avenue of property rights and common law in favor of common ownership and government control, the progressives stopped — deliberately in some cases — proven methods of redress for environmental damage.

The Cuyahoga river fire of 1967, for instance, could have been prevented if a paper company that sued to get the river cleaned up in the 1930s had been allowed to proceed with its action. Instead, the City of Cleveland claimed a prescriptive right to allow pollution and the State of Ohio went on to issue licenses to pollute. Capitalism didn’t set the Cuyahoga on fire, progressivism did!

There are many more examples, too many to cite here. Yet as I show in the book, environmentalism has become the economic and even spiritual justification for much of left-liberal policy.

It is important to break that bond and show that the environment is actually best served by conservative policies that combine free-market and time-tested traditional approaches. More than anything else, confining command-and-control regulations to the trashcan of history will help prevent future ecological and humanitarian disasters.

I’d even toast with a small glass of ethanol to celebrate that event.