Nice Beavers
With Joe Biden out in the U.K. yucking it up with Boris Johnson about forming a new Atlantic Charter to fight (ever notice how everything is a ‘fight’ nowadays?) “climate change”, it just seems again as though they will never learn.
No matter how daunting, how imaginary, or worse, how dauntingly imagined a crisis might be, the solutions rendered by government always end up exacerbating real pain, worsening the hysteria, or creating new crises altogether.
Take, for example, the tragedy of the commons conditions by which the United States national government ruined–or at least severely compromised–the ecology of the American West. Whether it be the disastrous Pacific Railway Act which incentivized literally blowing up mountainsides for subsidies or the anti-privatizations efforts which led to the depletion of buffalo and beaver populations, and Washington D.C.’s environmental record is one of destruction and certainly not conservation or preservation.
As it turns out, beavers are nature’s greatest and most successful waterway preservationists. So while the Colorado and its tributaries run dry, do not blame capitalists or capitalism. Should those animal populations in part have been privatized and managed, as Patrick Barron points out on the Audio Mises Wire, their numbers would never have been brought to near extinction levels. But, in lands owned by no one but claimed by a distant, centralized, and generally dumb state, everyone sated their voracious appetites for that which was not clearly owned. It was a get-grab-and-go scenario instead of an own-invest-wait-and-prosper scenario. And it led to environmental disasters.
Should the rest of us be surprised? The secular progressive dominated world wars against the notion of human nature and natural law. It’s not a bridge or dam too far to be warring against nature itself under the pretense of messianic environmentalism. Grab all the virtue signaling credit while the world burns. It’s high time to make progressives own it.
