With the recent news of the EU pushing back against anti-global warming policies and the ever-present news of pollution in China, the timing seems right to tap into Murray Rothbard’s thinking on pollution. Statists always point to pollution as a weakness in libertarian thinking but, of course, there is a sound answer.

This excerpt is from a much larger essay in “For a New Liberty,” with this particular section focused on air pollution.

The vital fact about air pollution is that the polluter sends unwanted and unbidden pollutants — from smoke to nuclear radiation to sulfur oxides — through the air and into the lungs of innocent victims, as well as onto their material property. All such emanations which injure person or property constitute aggression against the private property of the victims. Air pollution, after all, is just as much aggression as committing arson against another’s property or injuring him physically. Air pollution that injures others is aggression pure and simple. The major function of government — of courts and police — is to stop aggression; instead, the government has failed in this task and has failed grievously to exercise its defense function against air pollution.

In the full essay, Rothbard breaks down numerous varieties of pollution, the failings of government to inhibit these pollutants, and examples of the State actually enabling wanton pollution to the detriment of the individual citizen.

Rothbard’s final summation at the end of his writing puts a bow on the whole issue.

Thus, when we peel away the confusions and the unsound philosophy of the modern ecologists, we find an important bedrock case against the existing system; but the case turns out to be not against capitalism, private property, growth, or technology per se. It is a case against the failure of government to allow and to defend the rights of private property against invasion. If property rights were to be defended fully, against private and governmental invasion alike, we would find here, as in other areas of our economy and society, that private enterprise and modern technology would come to mankind not as a curse but as its salvation.

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