At 10:52 AM 6/7/96 -0400, Perry wrote:
Well, Milton Friedman's method for saving the whale is to leave it to the free market, if people want whales in the oceans they won't buy whale meat. [...] Dr. Phill Hallam-Baker, PhD, however, does not understand economics in spite of his PhD and thus attributes views to free market economists
hallam@Etna.ai.mit.edu writes: [...] that they do not hold, as in his whole cloth synthesis of a viewpoint which he ascribed to Milton Friedman which Milton Friedman would never in a million years espouse.
Oh, come on now, Perry - while Friedman has more sense than that, you've been around the Libertarian party long enough to know people who call themselves free-market environmentalists who contend that whales will be best protected if they're owned property, that do-gooder environmentalists will be free to outbid Sushi Inc.* for them, and that initial ownership of the whales ought to be decided by the traditional initial land-ownership method of homesteading. Personally, I view this as rent-seeking by folks who ought to let the whales own themselves, and think they've got as little understanding of free-market environmentalism as the government bureaucrats who massively subsidize the logging of US National Forests, but they _are_ there. [*A wholly owned subsidiary of Taco Bell, but with digicash** and anonymous stock ownership, On the Internet, nobody knows that all restaurants are Taco Bell.] [**Ineffective attempt to pretend some relevance to cypherpunks...] # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # http://www.idiom.com/~wcs # Dispel Authority!