Give some examples from the past century of how statist societies cause environmental damage by preventing voluntary resource optimization.

We can find horrific examples of environmental disasters under communism in the former Soviet Union and its Eastern Europe satellite states (Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, etc.), ranging from dense smog to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. China, a country that only sometimes respects individual rights, applies central planning to huge areas of its economy—housing, infrastructure, banking and finance, manufacturing, etc.—resulting in enormous misallocation of resources. And regulations and subsidies in the welfare states of Western Europe and here in the United States have crippling impacts on efficient resource use. For example, severe restrictions on nuclear energy development in most advanced economies have effectively killed promising, energy-efficient, CO2 reducing technologies such as liquid fluoride thorium reactors (LFTR) and the ultimate clean energy source, fusion reactors. And government tax-based funding of unreliable energy technologies such as wind and solar takes money from voluntary resource-optimizing, CO2-reducing, fossil fuel efficiency initiatives.

Back