                     Why Socialism Causes Pollution
        
                         by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
        
                             A Reprint from
                              The Freeman
                       from the March 1992 issue
        
            Copyright (c)1992 by The Foundation for Economic
          Education, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A. Permission is
          granted to reprint any article in this issue except
              "The Illusion That's the Welfare State" and
          "Czechoslovakia on the Hudson," provided appropriate
            credit is given and two copies of the reprinted
                  material are sent to The Foundation.
        
        
        Corporations are often accused of despoiling the
        environment in their quest for profit. Free enterprise
        is supposedly incompatible with environmental
        preservation, so that government regulation is
        required.
        
        Such thinking is the basis for current proposals to
        expand environmental regulation greatly. So many new
        controls have been proposed and enacted that the late
        economic journalist Warren Brookes once forecast that
        the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could
        well become "the most powerful government agency on
        earth, involved in massive levels of economic, social,
        scientific, and political spending and interference.''l
        
        But if the profit motive is the primary cause of
        pollution, one would not expect to find much pollution
        in socialist countries, such as the former Soviet
        Union, China, and in the former Communist countries of
        Eastern and Central Europe. That is, in theory. In
        reality exactly the opposite is true: The socialist
        world suffers from the worst pollution on earth. Could
        it be that free enterprise is not so incompatible with
        environmental protection after all?
        
        
                I. SOCIALIST POLLUTION The Soviet Union
        
        In the Soviet Union there was a vast body of
        environmental law and regulation that purportedly
        protected the public interest, but these constraints
        have had no perceivable benefit. The Soviet Union, like
        all socialist countries, suffered from a massive
        "tragedy of the commons," to borrow the term used by
        biologist Garrett Hardin in his classic 1968 article.2
        Where property is communally or governmentally owned
        and treated as a free resource, resources will
        inevitably be overused with little regard for future
        consequences.
        
        The Soviet government's imperatives for economic
        growth, combined with communal ownership of virtually
        all property and resources, caused tremendous
        environmental damage. According to economist Marshall
        Goldman, who studied and traveled extensively in the
        Soviet Union, "The attitude that nature is there to be
        exploited by man is the very essence of the Soviet
        production ethic."3
        
        A typical example of the environmental damage caused by
        the Soviet economic system is the exploitation of the
        Black Sea. To comply with five-year plans for housing
        and building construction, gravel, sand, and trees
        around the beaches were used for decades as
        construction materials. Because there is no private
        property, "no value is attached to the gravel along the
        seashore. Since, in effect, it is free, the contractors
        haul it away."4 This practice caused massive beach
        erosion which reduced the Black Sea coast by 50 percent
        between 1920 and 1960. Eventually, hotels, hospitals,
        and, of all things, a military sanitarium collapsed
        into the sea as the shoreline gave way. Frequent
        landslides--as many as 300 per year-- have been
        reported.
        
        Water pollution is catastrophic. Effluent from a
        chemical plant killed almost all the fish in the Oka
        River in 1965, and similar fish kills have occurred in
        the Volga, Ob, Yenesei, Ural, and Northern Dvina
        rivers. Most Russian factories discharge their waste
        without cleaning it at all. Mines, oil wells, and ships
        freely dump waste and ballast into any available body
        of water, since it is all one big (and tragic)
        "commons."
        
        Only six of the 20 main cities in Moldavia had a sewer
        system by the late 1960s, and only two of those cities
        made any effort to treat the sewage. Conditions are far
        more primitive in the countryside.
        
        The Aral and Caspian seas have been gradually
        disappearing as large quantities of their water have
        been diverted for irrigation. And since untreated
        sewage flows into feeder rivers, they are also heavily
        polluted.
        
        Some Soviet authorities expressed fears that by the
        turn of the century the Aral Sea will be nothing but a
        salt marsh. One paper reported that because of the
        rising salt content of the Aral the remaining fish will
        rapidly disappear. It was recently revealed that the
        Aral Sea has shrunk by about a third. Its shore line
        "is arid desert and the wind blows dry deposits of salt
        thousands of miles away. The infant mortality rate [in
        that region] is four to five times the national
        average."5
        
        The declining water level in the Caspian Sea has been
        catastrophic for its fish population as spawning areas
        have turned into dry land. The sturgeon population has
        been so decimated that the Soviets have experimented
        with producing artificial caviar.
        
        Hundreds of factories and refineries along the Caspian
        Sea dump untreated waste into the sea, and major cities
        routinely dump raw sewage. It has been estimated that
        one-half of all the discharged effluent is carried in
        the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. The
        concentration of oil in the Volga is so great that
        steamboats are equipped with signs forbidding
        passengers to toss cigarettes overboard. As might be
        expected, fish kills along the Volga are a "common
        calamity."
        
        Lake Baikal, which is believed to be the oldest
        freshwater lake in the world, is also one of the
        largest and deepest. It is five times as deep as Lake
        Superior and contains twice the volume of water.
        According to Marshall Goldman, it was also "the best
        known example of the misuse of water resources in the
        USSR."6
        
        Factories and pulp mills have been dumping hundreds of
        millions of gallons of effluent into Lake Baikal each
        year for decades. As a result, animal life in the lake
        has been cut by more than 50 percent over the past half
        century. Untreated sewage is dumped into virtually all
        tributaries to the lake.
        
        Islands of alkaline sewage have been observed floating
        on the lake, including one that was 18 miles long and
        three miles wide. These "islands" have polluted the air
        around the lake as well as the water in it. Thousands
        of acres of forest surrounding the lake have been
        denuded, causing such erosion that dust storms have
        been reported. So much forest land in the Lake Baikal
        region has been destroyed that some observers reported
        shifting sands that link up with the Gobi Desert; there
        are fears that the desert may sweep into Siberia and
        destroy the lake.
        
        In other regions the fact that no compensation has to
        be paid for land that is flooded by water projects has
        made it easy for government engineers to submerge large
        areas of land. "As much land has been lost through
        flooding and salination as has been added through
        irrigation and drainage in the Soviet Union." 7
        
        These examples of environmental degradation in the
        Soviet Union are not meant to be exhaustive but to
        illustrate the phenomenon of Communist pollution. As
        Goldman has observed, the great pollution problems in
        Russia stem from the fact that the government
        determined that economic growth was to be pursued at
        any cost. "Government officials in the USSR generally
        have a greater willingness to sacrifice their
        environment than government officials in a society with
        private enterprise where there is a degree of public
        accountability. There is virtually a political as well
        as an economic imperative to devour idle resources in
        the USSR."8
        
        
                                 China
        
        In China, as in Russia, putting the government in
        charge of resource allocation has not had desirable
        environmental consequences. Information on the state of
        China's environment is not encouraging.
        
        According to the Worldwatch Institute, more than 90
        percent of the trees in the pine forests in China's
        Sichuan province have died because of air pollution. In
        Chungking, the biggest city in southwest China, a
        4,500-acre forest has been reduced by half. Acid rain
        has reportedly caused massive crop losses.
        
        There also have been reports of waterworks and landfill
        projects severely hampering fish migration. Fish
        breeding was so seriously neglected that fish has
        largely vanished from the national diet. Depletion of
        government-owned forests has turned them into deserts,
        and millions of acres of grazing and farm land have
        been devastated. Over eight million acres of land in
        the northern Chinese plains were made alkaline and
        unproductive during the "Great Leap Forward."
        
        
                       Central and Eastern Europe
        
        With Communism's collapse, word has begun to seep out
        about Eastern Europe's environmental disasters.
        According to the United Nations Global Environment
        Monitoring Program, "pollution in that region is among
        the worst on the Earth's surface."9 Jeffrey Leonard of
        the World Wildlife Fund concluded that "pollution was
        part and parcel of the system that molested the people
        [of Eastern Europe] in their daily lives.''10 Evidence
        is mounting of "an environmental nightmare," the legacy
        of "decades of industrial development with little or no
        environmental control.''1l
        
        Poland. According to the Polish Academy of Sciences, "a
        third of the nation's 38 million people live in areas
        of ecological disaster.''l2 In the heavily
        industrialized Katowice region of Poland, the people
        suffer 15 percent more circulatory disease, 30 percent
        more tumors, and 47 percent more respiratory disease
        than other Poles. Physicians and scientists believe
        pollution is a major contributor to these health
        problems.
        
        Acid rain has so corroded railroad tracks that trains
        are not allowed to exceed 24 miles an hour. The air is
        so polluted in Katowice that there are underground
        "clinics" in uranium mines where the chronically ill
        can go to breathe clean air.
        
        Continuous pumping of water from coal mines has caused
        so much land to subside that over 300,000 apartments
        were destroyed as buildings collapsed. The mine sludge
        has been pumped into rivers and streams along with
        untreated sewage which has made 95 percent of the water
        unfit for human consumption. More than 65 percent of
        the nation's water is even unfit for industrial use
        because it is so toxic that it would destroy heavy
        metals used by industry. In Cracow, Poland's ancient
        capital, acid rain "dissolved so much of the gold roof
        of the 16th century Sigismund Chapel that it recently
        had to be replaced.''13
        
        Industrial dust rains down on towns, depositing
        cadmium, lead, zinc, and iron. The dust is so heavy
        that huge trucks drive through city streets daily
        spraying water to reduce it. By some accounts eight
        tons of dust fall on each square mile in and around
        Cracow each year. The mayor of Cracow recently stated
        that the Vistula River--the largest river in Poland--is
        "nothing but a sewage canal.''14 The river has mercury
        levels that are three times what researchers say is
        safe, while lead levels are 25 times higher than deemed
        safe.
        
        Half of Poland's cities, including Warsaw, don't even
        treat their wastes, and 41 animal species have
        reportedly become extinct in Poland in recent years.
        While health statistics are spotty--they were not a
        priority of the Communist government--available data
        are alarming. A recent study of the Katowice region
        found that 21 percent of the children up to 4 years old
        are sick almost constantly, while 41 percent of the
        children under 6 have serious health problems.
        
        Life expectancy for men is lower than it was 20 years
        ago. In Upper Silesia, which is considered one of the
        most heavily industrialized regions in the world,
        circulatory disease levels are 15 percent higher than
        in the general population, cancer rates are 30 percent
        higher, respiratory disease is 47 percent higher, and
        there has been "an appalling increase in the number of
        retarded children," according to the Polish Academy of
        Sciences. Although pollution cannot be blamed for all
        these health problems, physicians and scientists attach
        much of the blame to this source.
        
        Czechoslovakia. In a speech given on New Year's Day of
        1990, Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel said, "We
        have laid waste to our soil and the rivers and the
        forests . . . and we have the worst environment in the
        whole of Europe today.''15 He was not exaggerating,
        although the competition for the title of "worst
        environment" is. clearly fierce. Sulfur dioxide
        concentrations in Czechoslovakia are eight times higher
        than in the United States, and "half the forests are
        dead or dying. 16
        
        Because of the overuse of fertilizers, farmland in some
        areas of Czechoslovakia is toxic. to more than one foot
        in depth. In Bohemia, in northwestern Czechoslovakia,
        hills stand bare because their vegetation has died in
        air so foul it can be tasted. One report describes the
        Czech countryside as a place where "barren plateaus
        stretch for miles, studded with the stumps and
        skeletons of pine trees. Under the snow lie thousands
        of acres of poisoned ground, where for centuries thick
        forests had grown.''17 There is a stretch of over 350
        miles where more than 300,000 acres of forest have
        disappeared and the remaining trees are dying.
        
        A thick, brown haze hangs over much of northern
        Czechoslovakia for about eight months of the year.
        Sometimes it takes on the sting of tear gas, according
        to local officials. There are environmental laws, but
        they aren't enforced. Sulfur in the air has been
        reported at 20 times the permissible level. Soil in
        some regions is so acidic that aluminum trapped in the
        clay is released. Scientists discovered that the
        aluminum has poisoned groundwater, killing tree and
        plant roots and filtering into the drinking water.
        
        Severe erosion in the decimated forests has caused
        spring floods in which all the melted snow cascades
        down mountainsides in a few weeks, causing further
        erosion and leading to water shortages in the summer.
        
        In its search for coal, the Communist government has
        used bulldozers on such a massive scale that they have
        "turned towns, farms and woodlands into coarse brown
        deserts and gaping hollows.''18 Because open-pit mining
        is cheaper than underground mining, and has been
        practiced extensively, in some areas of Czechoslovakia
        "you have total devastation of the land.''19
        
        East Germany. The new German government has claimed
        that nearly 40 percent of the East German populace
        suffers ill effects from pollutants in the air. In
        Leipzig, half the children are treated each year for
        illnesses believed to be associated with air pollution.
        
        Eighty percent of eastern Germany's surface waters are
        classified as unsuitable for fishing, sports, or
        drinking, and one out of three lakes has been declared
        biologically dead because of decades of untreated
        dumping of chemical waste.
        
        Much of the East German landscape has been devastated.
        Fifteen to 20 percent of its forests are dead, and
        another 40 percent are said to be dying. Between 1960
        and 1980 at least 70 villages were destroyed and their
        inhabitants uprooted by the government, which wanted to
        mine high-sulfur brown coal. The countryside is now
        "pitted with moon-like craters" and "laced with the
        remains of what were once spruce and pine trees,
        nestled amid clouds of rancid smog."20 The air in some
        cities is so polluted that residents use their car
        headlights during the day, and visitors have been known
        to vomit from breathing the air.
        
        Nearly identical problems exist in Bulgaria, Hungary,
        Romania, and Yugoslavia. Visiting scientists have
        concluded that pollution in Central and Eastern Europe
        "is more dangerous and widespread than anything they
        have seen in the Western industrial nations.''21
        
        
               II. UNITED STATES: PUBLIC SECTOR POLLUTION
        
        The last refuge of those who advocate socialistic
        solutions to environmental pollution is the claim that
        it is the lack of democratic processes that prevents
        the Communist nations from truly serving the public
        interest. If this theory is correct, then the public
        sector of an established democracy such as the United
        States should be one of the best examples of
        environmental responsibility. But U.S. government
        agencies are among the most cavalier when it comes to
        environmental stewardship.
        
        There is much evidence to dispute the theory that only
        private businesses pollute. In the United States, we
        need look no further than our own government agencies.
        These public sector institutions, such as the
        Department of Defense (DOD), are among the worst
        offenders. DOD now generates more than 400,000 tons of
        hazardous waste a year--more than is produced by the
        five largest chemical companies combined. To make
        matters worse, the Environmental Protection Agency
        lacks the enforcement power over the public sector that
        it possesses over the private sector.
        
        The lax situation uncovered by the General Accounting
        Office (GAO) at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma is
        typical of the way in which many Federal agencies
        respond to the EPA's directives. "Although DOD policy
        calls for the military services to . . . implement
        EPA's hazardous waste management regulations, we found
        that Tinker has been selling . . . waste oil, fuels,
        and solvents rather than recycling," reported the
        GAO.22
        
        One of the world's most poisonous spots lies about 10
        miles northeast of Denver in the Army's Rocky Mountain
        Arsenal. Nerve gas, mustard shells, the anti-crop spray
        TX, and incendiary devices have been dumped into pits
        there over the past 40 years. Dealing with only one
        "basin" of this dump cost $40 million. Six hundred
        thousand cubic yards of contaminated soil and sludge
        had to be scraped and entombed in a 16-acre, double-
        lined waste pile.
        
        There are plenty of other examples of Defense
        Department facilities that need major cleanup. In fact,
        total costs of a long-term Pentagon cleanup are hard to
        get a handle on. Some officials have conceded that the
        price tag could eventually exceed $20 billion.
        
        Government-owned power plants are another example of
        public-sector pollution. These plants are a large
        source of sulfur dioxide emissions.
        
        The federal government's Tennessee Valley Authority
        operates 59 coal-fired power plants in the Southeast,
        where it has had major legal confrontations with state
        governments who want the Federal agency to comply with
        state environmental regulations. The TVA has fought the
        state governments for years over compliance with their
        clean air standards. It won a major Supreme Court
        victory when the Court ruled that, as a federal
        government enterprise, it could be exempt from
        environmental regulations with which private sector and
        local governmental power plants must comply.
        
        Federal agricultural policy also has been a large
        source of pollution, in the past encouraging over-
        utilization of land subject to erosion. Powerful farm
        lobbies have protected "non-point" sources of pollution
        from the heavy hand of regulation placed on other
        private industries.
        
        
                        III. POLICY IMPLICATIONS
        
        These examples of environmental degradation throughout
        the world suggest some valuable lessons. First, it is
        not free enterprise per se that causes environmental
        harm; if so, the socialist world would be
        environmentally pristine.
        
        The heart of the problem lies with the failure of our
        legal institutions, not the free enterprise system.
        Specifically, American laws were weakened more than a
        century ago by Progressive Era courts that believed
        economic progress was in the public interest and should
        therefore supersede individual rights.23
        
        The English common law tradition of the protection of
        private property rights--including the right to be free
        from pollution--was slowly overturned. In other words,
        many environmental problems are not caused by "market
        failure" but by government's failure to enforce
        property rights. It is a travesty of justice when
        downstream residents, for example, cannot hold an
        upstream polluter responsible for damaging their
        properties. The common law tradition must be revived if
        we are to enjoy a healthy market economy and a cleaner
        environment. Potential polluters must know in advance
        that they will be held responsible for their actions.
        
        The second lesson is that the plundering of the
        environment in the socialist world is a grand example
        of the tragedy of the commons. Under communal property
        ownership, where no one owns or is responsible for a
        natural resource, the inclination is for each
        individual to abuse or deplete the resource before
        someone else does. Common examples of this "tragedy"
        are how people litter public streets and parks much
        more than their own yards; private housing is much
        better maintained than public housing projects; cattle
        ranchers overgraze public lands but maintain lush
        pastures on their own property; the national forests
        are carelessly over-logged, but private forests are
        carefully managed and reforested by lumber companies
        with "super trees"; and game fish are habitually
        overfished in public waterways but thrive in private
        lakes and streams. The tragedy of the commons is a
        lesson for those who believe that further
        nationalization and governmental control of natural
        resources is a solution to our environmental problems.
        
        These two pillars of free enterprise--sound liability
        laws that hold people responsible for their actions and
        the enforcement of private property rights--are
        important stepping stones to environmental protection.
        
        
                               FOOTNOTES
        
        [ShareDebate International Editor's Note: this text was
        received in electronic form and it was intially scanned
        in via an OCR program--it appears as if some uncaught
        scanning errors remain in the bibliography.  Where they
        remain, I have replaced the characters with a '??'.  I
        did not receive this file direct from The Freeman but
        from someone on the Internet who was scanning in their
        articles that had blanket reprint permissions attached
        to them--unfortunately, I have misplaced his name.]
        
        1. Personal interview with Warren Brookes on April
        ??, 1990.
        
        2. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons,"
        Science, December 13, 1968, pp. 1244-45.
        
        3. Marshall Goldman, The Spoils of Progress:
        Environmental Pollution in the Soviet Union (Cambridge:
        MIT Press, 1972), p. 56.
        
        4. Ibid., p. 162.
        
        5. Peter Gumbel, "Soviet Concerns About Pollution Danger
        Are Allowed to Emerge from the Closet," The Wall Street
        Journal, August 23, 1988.
        
        6. Goldman, p. ??.
        
        7. Ibid. p. 232.
        
        8. Ibid. p. 188.
        
        9. Cited in Larry Tye, "Pollution a Nightmare Behind
        Iron Curtain," The Arizona Republic, February 25,1990.
        
        10. Cited in Mike Feinsilber, "Eastern Europe Fighting
        Worst Pollution in World," The Chattanooga Times,
        January 17,1990.
        
        11. Tye, op. cit.
        
        12. Marlise Simons, "Rising Iron Curtain Exposes
        Haunting Veil of Polluted Air," The New York Times,
        April 8, 1990
        
        13. Lloyd Timberlake, "Poland--The Most Polluted
        Country in the World?" New Scientist, October 22, 1981,
        p. 219.
        
        14. Marlise Simmons, "A Green Party Mayor Takes on
        Industrial Filth of Old Cracow," The New York Times,
        March 25, 1990.
        
        15. Feinsilber, op. cit.
        
        16. Tye, op. cit.
        
        17. Marlise Simons, "Pollution's Toll in Eastern
        Europe: Stumps Where Great Trees Once Grew," The New
        York Times, March 19, 1990.
        
        18. Marlise Simons, "Central Europe's Grimy Coal Belt:
        Progress, Yes, But at What Cost?" The New York Times,
        April 1, 1990.
        
        19. Ibid.
        
        20. Jeffrey Gedamn, "Polluted East Germany," Christian
        Science Monitor, March 16, I990.
        
        21. Simons, "Rising Iron Curtain."
        
        22. Comptroller General, Wastepaper Recycling: Programs
        of Civil Agencies Waned During the 1980s (Washington,
        D.C.: General Accounting Office, 1989), p. 13.
        
        23. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American
        Law, 1780-1860 (Cambndge: Harvard University Press,
        1977).
        
                                  ***
        
        Dr. DiLorenzo holds the Probasco Chair of Free
        Enterprise at the University of Tennessee at
        Chattanooga. This article is adapted from a larger
        study published by the Center for the Study of American
        Business at Washington University in St. Louis and
        presented at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Big
        Sky, Montana, August 22-26, 1991. The Freeman is the
        monthly publication of The Foundation for Economic
        Education, Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533. FEE,
        established in 1946 by Leonard E. Read, is a
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