Armed and Dangerousby
George Reisman The New York Times has reported that California’s Attorney General, Bill Lockyear, is suing the six largest automobile manufacturers because of their alleged contribution to “global warming” and its resulting damage to the State of California. “Global warming,” it reports the attorney general as saying, “is causing significant harm to California’s environment, economy, agriculture and public health. . . . Vehicle emissions are the single most rapidly growing source of the carbon emissions contributing to global warming . . . .” The suit accuses the auto companies, in the words of the Times, “of creating a public nuisance by building millions of vehicles that collectively discharge 289 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually.” Mr. Lockyear and his supporters apparently do not think in terms of principles. If they did, they would realize that the logic on the basis of which he is suing the automobile companies would also enable him to sue Caltrans, the state agency responsible for highway, planning, construction, and maintenance. He could sue Caltrans for its role in making possible the presence of the millions of automobiles in the state emitting carbon dioxide. After all, if Caltrans had not built its roads, the number of automobiles that would have been sold in California would have been far less, and thus the problems that Mr. Lockyear complains of would also have been far less. By extension, he could add to the list of defendants the state legislators who voted for the annual budgets of Caltrans. And by the same logic, applied at a more fundamental level, he could sue all the millions of individual California residents whose purchases of automobiles over the years provided the automobile manufacturers with the incentive and financial means to continue their allegedly destructive activity of providing people with convenient, low-cost means of transportation. Few things are more certain than that in the absence of their purchases, very few automobiles would ever have come into California.
In an earlier era, when confronted with the possibility of encountering an armed and dangerous man, citizens were cautioned not to attempt to approach him but to summon law enforcement instead. The tragedy – the joke – is that today Mr. Lockyear and others of his ilk so often are law enforcement. September 26, 2006 George Reisman [send him mail] is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics, and is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. Visit his website. Copyright © 2006 George Reisman |
