L.A. Liberty

[I]f private individuals were to own all the lands and resources, then it would be to the owners’ interest to maximize the present value of each resource. Excessive depletion of the resource would lower its capital value on the market. Against the preservation of the capital value of the resource as a whole, the resource owner balances the income to be presently obtained from its use. The balance is decided, ceteris paribus, by the time preference and the other preferences of the market. If private individuals can only use but not own the land, the balance is destroyed, and the government has provided an impetus to excessive present use.

Not only is the announced aim of conservation laws—to aid the future at the expense of the present—illegitimate, and the arguments in favor of it invalid, but compulsory conservation would not achieve even this goal. For the future is already provided for through present saving and investment. Conservation laws will indeed coerce greater investment in natural resources: using other resources to maintain renewable resources and forcing a greater inventory of stock in depletable resources. But total investment is determined by the time preferences of individuals, and these will not have changed. Conservation laws, then, do not really increase total provisions for the future; they merely shift investment from capital goods, buildings, etc., to natural resources. They thereby impose an inefficient and distorted investment pattern on the economy.

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Murray Rothbard, Power & Market

The free market conserves resources.

Posted August 3, 2012 at 3:25pm in Environment | comments || home