on 2/15/00 10:51 AM, William Meecham at [log in to unmask] wrote:

> That there is pollution under communism (see below) is of course true.
> But the great difference is the rich corps. control most of the govt.
> here, and make correction extremely difficult.  Whereas under socialism
> there is no such super rich class promoting profit at the expense
> of the health and life of the population as a whole.  That is socialists
> can correct the evils of industrialization, whereas in the US we
> see it is almost impossible.
Untrue. All it takes is the profit motive. We see that happening everywhere
now. Between government regulation, lawsuits and the profit motive, there is
no shortage of incentives to conserve resources and reduce pollution. Plenty
of companies are in business solely to meet the demand for environmental
cleanup. Sure, a company will try to socialize what costs it can--corps are
amoral--but those costs that it can't, it will conserve in the interests of
keeping costs down. The kind of environmental regulation that many on the
Left despise (and which I am ambivalent about), the trading of pollution
credits, operate on exactly that principle, namely, forcing companies to
incorporate extrinsic costs into their balance sheets.

Meanwhile, in the USSR, we saw the wasteland created by a system that had no
discipline imposed by the market. It squandered nearly all its oil reserves
in much less time than it took us to, and its use of coal was also extremely
wasteful. To cite one example, the USSR used something like 3 times the coal
to produce one ton of steel, compared to Western capitalist countries.

To say this doesn't mean I like it that way, only that what's true is true,
regardless of one's ideology. If you have an idea how the next socialist
revolution can solve that problem, let's hear it.