Or, should we force all people into machines, if we had them, that would redistribute IQ points from those who were deemed to have “too much” intelligence, to those deemed to have “too little?” This would appear to be a logical implication of “equity,” and yet our sense of justice recoils in horror from any such scenario.

https://walterblock.substack.com/p/contra-watermelons?utm_campaign=email-post&r=iw8dv&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Walter Block

[This article is a response to Paul Baer et al., “Greenhouse Development Rights: A Proposal for a Fair Global Climate Treaty,” Ethics, Place & Environment, volume 12, issue 3 (2009).]

There are not one but rather two schools of thought on the environment and its challenges. For want of better nomenclature, I shall characterize them as the watermelons and the free-market environmentalists.

The first is far more well-known than the second. Here, the solution to all problems arising from this source is more government intervention into the economy, more (green) central planning, more denigration of private-property rights, new discoveries of “market failures.”

Why call them “watermelons”? Because this fruit is green on the outside, but red on the inside. Advocates of this system are busybodies; their “philosophy” consists of do-gooding and ordering other people around: controlling property that does not belong to them, forcing others to cater to the latest political correctness emanating from who knows where. For a while, a long while, these people had hitched their intellectual wagon to the preeminent philosophy of the day, which promoted these goals: communism. But, then, in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, and in 1991, with the dissolution of the USSR, socialism could no longer suit their purposes. A new vehicle was needed: ecology was chosen.

The second school of thought on these matters is free-market environmentalism (FME).[1] For adherents of the first view, this name is a contradiction in terms. In their view the marketplace is seen as the enemy of the planet and its flora and fauna. I was once in a debate with a professor of biology who espoused watermelonism, and when I mentioned FME, he burst out laughing. Nor was this a debater’s trick. He honestly thought it was outrageously funny.

It is the perspective of FME that all environmental problems stem from either lack of private-property rights, or from government regulation of laissez-faire capitalism, or from state control of resources. With economic freedom, all such challenges would either disappear outright, or become far more manageable.

The article by Baer is an example of watermelonism. Let us, then, mention some of its shortcomings.

Most egregious, this article speaks of “anthropogenic climate change” (emphasis added). Why is this objectionable? In the 1970s, the (then prewatermelon) green market critics were charging the capitalist system with creating global cooling. When the evidence did not appear to support this charge, they reversed field, and indicted free enterprise with global warming. But when one too many of their environmental conferences had to be cancelled due to freezing icy conditions, they changed yet once again. Now, it is climate change that is the enemy of all that is good and proper, not either cooling or warming.

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