On Saturday, January 19, 2008, I attended a seminar presented by the Institute for Liberal Studies (ILS). I had never heard of the organization and only discovered it a few weeks ago when I searched "libertarian" in facebook and came across the group. Since they were hosting an event, I thought it would be nice to check them out to see if ,indeed, it were possible for libertarians to organize themselves. The theme of the day-long seminar was environmental issues and featured three speakers: Jim Harris (former Green Party leader), Dr. Pierre Desrochers of UofT, and Dr. Glenn Fox from the University of Guelph. The topic was appealing, since I am frustrated at the lack of debate in our society surrounding environmental issues, and I thought it would be nice to finally find some people who can cut through the socialist bullshit that has infected the environmental movement to present realistic and effective solutions to some of the problems we are facing.
Jim Harris spoke first and his presentation was almost exactly as I had predicted. As a motivational speaker by trade, he tried to tailor his talk to how we can use market forces to better the environment. While I agreed with his points about why industry can become more efficient when faced with increasing resource costs, he still seemed to think that more government legislation is the solution. His analysis of the peak oil phenomena (and how he thinks we are there now) was unconvincing but I applaud the effort since I'm sure he knew he was speaking to a skeptical audience. I liked how he demonstrated how some corporations have increased profits by reducing waste. I always thought environmental groups should focus their efforts on promoting innovation and efficiencies in industry rather than resorting to bullying corporations and whining to governments and Harris seemed to want to almost echo this idea.
The next presentation by Dr Desrochers (entitled "The Environmental Responsibility of Firms to Increase Profit") was entertaining and informative (especially for someone like me who has never taken economics classes). He began his talk by saying that there was no market failure (in direct opposition to the previous speaker), and quickly criticizes those who think that capitalism revolves around profits at the expense of the environment. This is obviously wrong since by destroying the environment, capitalists would destroy their market (thus eliminating profit, the sole objective of any capitalist). If you want to lose weight, you don't cut off your leg, he says in as an analogy. With this in mind, in an homage to Adam Smith, Dr. Desrochers presents the 'invisible green thumb', basically a symbol of how free market forces will protect the environment better than anything else. Again, efficiency is the key to improving the environment and he outlines examples of how a centrally planned system (and it's inherent inefficiencies) produces more waste and environmental degradation that a free market system. He criticized politicians and environmentalists for supporting inefficiencies and he offered the 100 mile diet as an example of how you could be producing more waste by trying to be environmentally conscious. He wonderfully concludes his presentation by saying that if we let people be creative and reward them for innovation and effort, we can rely on a decentralized system to protect the environment.
The third presentation by Dr. Glenn Fox was similar to the previous in that it was primarily presented as a basic economics lecture. He focused on how property rights is the key to a cleaner environment. By letting people own sections of our environment, we can trust them to not destroy it. He points to the privatization of the fishing industry in Iceland as an example. When the Icelandic government assigned shares to every fishing company (that can be bought and sold), and let them set their own quotas, the result was a decrease in fish catches, since the industry knew that they would profit more in the future if they let the fish stocks grow (hey Newfoundland, look this up!). He concludes by saying that the free market is often misunderstood and that it has an ethical component that its opponents neglect.
Overall, I enjoyed the three presentations and I gathered that they were also well received by the audience. My only advice, from an activist's point of view, is that we can't focus solely on economics to prove our point. If we are to convince people to take more responsibility for their lives and reduce government, we can't throw a bunch of fancy terminology in their faces because people are far too busy with their own lives to teach themselves basic economic theory. The introductions were short and to the point, which is normally appreciated. However, I would have liked more details about the hosting organization (who they are, what they represent, what they plan on doing, etc.) for newbies like me, and the absence of these details led me to believe that most people in the room knew each other already, thus giving the place an eerie cult-like feeling but the discussion groups that followed each presentation helped liven things up (and were as interesting as the presentations themselves). I wish the ILS luck and hope to see many similar seminars in the future.
