Get the government out of environmental control.

• Author: Meiners, Roger

IF the Republican-controlled Congress' efforts to pass assorted statutes that would affect Federal environmental controls succeed, there would be compensation for regulations that cause a substantial drop in the value of private property; cost-benefit and risk analyses may be required in devising new environmental regulations; and the Clean Water Act might be modified slightly. Environmentalists are claiming such reforms would gut environmental regulation and roll back 25 years of progress. Only Chicken Little would peer at the pending reforms and pronounce environmental collapse.

The move to protect private property rights was revolutionary 200 years ago, but hardly should be so today. As recently as during the Reagan Administration, the government paid when private land was desired to protect wildlife and wetlands. A requirement for benefit-cost and risk analyses was called for in Reform of Risk Regulation: Achieving More Protection at Less Cost, a study by the Center for Risk Analysis at the Harvard School of Public Health. This kind of reform is evolutionary, not revolutionary.

Environmentalists know this. The plaintive cries heard from the environmental community reflect a deeper distress. Things environmental no longer are out of bounds for rational debate. When examined with emotions stripped away, the Federal record for protecting the environment is weak at best. While the air is cleaner than it was 25 years ago, more miles of rivers are swimmable, and lots of contaminated soil has been dug up at one site and moved to another, the gains have come at huge costs that could have been significantly lower. Environmentalists know this, too. Their enterprise is threatened, however, and that is why they are nervous. It is an interesting bit of history that, when the environmental statutes were written during the Nixon Administration, the environmental groups played little role. The biggest polluters spent years lobbying, so the environmental statutes were drafted in such a way as to not offend some of their interests. How times have changed.

It is common knowledge that the government is a terrible steward of the environment. When a government controls all property, as it did in the former U.S.S.R., the result is that almost the entire country becomes a Superfund site by American standards. Yet, how much better is the U.S.'s record?

Recent General Accounting Office estimates are that the cost of cleaning up just the radioactive messes on Department of Energy land will run a minimum of $300,000,000,000 to as much as one trillion dollars. Government handling of such materials has been so careless that cleanup costs are nearly impossible to estimate. Private handlers of radioactive materials never allowed such massive problems to occur. The situation is not unique to the Department of Energy. The Army Corps, which claims to be the protector of wetlands, has been a major destructive force, as has the Forest Service, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Agriculture, and other agencies that maintain they are environmental guardians. As one review of government treatment of the environment summarized, "If we are serious about environmental quality, we should avoid relying heavily on government to provide it."

The proposed revisions of environmental statutes hold the promise of reducing costs and targeting resources to higher-risk situations, all in the existing blueprint of command-and-control regulation. What if the slate were wiped clean and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) became a monitoring and research agency and returned environmental control to its pre-1970 status? Would we all drown in a sea of toxic wastes and suffocate from chemical-laden air? Hardly. In fact, we feel the environment is safer under the rules of common law (a part of state law) than under the control of one Federal agency.

Making the case for markets and the rule of law never has been easy. If people used to having their daily bread provided by government agencies are told to forget that and try the free market, would they cheerfully give up command-and-control? What if none of the people even could remember how markets under a rule of law worked? Discussing common law solutions to environmental protection encounters a similar challenge. In an uninformed debate, government delivery of environmental quality seems to win hands down.

Government planning is attractive because of its simplicity. Congress writes a law and the EPA enforces it with regulations about how much of this or that is legal or illegal. That is so much easier to understand than a free society relying on people to protect their rights through private arrangements of their devising that are enforced through the courts. The role of government is limited to providing a well-functioning judiciary that helps enforce contracts, protect property, and resolve...