Most of the abuses that are mentioned are addressable by a consideration of property rights. When private property is part of the equation, and a system of objective and realistic laws that protect these property rights, these problems resolve themselves. A very simple example: I can do pretty much what I want in my yard, but if I throw garbage into your yard--or foul smoke--I have violated your property rights. All this can be handled with the government fulfilling its primary function: protecting individual rights by protecting people against force and fraud.

Where it begins to get more complicated is when a resource or other thing of value is not easily set up as someone's property. Who owns a river? Who owns the air? Who owns the ocean? Still, although it gets more complicated, and the property issues grow more vague, the basic principle is still there. It should not be legal to pump waste into a river when other people downstream are poisoned by it, and laws of this sort are valid under a free market system, just as would be laws against throwing rocks through other people's windows.

No one objects to antipollution laws in general. They are a refinement of normal laws which protect property. However, free market supporters do often object to some laws which have been taken to extremes based on little scientific evidence. The asbestos farce I posted about earlier is one of these. Ideally, a company that caused a real injury should be forced to compensate the victim. In practice, the injuries are often theoretical or statistical, and the actual victims see little of any compensation while attorney skim huge amounts off the top.

Unfortunately, this type of over-regulation seems to be increasing, with the goals seeming to be more shaking down industries, or destroying them, instead of simply protecting citizens from real external consequences.

The situation with the fish is part of what is called the "tragedy of the commons." A resource that is owned by no one is almost always exploited to exhaustion, since those who are careful and sparing with the resource are easily run down by those who are wasteful, and without a valid property claim there is no easy way to restrict this. Concientious fisherman set rigid limits based on their experience, and agree among themselves to abide by them. In this way, the forward-looking fishermen can maintain a renewable resource for profit far into the future. Perhaps a number of countries agree among themselves on limits. Unfortunately, a single rogue fisherman, or nation, can come in and sweep the place clean with large fishing ships, and without some form of property rights the other fishermen are out of luck. As long as the oceans are a commons, this will always be a problem.

Similar problems occur when forests are taken from private hands and made "public," yet logging is still permitted. The loggers have no incentive to preserve the forest, since if they don't take the trees, someone else will. A forest owned by a logging company interested in profits over many years, is often carefully preserved, replanted, and cared for.

I have long been against highly-subsidized industries on public land, including grazing, mining, logging, and others. Laws set up to create these subsidies are left over from another time when the country looked a lot more inexhaustible, and when a mining concern used mules and pickaxes. My solution would be for the government to sell some of its vast resources back to the private sector, with safeguards to prevent abuse of such a process. In private hands, the real costs of exploiting the resources would bring market forces back to bear on preserving vast areas of wilderness that in reality are not practical to exploit (the South American jungle would not be in nearly as much danger if the government down there was not building access roads at no cost to the industries.)

The objective is to place the property in the hands of the user in such a way that he benefits and profits from using it wisely. As long as the property is a commons, people will benefit by wasting it, with long-term losses passed to those who did not waste it.

There are entire books on this subject, and I have not described it as well as I could have. Suffice it to say that the problems cited can be handled quite effectively with a limited government, a free market, and a solid base of property rights.