Who Takes Care Of The Environment Without Government? - Stateless Environmentalism Made Easy

“In the proposed voluntaryist stateless free market, who will protect the forests, the air, the oceans, and historical heritage sites?”

First off, the government is doing a poor job at protecting the environment, especially when it runs massive militaries, provokes unnecessary wars, wastes resources in ridiculous wasteful Keynesian policies of “market stimulation”, and so on. Corrupt government officials have now decided to just focus on CO2; the only industrial by-product that isn’t a pollutant (and that it feeds vegetation). All the while, government pretends that microplastics, toxic chemicals, and other industrial pollutants don’t exist, or that they are not as damaging as CO2, supposedly. In fact, it was government that incentivized (through enforced regulation, funding and tax incentives) the use of plastic, and the banning of paper packaging, supposedly to “protect the environment”. What happened was the emergence of an incentive for government officials with regulating powers to promote a new technology, plastic. Only they, and their partner shareholders, would have prior knowledge of future regulations that would spike demand for plastic, in which they had already invested. We went from glass bottles and paper packaging in the 1980s and 1990s to all-plastic packaging, backs and bottles. Sure, that’s environmental. But this is what happens when new regulations emerge. When you have the power to enforce business practices through the monopoly of violence of the state, then you have every incentive to make up arbitrary corrupt regulations, such as enforcing a new material (plastic) while having first-access insider information to make stock market decisions on. The stock market is a statist’s wet dream, but I digress.

We want to know how we can protect the environment without the state. Granted, the state does have some environmental policies in place, whether their enforcement is flexible for lobbying billionaires or not.

The state has some environmental regulations because a critical mass of people care about the environment. Even a monopoly of violence like the state must consider, even slightly, the sentiments of its desperate customers, otherwise it faces destabilization, not to mention being overthrown in a colour revolution. Yes, even the most dictatorial state, theocracy and brutal monarchy must somewhat consider the wants of the people, which is why kings and government officials invest so much in propaganda to influence the wants of the people. If the general sentiment of the people didn’t matter, then propaganda would be useless.

The free market responds to the wants of the people more accurately and in real time. This is because, without a state to helplessly rely on and to cast a meaningless vote in, people must put their money where their mouths are. The free market not only gives you what you want, but how much you want it too. You vote every time you decide to buy or not buy something. You vote every time you cast a positive or negative review, every time you recommend or disregard a business. So, businesses respond to you directly, organically, proportionally, and without the corrupt middleman of the state. In a free uninterrupted market, society responds to the wants of the people accurately, proportionally and timely; and all this accomplished spontaneously, organically, decentralized.

Are you an environmentalist? How much of an environmentalist are you? How much of your own money (not the taxes of others) are you willing to give to protect what you pretend to value? If you value the environment enough, you should be able to put your money where your mouth is, and you get some skin in the game.

So environmentalism and heritage protection in the free market works exactly the same as any other public good without government: private ownership and insurance. Does a society have enough people who want enough to protect something? Then they will find a way to do it. If not, then that society does not deserve to preserve anything, and if not, then certainly no state would feel obligated to protect it anyway. And if a state does enforce something that society as a whole doesn’t want, then that is undemocratic and oppressive. If the free market doesn’t lead to a community protecting a forest, for example, then you can be damn sure than the state wouldn’t protect it either. This is why we’re left with very few forests now; even though government has metastasised to every corner of the world.

People didn’t have an environmental or historical heritage sentiment up until very recently. Ancient ruins, for example in Rome, were not ruined by themselves. People kept pillaging them for centuries, vandalizing and reusing free statues, marble and building material for their own newer constructions. Even now we know of specific buildings in Rome and other ancient cities that were build using material from specific older ruins. And this happened even though some form of state (feud, monarchy, empire, democracy etc) was already in place. Why didn’t the state protect this historical heritage? Because society as a whole didn’t have a heritage consciousness. It wasn’t shameful or taboo to destroy parts of your history to build your home. People didn’t value heritage as much. The Colosseum, for example, is missing one half of its outer rim because that was the most accessible part from the the city, which made it easier to dismantle it from there. But the dismantling of the Colosseum stopped. Romans saw the ugliness of destroying something so beautiful, and so they developed a natural heritage sentiment. Then, and only then, the state intervened, not because the state is divinely benevolent, but because people developed that sentiment first. If the state were divinely benevolent and wise, it would have protected the Colosseum before having to wait for people to become conscious. The state caught up with the societal sentiment just to keep itself relevant, and to take credit for the goods of the free market. And if the state can do a good, then the free market can do it much better.

Without a state, environmentalists can acquire, buy or claim natural and historical heritage sites, according to how a free market is achieved (more on this later). But how statelessness is achieved is not as relevant as how it works. In a fee market, we insure our property and our rights, which is supposed to be the role of government (which does such a poor job at it). The only difference is that there are competing insurance companies, which organically share a database of clients, just like today’s insurance companies. People with bad ratings would have to pay extra premiums, and would face justified discrimination in society, just like people with a criminal records or bad credit ratings. Notice how, even today under a state, the free market takes into consideration your criminal record and credit rating if you’re to get a job, get investors, or even get married. The free market is inevitable, and it works spontaneously even better than the state, observably and demonstrably.

So naturally, if a society wants environmentalism enough to pressure government to do something about it, then it can certainly allocate natural and historical heritage sites to those who value them more. How I know this? It’s free market dynamics. And it is observable, for example, private collectors pay vast amounts to secure historical relics, even though this is illegal for any state. They pay a premium due to the illegal status of private historical heritage collection, plus they run the risk of persecution. Imagine what they could do to protect heritage site were it not illegal to own one. Those who wouldn’t value heritage sites would have no incentive to destroy them; they’d seek the suckers-for-heritage to sell to. Show me how the state of Syria, or the state of the USA that funded ISIS protected the ancient site of Palmyra. And let’s not get into the environmental damage of war (napalm carpet-bombing of the jungles of Vietnam for example), which is the most predictable symptom of government.

Besides, it’s a burden of proof fallacy to demand that I prove how the free market would protect the environment more than the state. The free market (non-existence of the state) is the default. So the state (alternative hypothesis to the default) must prove how it protects the environment better than the free market. The state is an unprovable circular-reasoning fallacy that presumes to work better because it presumes to work better.

In a free market, we can insure the air, the oceans, and historical heritage sites. Everyone who wants to participate in society would have an incentive to have some sort of insurance, just like today. Insurances would have clauses in them for clients to not pollute the environment or disrespect natural history sites, so that insurances can reduce their costs. This is the same as a car insurance company requiring that you have a driving licence in order to get insured; if you want to be insured, you must help them protect their other clients.

But there are people who don’t value the environment as much, or who value their business more than the environment it damages. In that case, the optimal solution between environmental preservation and industry would be found spontaneously and organically through uninterrupted and organic free-market feedback. If enough people value the environment enough, they’d show it to polluting businesses, and to customers of such businesses. If not, then they don’t deserve a protected environment. In a free market, self-accountability is one of the highest virtues and strengths.

It is strength to see where you are responsible in a problem; only then do you see where you have the power to fix it.

“But will we have to pay insurance to protect our rights and the environment?” Yes, people in a free market would prefer some sort of insurance to preserve their rights, and to show good faith that they are willing to play nice with others. We now pay arbitrary unfair crippling taxes that fund oil wars, and still most people won’t complain. Yet critics of the free market complain that they’d have to pay insurance for their rights; even though nobody forces them to. The difference between taxes and free-market insurances is that, in the free market, you retain the right to not insure yourself at all, and take your chances. Also competing insurances, without barriers of entry for new competitors, secure the most cost-effective insurance premiums for clients.

Forests and beaches are the easiest to protect in the free market, because they can be privately owned by collective groups of environmentalists, who can fund their upkeep by taking in paying visitors, who will in turn be bound by rules not to pollute. If they fail to abide by the rules, they lose their right to revisit, just like the rules of a gym or a restaurant or a club. If visitors do damage, then the environmentalist owners can seek retribution from the visitor’s insurance. He doesn’t have insurance? Then maybe no one can visit the site without insurance. See how insurance can completely substitute legislation and statist social order?

“But what about the air and the sea?” The ocean and the air are not area-specific, so they can’t be insured by owners; there are no owners. But we can still insure them regardless. Remember, an insurance is the same as a bet: you bet against what you want, so the insurance (bookie) will want you to get what you want. So, if enough people want to insure the air and the water, they can private donate into a recurring bet: a specified, realistic and measurable level of cleanliness. Clients will want to place this bet with insurance companies that insure industries, so that insurances companies will have an incentive to influence their clients with contract clauses, discounts, etc. In other words, insurances will make more money if they pressure industries to adopt environmental practices. If environmentalists want environmentalism enough, then these insurances will get free-market feedback that there is demand for environmentalism, and this demand is from enough people who want something enough to pay for it. So insurances have a tempting offer: to receive money from environmentalists simply by incentivizing their industry clients to follow environmental practices. If the environmental input is tempting enough, then insurances can provide discounts to their industry clients. So, for the insurances, the loss of income from the discounts they provide to industrialists will be offset by the environmentalists’ premiums. And for the industrialists, the loss of income from from environmental practices will be offset by the discounts provided by their insurances. How mush the environment is protects will depend on how much environmentalists as a whole are willing to chip in to protect the environment in such a way, and how much cost-effective environmental technology becomes.

And who will measure the environmental impact to see whether insurance companies are doing their job? Private industry standards already exist, and government always plays catchup with them. For example, the food safety standard HACCP emerged privately decades before any government decided to enforce it. You might argue that, without government, you’d get the odd food businesses without food safety standards. This is true, but to each their own. Why would you deny the option of people who don’t value their food safety to get cheap food from businesses will less food safety? This is their own business. You might argue that perhaps their poor health might indirectly affect you. Maybe. But enforcing government authority directly impacts everyone, and I don’t see enough people making this argument against the state.

I hear you now asking “But do we have to pay for the environment? Wouldn’t it be cheaper if a government enforced environmental practices?” Not at all. To maintain a monopoly of violence of the state, we need vast polluting armies (the greatest polluter in the world is the US military). The largest part of everything we buy with our “net” income is in fact hidden taxes (sales tax, customs tax, energy taxes, corporate fees and taxes, packaging and other penalties, etc). So we already pay most of our labour into government to utilize military industrial complexes and wars and nuclear weapons that pollute the environment more than anything. Is all that environmental damage worth it to supposedly protect the environment? And yes, the state has every incentive to make war because it needs to make itself relevant. When we centralize so much power in the hands of the few, it is tempting to use said power. So how is the state environment-friendly again?

Without the state and it’s wasteful economy-suppressing practices, we would have much more available income to insure the environment, if it matters as much as we pretend it does. But what about the free riders who would enjoy the environment without chipping in to owning an environmental site, or insuring the air and sea? This is a non-problem. Forcing people to pay for something they never asked is immoral. Yes, maybe they do value it but decide not to pay regardless, if others pay for it anyway. Then again, that is not a reason to enforce government. If it free riding is unfair, then wait until you realise who unfair government is. The free rider non-problem is not enough to sell our souls to the devil of enforced governance. Plus, just like in today’s voluntary charities (despite people being taxed to the bone for welfare): enough people get satisfaction from contributing to a good cause, even though most charities today are money laundering, tax exemption schemes, scams, and secret service fronts. People who contribute to environmental and historical heritage protection would enjoy societal recognition, status, and community.

Lastly, let us not forget how the centralization of government powers makes them easy to be hijacked by the highest bidder. Lobbying is a euphemism for bribing. Industries lobby government to give them a free pass to pollute, while also imposing costly environmental regulations to small/medium competitors, which drives them out of business, and causes monopolies of polluting lobbyists. In a free market, it is much harder to bribe private standards and private insurances because they are numerous, they are competing, and there are no barriers of entry for new emerging competitors. This is another reason why government exacerbates environmental damage.

So, why on earth would be rest the environment on something as toxic as the government?