To my mind, libertarian and anarchocapitalist philosophers have a particularly hard time explaining how the free market can deal with industrial pollution and environmental toxicity. Economists call these things externalities — costs that aren’t part of a manufacturer’s overhead and don’t make it onto the price tag you see at Wal*Mart. They just get passed on to whoever’s downwind. I suppose, therefore, that it shouldn’t surprise me when people go running to the government whenever such things pop up in casual conversation… or in academic journals:

• Toxic pollutants kill up to 25,000 Canadians annually: B.C. study (CBC.ca)

That’s a lot of deaths, there. Still, I can’t help being a little bit suspicious. Apparently, the study in question uses methodology developed by the World Health Organization — and the WHO has a vested interest in scaring people about health issues (they get more money that way). Fortunately, this is a piece of honest-to-balls published academic research, so I can look up the article, follow the references, and satisfy myself on this matter. Let’s continue:

Canadians are awash in toxic chemicals that are held responsible for 24,000 new cases of cancer annually and for low birth weights in 2,500 babies, a researcher at the University of British Columbia says.

Toxins in air pollution, pesticides, dioxins, heavy metals and household cleaning agents are also killing between 10,000 to 25,000 Canadians annually, said David Boyd, the lead author of a UBC study published this week in Environmental Research.

“There are many contaminants individuals simply can’t avoid. They’re invisible. We can’t see them. We can’t smell them. We can’t taste them,” Boyd told CBC News Tuesday.

Yikes! That’s frightening stuff. You can’t see them, or smell them, or taste them — why, contaminants are scarier than terrorists!

It kind of makes you wonder why we’re so freaked out about firearms that we’re slashing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to quivering shreds — how many people do we shoot in this country every year, anyway? A few hundred? — unless you attribute those shooting deaths to, uh, high-velocity lead poisoning. For that matter, maybe our beloved and benevolent governments ought to suspend their high-handed sanctimonious campaigns against drugs, smoking, and gambling until they’ve properly dealt with “toxins in air pollution, pesticides, dioxins, heavy metals and household cleaning agents”. Because, you know, this is at heart the governments’ problem, right?

“The onus must be on government to do a better job of protecting Canadians from these hazards,” he said.

Did we see that coming, or what?

For those of you who’ve come late to class, let me explain why I’m so fucking annoyed. By placing the onus upon government to protect Canadians from the lethal horrors of pervasive toxins, Boyd is abdicating all responsibility for dealing with the problem upon the behalf of the entire public sector. He is passing the buck. In doing so, he is both ignoring a powerful consequence of the profit-driven free market (most companies will gladly clean up their environmental acts if they think they can make more money that way) and giving government yet another cause behind which to rally us (“we’re doing it to fight toxins!”) while they seize yet more power and deny us yet more liberty.

Sure, I’m overstating the case. Writing’s more fun that way. I am, however, overstating the magnitude of the danger, not its existence or scope, and I don’t think I’m overstating it by much.

Let’s have an example. I don’t want to pick on the Canadian government exclusively, so let’s do automobile fuel economy standards in the United States. These are given by the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) regulations, and if you look at that nice little graph you’ll notice that the government-mandated standards haven’t changed since 1990.

However, in 2006, our dear benefactors in D.C. amended the CAFE standards to eliminate minivan and SUV exemptions by 2011. Notice that Reagan and both Bushes raised fuel economy standards, while Clinton left them alone. Some of you might find this ironic; I suspect that it may support my point. Anyway.

On the other hand, the same graph shows that average fuel economy has been rising since about 1998. Gas-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius surely weren’t available in mass production in 1989, the last time the U.S. FedGov raised fuel-economy standards. We are left with a seeming contradiction: government has done nothing in the past decade and a half to mandate increased fuel efficiency, yet manufacturers have increased the average fuel efficiency of their vehicles. It’s enough to make a good socialist’s brain explode.

Here’s the thing. About ten years ago, Toyota realized that it could make a shit-ton of money (that’s an Imperial measurement, by the way; the metric unit is spelled shite-tonne) by appealing to consumers who liked to think of themselves as environmentally friendly, ecologically conscious, gentle lovers of Mother Gæa who tread upon this planet with the lightest of footprints. Out comes the Prius. Since then, most every automaker has released a brace of hybrid vehicles… and strangely, they did so because people want to buy hybrids, not because the government threatened to send in thugs with guns if they didn’t.

Curiously, automakers haven’t just built purportedly environmentally-friendly cars absent demand from the American government — they have even built cars of drastically low emission in spite of government laws prohibiting them from selling such cars! Maybe the popular myth of the avaricious, short-sighted, and destructive megalocorporation is somewhat less than perfectly accurate. Avaricious I’ll give you — but businesses that amass as much sheer power as (say) Toyota are not likely to have been short-sighted and destructive.

This is where consumer preference and the profit motive come in. Now, the profit motive gets a bad rap among the purportedly conscientious — it’s seen as mindless, short-sighted greed. I suspect rather that the vast majority of free-market decision-makers are motivated by a rather more perceptive and long-term form of greed. Witness, for example, the success of “Fair Trade” coffee, or “organic” grocery stores like Trader Joe’s. You accept a bit more overhead, charge higher prices to yuppies wearing forty-dollar Che Guevara t-shirts, and win.

This works if and only if consumers — that’s us, folks — take responsibility for the shit we buy and for the money we spend and make sure that it doesn’t support externalities we hate. Yes, that means paying more and buying less. Life sucks, get a helmet — but it sucks a lot less when you don’t have cancer.

That’s the problem with “putting the onus upon the government” — doing so is an abdication of responsibility. We tell ourselves — and our politicians — that the government ought to take care of this particular problem, and then we forget about it. We shut up about it. We tell ourselves that we’ve done all we can, it’s someone else’s problem now… and maybe if we’re really keen we write an email to our MP or Congresscritter and ask s/h/it whether there’s been any progress. Maybe we complain about how the government can’t seem to get anything done. But we’ve done our part: we’ve passed the fucking buck to the government.

While I’m at it: just why do we expect the government to be able to figure this shit out, anyway? Look at this:

• Burning chilli sparks terror fear (The Beeb)

A pot of burning chilli sparked fears of a biological terror attack in central London.

Firefighters wearing protective breathing apparatus were called to D’Arblay Street, Soho, after reports of noxious smoke filling the air.

Police closed off three roads and evacuated homes following the alert.

Specialist crews broke down the door to the Thai Cottage restaurant at 1900 BST on Monday where they discovered the source – a 9lb pot of chillies.

Yes, kids, you read that right: the British Government mistook a Thai curry for a biological terror attack!