The forest is nothing without the trees. If it is harmful to the individual, it is harmful to society. It is not a Free Market Economy vs. a Mixed Economy or Command Economy. It is economic slavery governed by a ruling elite vs. peaceful people engaging in voluntary and consensual interaction. A regulation is strangulating the entrepreneur/employer by means of violent legislation. A tax is currency that is extorted from an individual or business by the threat of kidnapping or death should that individual resist. Both taxes and regulations divert precious resources away from production and customer satisfaction in order to placate the political megalomaniacs who will waste that stolen currency on pork barrel projects, boondoggles, and violent occupations, invasions, assassinations, drone strikes, genocide, and overseas war. They drive up prices and sacrifice quality in the marketplace. It is one giant Broken Window Fallacy. It is always a lose-lose proposition.

“Government” is a monopoly on initiated aggression over a given geographical region funded by extortion and propped up by the belief in the myth of authority. Saying that we need “government” to prevent certain businesses from polluting falsely assumes that “government” is not the largest polluter of all by means of the U.S. military and that our sociopathic political control freaks necessarily have the best intentions in mind.

Green Party environmentalists would do well to not forget the pollution of dead bodies and corpses that has littered history whenever “government” gets involved in anything. That is the only pollution that worries me. Once we get that taken care of then we can turn our attention to clean air, potable water, and fertile land. It was not the Anarchists that dropped two atomic bombs on defenseless cities immediately killing thousands, violently interned thousands of Japanese-Americans and German-Americans, exterminated Native Americans by the millions, captured, castrated, raped, and enslaved millions of Africans and Irish for centuries, waged bloody wars, murdered millions of German Jews in gas chambers, starved millions of Chinese and Russians due to misguided Communistic economic policies, killed or maimed 1 million Iraqis, and economically enslaved present generations and the unborn to crippling debt and unfunded liabilities so that we may continue to live in the phony dream of a thriving economy.

These insane megalomaniacs care only about securing their own power and ruling over peaceful people. If they express a concern for the environment it is only because they believe such rhetoric will land them more votes due to popular sentiment of the times. If we lived in the early 1800s you can be damned sure many if not all politicians would be campaigning on the grounds of supporting chain slavery and how best to subjugate the negro. This is not for any concern over slave masters but rather because popular sentiment dictates that a pro chain slavery perspective is likely to get one elected by support of those special interest groups. It is not only that “government” corrupts but also that it attracts the corruptible. If you think you can wear the ring of power and not be corrupted by its influence than you suffer from a destructive delusion far greater than ignorance. It is not that some classes are unfit to rule. All classes are unfit to rule! Vacate the State!

Americans shall never have real, lasting peace so long as we give our allegiance to a king — that is, in our case, to the whole conglomeration of institutionalized exploiters and murderers we know as the State.

Robert Higgs