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Title: RFK2 Redux
Author: Kevin Carson
Date: April 21, 2005
Language: en
Topics: Democratic Party, green capitalism
Source: Retrieved on 4th September 2021 from https://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/04/rfk2-redux.html

Kevin Carson

RFK2 Redux

Recently B.K. Marcus expressed his surprised pleasure, with some

reservations, at RFK Jr.‘s apparent endorsement of a free market

approach to environmentalism.

I read this and I’m awfully suspicious. I’m suspicious of any Kennedy.

I’m especially suspicious of a rich-boy Yankees in the spotlight.

But I read this. I reread this. And all I can say for now is:

“Right on, Bobby, Jr!”

As it turns out, his misgivings were probably based on sound instinct.

The Commons Blog and Steve Verdon go so far, respectively, as to

denounce Kennedy as a “Free Market Fraud,”

Of course, Robert Kennedy has little interest in the free market or

protecting property rights. Rather, he is a “faux market

environmentalist” and partisan defender of the federal environmental

regulatory bureaucracy....

and a “prevaricator.”

Both bloggers object strenuously to RFK’s claim to the “free market”

label, owing to his frequent statements like this one in The Grist:

You have to force companies to internalize costs. All of the federal

environmental laws are designed to restore free-market capitalism in

America in this regard....

I’m a free-marketeer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the

polluters who are cheating the free market and I say, “We are going to

force you to internalize your costs the same way you are internalizing

your profit.” That’s what the federal environmental laws allow us to do:

restore real property rights in America.

Kennedy seems, as evidenced by quotes like that above and the following

one from a Buzzflash interview, to view the federal regulatory state as

the best mechanism for internalizing costs:

But the energy industry gave $48 million to President Bush and the

Republican Party during the 2000 race, and the payback is billions of

dollars of relief from regulations that are meant to protect the

commons, including the Clean Air Acts’ resource performance standards,

which the Bush Administration abandoned last month. So it’s illegal for

those companies to put those substances into our air, but the Bush

Administration has now said that it is no longer going to enforce the

laws against them....

Let me add one other thing. Yesterday, the Bush Administration announced

that it wasn’t going to enforce mercury standards....

A government regulation, enforced by administrative law, is about the

most inappropriate mechanism for cost internalization I can think of.

Even if you believe some form of federal action is necessary, which I do

not, some form of “green tax” or Pigouvian tax on externalities (which

Verdon seems to suggest at one point) is a much better way of doing it.

Personally, I’d prefer restoring the common law of public and private

nuisance as it existed before the commercial interests emasculated it in

the 19^(th) century, and let local juries assess damages against

corporations that pollute their neighbors’ air and groundwater. The

polluters might just decide that the EPA was a big ol’ pussycat, after

all. Indeed, the whole point of administrative penalties enforced by

executive agencies was that they preempted potentially much costlier

civil actions and replaced them with a lowest-common-denominator

standard.

RFK2 continues:

All of our federal agencies have now been captured by the industries

that they’re intended to regulate. The head of the Forest Service is a

timber industry lobbyist. The head of our public lands is a mining

industry lobbyist....

Captured? They are the creations of the agencies they were ostensibly

intended to regulate, as Gabriel Kolko might have told him. The great

land barons and timber interests worked hand in glove with “progressive”

government to create conservation laws, as Murray Rothbard described the

process in Power and Market:

Conservation laws... must also be looked upon as grants of monopolistic

privilege. One outstanding example is the American government’s policy,

since the end of the nineteenth century, of “reserving” vast land tracts

of the “public domain”--i.e., the government’s land holdings....

Forests, in particular, have been reserved, ostensibly for the purpose

of conservation. What is the effect of withholding huge tracts of

timberland from production? It is to confer a monopolistic privilege,

and therefore a restrictionist price, on competing private lands and on

competing timber.

The great landed interests and the timber industry were, therefore,

major supporters of federal conservation policy.

Kennedy’s statement below, especially, demonstrates a muddled thought

process:

And the free market has to be protected through government regulation.

As I say, capitalists do not want free markets. They want profits. And

the best way to capture profits — to capture a reliable profit stream —

is to get control of government and use government to crush your

competition.

If government intervention itself, what Kolko called “political

capitalism,” is the best way to capture profits, then it doesn’t make

much sense to argue at the same time that government intervention is

also the best way to prevent such profiteering. Government cannot

simultaneously be the main cause of something, and the only way of

preventing it.

Mr. Kennedy also seems rather mixed up about the nature of the commons,

confusing a common with state property:

One of the central roles of government from the beginning of the first

organized communities has been protection — the safeguarding of the

commons on behalf of the public. The commons under Roman law — under the

Code of Justinian — were defined as those things that are not

susceptible to private ownership; in other words, the shared resources,

the air that we breathe, the waterways, the dune lands, wetlands,

wandering animals.

And under Roman law, if you were a citizen of Rome, the Emperor himself,

whether you were humble, noble, rich or poor, could not stop you from

crossing a beach flowing at an ebb and taking out the fish. Everybody

had a right to use those resources. Nobody had a right to use them in a

way that would diminish or injure their use and enjoyment by others.

That principle is echoed in the Magna Carta and in the constitutions of

all of our states, through a doctrine that’s called the Public Trust

Doctrine. And it’s at the heart of our environmental laws. And again,

from the beginning of time, the first acts of tyranny were to privatize

the commons. In fact, the Magna Carta was passed because of the Battle

of Runneymede, which was precipitated by King John’s efforts to turn the

rivers, the fisheries and the deer over to private corporations and

privileged parties.

For too many free market libertarians, this would be the cue to bring in

a horrible misrepresentation of Garrett Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons,

and an argument that the only solution is to “privatize” forests into

the hands of the usual big busienss suspects. Verdon does himself

credit, and throws away any chance for sitting at the vulgar libertarian

kool kids table, by coming to the defense of the commons as a legitimate

form of property.

....Kennedy is also prevaricating when he talks about both the tragedy

of the commons as well as firms internalizing costs.

First, there is no law in economics that says a common resources has to

result in the tragedy of the commons scenario. In fact, there are

instances where common resources are managed just fine with little or no

government internvention.

Verdon then quotes this statement from a review of Elinor Ostrom et

al.‘s Governing the Commons to bolster his position:

In contrast to the proposition of the tragedy of the commons argument,

common pool problems sometimes are solved by voluntary organizations

rather than by a coercive state. Among the cases considered are communal

tenure in meadows and forests, irrigation communities and other water

rights, and fisheries.

(In fairness to Hardin, he himself specified that his argument applied

only to an unregulated common.)

Contrary to popular stereotype, quite a few free market libertarians are

amenable to the idea of the common, as a form of socially-owned (not

state-owned) property. For example, check out this article by Roderick

Long, and this one by Carlton Hobbs.

Still another Kennedy quote that raises some problems is this:

And that’s what’s happening in this country — the free market is being

eliminated. And in many of the major sectors, the free market has

already disappeared. There is no free market left in agriculture. A

farmer can’t raise a pig and get it slaughtered, and bring it to a

stockyard and sell it. The stockyards are gone. The farmers are out of

business, and hog production and meat production and chicken production

in this country is now controlled by giant agri-businesses, as is grain

production. The same is true in the energy sector, and in the media —

you’ve got 17,000 news outlets in this country that are now controlled

by 11 corporations.

He apparently confuses a particular market structure--what neoclassical

economists call “perfect competition”--with the free market, and regards

it as government’s job to promote the “free market” by actively

intervening to breaking up concentrations of ownership. In that sense,

he is a throwback to the liberals at the turn of the 20^(th) century,

who regarded a petty bourgeois economy of small firms and atomistic

competition as their beau ideal, but considered federal anti-trust

action necessary to maintain such an economy in existence. For him, the

free market is not a set of procedural rules, but a particular outcome.

He confuses a symptom with the disease.

Now, I agree with Mr. Kennedy’s view that the state of affairs he

describes in the block quote above is not a free market. But not because

any particular level of concentration violates the model of “perfect

competition” necessary for a free market. I object, rather, because I

believe such levels of concentration came about through massive state

intervention to cartelize the market; further, I do not believe that

such concentration is possible through a free market mechanism, in the

vast majority of cases. If, however, the levels of concentration he

describes were the outcome of a genuinely free market, and resulted from

superior efficiency of such large-scale organization against

smaller-scale competitors rather than from state coercion, then I would

have to accept them as legitimate (despite some aesthetic revulsion).

Kennedy is greatly in need of theoretical clarity; he needs to state

exactly why such market concentration is incompatible with the free

market. Does he believe that certain outcomes of a free market can

create, without government intervention, the preconditions for a

non-free market? Does the market concentration he describes result from

laissez-faire, or from state intervention? And if the latter, how does

it gibe with his claim that government intervention is necessary to

prevent concentration?

His theoretical confusion in this regard reminds me of Chomsky, who

sometimes writes in great detail of the utter dependence of large

corporations on the state to externalize their costs on the taxpayer and

protect them from competition, and then at other times calls for a

dramatic strenghtening of the state as the only way to break up “private

concentrations of power.” For Chomsky, the corporation is utterly

dependent on the state, but at the same time threatens to achieve total

power if the state does not restrain it.

But despite all these caveats, I cannot go so far as Kennedy’s other

critics in calling him a prevaricator or a fraud. He is, all in all,

much superior to the general run of Democratic politicians (not to

mention having a claim to the “free market” title at least as good as

that of the hangers-on at ASI and the Globalization Institute). Although

admittedly he isn’t thinking very clearly about the solutions, he often

hits fairly near the mark in pointing out the problems. And even when

he’s somewhat off the mark, his general approach is quite an improvement

on that of most big government liberals. He at least sees that the big

polluters are engaged in some sort of collusion with the government, and

that government action is somehow involved in preventing costs from

being internalized. He’s not nearly as far from the right path as other

members of his party, and could well be amenable to rational persuasion

regarding legitimate free market environmentalist policies. Certainly,

in using “free market” as a god-term rather than a devil-term, and

portraying big business as its main enemy, he’s light years ahead of the

average “progressive.” After reading the work of someone like, say,

Thomas Frank, who treats “laissez-faire” and “free market” as synonyms

for the feudal dominion of GM and Wal-Mart, RFK Jr.‘s rhetoric is a

breath of fresh air.

All things considered, I still think Kennedy holds more promise for

fruitful cooperation with the free market left than almost any other

prominent Democratic figure.