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In front of the Danna Center this week, student activists representing Public Interest Research Groups were trying to rally support for yet another ignorant liberal agenda. According to their vague and biased research, power plants are responsible for releasing high levels of mercury into water tables and contaminating fish, which later get consumed as food. One pamphlet read, "Mercury can cause severe neurological and developmental problems in unborn fetuses whose brains are still developing."
These claims, while vague and undefined, are probably accurate; but how should these problems be solved? PIRG's suggested methods are unacceptable. When analyzing environmental problems from a free market economic perspective, injustices such as these are the result of a lack of property rights. Ocean space and fish populations are not privately owned and, therefore, polluting firms feel no legal accountability when damaging them. Privatization of these un-owned resources would alleviate such pollution externalities. But more serious issues of liberty and justice are at play with the PIRG activists.
The industries of energy production and supply are heavily governmentally regulated and sponsored as they currently exist. It's no surprise to hear that they have low quality products, high prices, pollution problems and inefficiencies of all sorts. This is the nature of socialism. Market forces are more adequate to solve such problems or, better yet, avoid the development of them pre-emotionally, but they have been repressed by the government's involvement.
Power plants and electric companies are contracted through governmental legitimacy. Once in possession of this mandate, competitive market forces such as technology advancements, quality standards, legal accountabilities, boycotts and substitute products are incapacitated. A free market for electric companies does not exist but it should.
These environmental crises that PIRG speaks of are the products of governmentally controlled and subsidized industries. PIRG goes on to offer a lazy and liberty-ignorant solution of more government involvement. While working their table, they attempted to gain support from students and faculty to pressure the EPA into enforcing stricter regulation onto power plants, offering more socialism to solve the problems of socialism. This constant feeding of the government's size, power and authority has to stop. Pressuring government officials to waste more time and taxpayer's money to regulate their own failing endeavors, which they have haphazardly monopolized, is not my responsibility, nor should it be yours. Fiscal accountability is a joke. Justice does not exist by curing one person's harm at the expense of innocent third parties, which is exactly what takes place by adding to the size of government regulatory programs through taxation and redistribution.
If fish consumption causes neurological disorders, I wonder just how much fish the PIRG supporters had to eat to arrive at their faulty logic, ignorant solutions and travesties of justice. The market system through dollar votes is the only fair and efficient means of allocating resources. Rather than feeding the obese monster of our inefficient state we should be jabbing it until its death.
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