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The 'Private' Approach Works
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16171 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1989 |
2,528 Words |
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Kent Jeffreys
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During the presidential campaign, then-candidate George Bush announced that it was his intention to become "the environmental president." While that is certainly a noble sentiment, how is President Bush to accomplish this goal? Unless he replaces the public-works style environmental programs prevalent today with "private works" approaches, he will fail to achieve his aim.
Since the days of Teddy Roosevelt and the original conservation movement, no president has done more to promote the environmentalist agenda than Richard Nixon. The average reader might find such a statement odd, but the record is clear. Whether or not Nixon philosophically supported the concept of a major federal role in environmental policy can be debated. But it is clear that he understood the political value of major federal spending initiatives. President Nixon presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Council on Environmental Quality. His administration also saw the beginnings of many of the major environmental legislative initiatives, such as the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act, that remain the fundamental federal responses to environmental issues.
These attempts to address national concerns over environmental quality utilize what is called a "command-and-control" method of regulation. For example, the federal government establishes not only the levels of permissible emissions, but also the methods to be used in attaining these goals. And no policy is considered complete without a massive infusion of federal dollars. Surely that is not what Bush envisions when he states a desire to be "the environmental president."
This traditional public-works approach to environmental issues is often defended on the ground that governments can marshal large resources and dedicate them to a specific goal, as in war. But marshaling resources is ineffective without an appropriate strategy. Although America had an overwhelming advantage in material resources during the Vietnam conflict, it failed to adopt an appropriate strategy to defend against a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Throwing resources at a problem without an appropriate plan is merely throwing them away.
Another defense of the public-works approach is based on the assumption that environmental policies should be micromanaged by federal agencies because bureaucrats are thought to have more appropriate incentives than private individuals motivated by profit. Much work has been done in the past decade to expose the counterproductive incentives inherent in a bureaucratic setting. When this view has focused on environmental issues, it has been called the New Resource Economics, or free-market environmentalism. In principle, this alternative to command-and-control model recognizes that the prices charged for goods sold in a market display far more accurate information than any bureaucratic regulation could ever convey.
Markets respond to prices very efficiently. If a market is structured so that pollution costs are not fully included in the price of the goods produced--as when the government subsidizes sewage treatment plants--more pollution will be the result. This is not a failure of the market; it is a failure of the government to create an appropriate incentive system in which markets will operate.
Too often, environmental programs protect bureaucratic jobs
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