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re: The Jungle
Tom Brosz — (archived)

It should be hereby noted and logged that I have long stipulated that objective and specific laws against pollution are a valid function of government, as part of its function of protecting property rights. Mr. Jones does not have a right to dump his trash over the fence into Mr. Smith's yard, and so on up the line. Mr. Jones does not have the right to run a little glue factory in his yard. Mr. Jones does not have the right to build high explosives in his yard. The libertarian philosophy is that a man has the right to swing his fist anywhere he likes as long as he doesn't connect with someone else's nose. Where the line is actually drawn has to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

The details and other aspects of antipollution laws are more complex, including the difficulty of dealing with property rights in things like the air, oceans, rivers, or other things not easily integrated into property issues. But such things can be dealt with. Some of it is in the jurisdiction of criminal law. Much of it is in the jurisdiction of civil law.

No one was a more enthusiastic supporter of the environmental movement a few decades ago when the object was to clean up the rivers and the air. Factories, yes. Cars, yes. But clean ones. We could be an industrial society and still clean up our act. And by golly, to a large extent, we did.

When a number of the major environmental groups became socialist buttmonkeys, despite the record of socialism in this area, I lost interest. When some radical environmentalists became actively anti-human, I got hostile.

Upton Sinclair, an enthusiastic socialist, wrote "The Jungle" to spotlight the horrible treatment of labor. He was as surprised as anyone to find that his description of the unclean conditions were what actually got everyone's attention.

At its height, the Beef Trust held 55 percent of the business, and there were indeed abuses against potential competitors. I have found that most monopolies and such rely on government to place legal barriers on their competitors, and have found many examples of this "mixed economy" technique in other industries, even today. I have not read of any examples of this in the Beef Trust, but would not be surprised.

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