The Great Waste

There is much concern today about waste of natural resources. The land area of this earth is lim­ited, and much of it is being put to wasteful use. Soil erosion is a serious problem. Forests are being denuded, timber supplies threat­ened. Scarce minerals and metals and coal and oil and gas reserves are being consumed. Many com­munities face serious water short­ ages. Wild life is jeopardized, on land and in the sea. The fear is that people are multiplying out of proportion to known resources, and that future generations will be unable to survive.

There's no disputing the impor­tance of the survival of the spe­cies; our lives may depend on it. But it is strange that people seem most concerned about this prob­lem at the very time when they are surviving in better condition and greater numbers than ever before. It would almost appear that mankind thrives by wasting resources; though the better he thrives, the more he worries at the waste of it all.

In a primitive foraging society where each person is primarily a consumer like every other, it doubtless would be true that the greater the number of persons, the fewer would be the resou rces available to each - and growth might mean death. But civilized, specialized, trading man is a fac­tor of prod uction as well as a con­sumer. And a growing population might well mean a higher level of living for each person, as men find new uses and new sources of materials previously unknown.

It should be obvious to anyone living in the United States today that the much-feared depletion of natural resources in no way ex­ plains how or why 191 million per­ sons now exist in comparative luxury and ease in a land that barely supported a million persons at a primitive subsistence level before the arrival of the first white settlers a few centuries ago. The mere presence of people does not tell the full story, of course; wit­ ness the teeming millions living today near starvation levels in much of the world. Yet the economic miracle of America does testify that 191 persons can live in comparative luxury where one lived sparingly before, relying on the same basic resources, but multiplied by the creative energies of individuals when each is relatively free to develop in his own best interest the potentialities of his being.

Vital Human Resources

The point is that human re­sources are at least as vital to economic well-being as are such natural resources as land, min­ erals, fuel, water, and the like. And by far the most important lesson in the history of men and nations is the long sad story of the waste of human effort and hu­man life, simply because some per­ sons have taken it upon themselves to enslave and regulate and control and deny others the freedom of choice and the responsibility for their own well-being.

Almost everyone in the world today is concerned about whether the reserves of petroleum are suf­ficient to meet the fantastic and growing demands for the product. And some contend that this valu­able natural resource is being wasted. They overlook how many human lives were wasted during the centuries before men learned of the vital properties and poten­tial uses of petroleum.

To some at the time, it might have seemed that candles and mid­night oil were being wantonly wasted by Thomas Edison and the numerous others, perhaps un­ known to one another, whose in­ ventive minds offered electric lighting to mankind. But perhaps the real waste could better be visualized in terms of the human lives lost over the centuries through ignorance of the qualities and uses of electrical energy.

Who knows how many potential geniuses failed to be born, or died in infancy, for lack of the wonder drugs and other miracles of medi­cal science that are taken for granted today?

There might be more standing timber and fewer "pulp" magazines in our time if printing presses had never been devised. But how many lives were wasted in the centuries before men learned to write or read or communicate freely through the press? How much timber had to be "wasted" to clear land for farming, or to pave the way to discovery of steel rails and beams and other forms to displace wooden structures, these in turn to give way to aluminum, or glass, or plastic?

Intervention Is Waste

Perhaps it is time to spell out more clearly here what we mean by "waste": To the extent that any person or group interferes with another' s peaceful purpose, contrary to his wishes, that is waste. Many readers will see at once the implications in this definition, for they might define "liberty" in similar terms: To the ex­tent that no person or group interferes with another' s peaceful purpose, contrary to his wishes, that is liberty. All we have said, then, is that waste occurs when there is any negation of liberty. Well, that's not bad for a start!

Unless one holds the view that he, himself , is God, he should be . prepared to concede to every peaceful person as much liberty or freedom of choice as he claims for his own. Human beings are fit neither to rule, nor to be ruled by, one another. Just as each person's best hope for his own emergence is through his own choice and responsibility, so the best hope for human progress is through liberty for every peaceful person. This is not to imply that we have learned to resist violence without fighting back, or that we can foresee a society without need for government as an organized defensive force against individual and collective criminal activities. We merely contend that the best hope for self-emergence and for human progress is through liberty for every peaceful person. Any deviation from that is waste.

When waste is thus defined as any negation of liberty, it scarcely makes sense to speak of the waste of coal or iron or land or timber in such broad general categories. If liberty is a strictly human condition, then so is waste ; the terms have no applicability to things or to lower animals. The waste, if any, is imposed by man on man.

Man, of course, is a complex being, and a part of each of us in this world is the property he owns -the resources he has appropriated to his own purpose and use without infringement upon the just claims of any other person.

Now, some others, of course, may think that an owner is using his property unwisely or even wastefully, just as some persons may think that another is wasting his own time or his own life. Bu t if we concede that liberty affords the best hope for human progress, we thereby agree not to try to live others' lives for them ; and one person cannot know or say for certain that someone else is wasting his life in peacefully doing as he pleases. Nor can one say that another is wasting his own property so long as he uses it without injury to other peaceful persons. For all others know, he may be in­ venting a wheel, or a printing press, or an electric light, or some other potential boon to mankind. If each person is free to judge and decide how best to use his life, his time, his property, the saf est presumption is that he will not deliberately waste them.

Government Controls People

Does the foregoing analysis mean, then, that by definition we have ruled out all possibility of waste in the traditional sense of the word? Far from it; we are merely looking at the long-neglected other side of the coin. What we are suggesting is that re­ sources are wasted whenever the private property of any peaceful person is taken without his con­ sent for redistribution or use by others who have done nothing to earn it. We are not referring here to taxes properly levied and collected to support the government in its limited role of defending life and property. We are referring to taxes improperly taken to finance all kinds of government intervention at home and abroad that violate, rather than defend, the lives and property of peaceful persons: that is waste.

Involved in such government­ actuated waste may be the timber land a man owns, or tillable farm land, or the mineral rights or the air rights to his property, or water rights, or other privately earned and owned resources. To take such property without the owner's approval is to deny its use for the purpose he had intended - thus, to that extent diminishing his life. In the final analysis, it is human life and liberty that matter, and it is human life that is wasted when liberty is violated.

As Dean Russell has well observed, "Price control is people control,"1 and so is rent control, wage control, rationing, tariff and protectionist legislation of all kinds, immigration control, interest and money and banking regulation, exchange control, airways and airwave control, postal regulation, managed news and censor­ ship, and countless other aspects of intervention. This is waste, originating in the authoritarian acts of men, the real cost of which is measurable in human lives. Life without liberty is sheer waste.

Faith Must Be Strong To Rely on Freedom

It is not expected that this brief analysis will allay the fears of all who are concerned about the depletion of natural resources - those, for instance, who are firmly convinced that the government ought to intervene and set aside vast tracts of timberland lest private interests strip them bare and leave future generations without forest products. We have merely tried to point out that such conservationists, who are determined to live and control the lives of their contemporaries on behalf of posterity, are presuming to be wiser than God.

Instead of devoting their own lives and their own property to reforestation, which they allege to be of first importance, their time and effort are devoted to wasting the lives and denying the individual goals of fellow human beings. They presume that had they been in charge of planning in the past, the resulting progress for all mankind would have been greater than man has known when each was free to try. They reject the entire history of civilization, and say, in effect, that compulsory collectivism affords a better hope than liberty. They know for sure that rocks and trees are more important than liberty and human life - that God had no business allowing individuals minds of their own! Leave reforestation to the voluntary efforts of individuals? Not on your life!

Nor is this analysis expected to refute the faith of those who see no way to live without government highways and government schools and government waterworks and thousands of other government projects over and beyond the strict police function. Surely, they will contend, not all of these can be counted as sheer waste ; human lives would be devoted to those projects even if the government took no hand in them at all! Probably true; but all we have tried to point out here is that, if they are right - if men would have done these things voluntarily anyway then it was sheer waste to resort to coercive measures to force some persons to do what others would have liked to do and undoubtedly could have done better. Our point stands: to the extent that any person or group interferes with another' s peaceful purpose, contrary to his wishes, that is waste. And the only alter­ native is liberty.