Libertarian Girl

Environmentalists consistently lobby for more ways in which America’s largest polluter can regulate all other polluters while giving themselves all immunity from their very own laws.

How is that? Well, the government causes more damage to the environment than any corporation, group, or entity in America, yet this same government regulates all others on how they can pollute — and environmental groups consistently want to expand that power. Honestly, what a scam the government has going here. Damage the environment more than anyone else, get people to want you to make laws protecting that environment– in fact, to beg you to take more power in protecting the environment, and then make yourself immune from those laws while polluting away the whole time.

Bureaucrats who pollute (and there are a lot of them, much more than CEOs or corporate underlings who do) have immunity from prosecution, either as a government entity or on an individual basis. That’s an injustice that a libertarian world would fix.

As Dr. Mary Ruwart writes:

“By turning to government for environmental protection, we’ve placed the fox in charge of the hen house…”

She goes on to detail some of the havoc that governments, federal, state and local, have wreaked on the environment:

“In 1988, for example, the EPA demanded that the Departments of Energy and Defense clean up 17 of their weapons plants which were leaking radioactive and toxic chemicals — enough contamination to cost $100 billion in clean-up costs over 50 years! The EPA was simply ignored. No bureaucrats went to jail or were sued for damages. Government departments have sovereign immunity.

In 1984, a Utah court ruled that the U.S. military was negligent in its nuclear testing, causing serious health problems (e.g. death) for the people exposed to radioactive fallout. The Court of Appeals dismissed the claims of the victims, because government employees have sovereign immunity.

Hooker Chemical begged the Niagara Falls School Board not to excavate the land where Hooker had safely stored toxic chemical waste. The school board ignored these warnings and taxpayers had to foot a $30 million relocation bill when health problems arose. The EPA filed suit, not against the reckless school board, but against Hooker Chemical! Government officials have sovereign immunity.”

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Environment, Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.