Why do I defend property rights so much? A large part has to do with the fact that I only wish that most people would leave other people alone. If your neighbors are strange, do not worry about it. Leave them be. I think this is why I usually do not have a problem with people who engage in obvious sinful behavior, since I just do not care.
There are some things that I do care about. When your behavior harms others, you better believe I will be calling for you head, so to speak. I do not care if you are on drugs, mentally insane, or whatever. I am not a merciful kind of guy, considering the state of the world we live in. Yes, I am well aware that Christian are to forgive, but that does not mean we have to give up on justice.
Anyway, one of the groups that really annoys me is the environmental movement. They are a bunch of upper-middle class hypocrites who want to reach some unspecified ideal balance between man and nature and they are wiling to trample your property rights to do it. Nothing they do has much to do with environmentalism usually either. If you go to a rally they put on, it usually has some anti-free market message and lots of neo-communist propaganda.
What really annoys me is that many of these people do not live the lives the want us to live. In most cases, they waste just as much as we do, although they have started to get around that via carbon credits. Still, they persist in informing us that by breathing, we are polluting the air and causing massive heat waves (or cooling waves?) across the entire world and they we are a virus. It is like they are all just a bunch of Agent Smith’s (did I mention I really hate that movie?) telling us that we are all viruses and that we destroy everything.
Well, I am here to tell you that if we all just gave property rights their proper respect, that is we left everyone else alone and allowed them to use their property as they saw fit, then there would be much less pollution in this world not more?
It is the truth and it is a sad fact that many people cannot wrap their heads around it because I think the world would be a better place if we all just respected the property rights of our fellow man instead of claiming some moral high ground and taking it away from other people.
How does this work? Well, let me describe for you a small, but hopefully relatable example. Say you own a small farm where you raise pigs. If you have ever been to a farm, you know that animal waste is a huge problem that must be dealt with. Usually, manure is used to fertilize crops, so you store it somewhere until you are ready to use it. Naturally, you are not interested in dumping it anywhere because you do not want it to be piled up somewhere on your farm and nobody really wants it on their property as well. Therefore, you are not polluting, but keeping it same from harming the environment.
When you own something, usually you want to keep it in good condition, unless you are mentally ill to begin with. Most people like to keep their lawns cut, their houses clean, and their cars in working order, all without government coercion. The few who do not do this are often ostracized by most people because who would want to be around a dirty person?
The sad fact is, environmentalism destroys free market enterprise which has in the last century or so prevent whales from being killed in mass due to oil exploration and kept horse waste off the streets due to the rise of the automobile. Appliances have gotten more energy efficient not because of concern for the environment, but because people want to spend less on their electricity bill but still enjoy things like coffee and toast.
As long as there is a free market incentive (and there always is), government coercion is not needed to protect the environment. But do not bother pointing this out to environmentalists. They could not care less and about as likely to listen to reason as a toaster would to Albert Einstein explaining the theory of relativity.
You see, they are out for a political agenda that disregards property rights. They look to the government as the salvation of this world. Many of them have taken to declaring mankind as a blight on this world when in fact we are not. Since most of them live in suburban and urban areas, it does not surprise me that they do not realize that man actually does not occupy much of the world. In the United States, we occupy maybe 5.6% of the land mass and leave the rest of it alone. When I look out the windows at my office, I see more trees than office buildings.
Most environmental groups are not interested in balance, even though they claim that they are. In truth, they are more interested in destroying the free market in the name of some vague ideal that even they cannot define. And such notions are very dangerous for mankind.
The best thing we can do is to reject their ideology outright and reason with the people who have been duped by them.