Free Enterprise Environmentalism

Free Enterprise Environmentalism argues that laissez capitalism can address climate change more effectively than socialism and government regulation. The contributors support the role of markets, free enterprise, limited government, and private property rights in service of environmental protections. Covering topics such as extinction, overpopulation, pollution, and resources exhaustion, the contributors offer alternate solutions to environmental degradation than have been proposed by the political left.

Block demonstrates how the basic institutions of a free society -- property rights, markets, and prices -- provide the necessary and sufficient building blocks for successful environmental preservation. And shows that the repeated abject failures of both socialist commons and governmental scientific bureaucratic management are inherently doomed to failure. This is an especially welcome and timely volume given the new Biden administration's plans for a vast expansion of the traditional command-and-control approach to all environmental problems as well as a massive acquisition of well-managed private forestlands, ranchlands, and farmlands.

Walter E. Block is Harold E. Wirth Endowed Chair and Professor of Economics, College of Business, Loyola University New Orleans.