Why Socialism Causes Pollution
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
A Reprint from
The Freeman
from the March 1992 issue
Copyright (c)1992 by The Foundation for Economic
Education, Inc. Printed in the U.S.A. Permission is
granted to reprint any article in this issue except
"The Illusion That's the Welfare State" and
"Czechoslovakia on the Hudson," provided appropriate
credit is given and two copies of the reprinted
material are sent to The Foundation.
Corporations are often accused of despoiling the
environment in their quest for profit. Free enterprise
is supposedly incompatible with environmental
preservation, so that government regulation is
required.
Such thinking is the basis for current proposals to
expand environmental regulation greatly. So many new
controls have been proposed and enacted that the late
economic journalist Warren Brookes once forecast that
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could
well become "the most powerful government agency on
earth, involved in massive levels of economic, social,
scientific, and political spending and interference.''l
But if the profit motive is the primary cause of
pollution, one would not expect to find much pollution
in socialist countries, such as the former Soviet
Union, China, and in the former Communist countries of
Eastern and Central Europe. That is, in theory. In
reality exactly the opposite is true: The socialist
world suffers from the worst pollution on earth. Could
it be that free enterprise is not so incompatible with
environmental protection after all?
I. SOCIALIST POLLUTION The Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union there was a vast body of
environmental law and regulation that purportedly
protected the public interest, but these constraints
have had no perceivable benefit. The Soviet Union, like
all socialist countries, suffered from a massive
"tragedy of the commons," to borrow the term used by
biologist Garrett Hardin in his classic 1968 article.2
Where property is communally or governmentally owned
and treated as a free resource, resources will
inevitably be overused with little regard for future
consequences.
The Soviet government's imperatives for economic
growth, combined with communal ownership of virtually
all property and resources, caused tremendous
environmental damage. According to economist Marshall
Goldman, who studied and traveled extensively in the
Soviet Union, "The attitude that nature is there to be
exploited by man is the very essence of the Soviet
production ethic."3
A typical example of the environmental damage caused by
the Soviet economic system is the exploitation of the
Black Sea. To comply with five-year plans for housing
and building construction, gravel, sand, and trees
around the beaches were used for decades as
construction materials. Because there is no private
property, "no value is attached to the gravel along the
seashore. Since, in effect, it is free, the contractors
haul it away."4 This practice caused massive beach
erosion which reduced the Black Sea coast by 50 percent
between 1920 and 1960. Eventually, hotels, hospitals,
and, of all things, a military sanitarium collapsed
into the sea as the shoreline gave way. Frequent
landslides--as many as 300 per year-- have been
reported.
Water pollution is catastrophic. Effluent from a
chemical plant killed almost all the fish in the Oka
River in 1965, and similar fish kills have occurred in
the Volga, Ob, Yenesei, Ural, and Northern Dvina
rivers. Most Russian factories discharge their waste
without cleaning it at all. Mines, oil wells, and ships
freely dump waste and ballast into any available body
of water, since it is all one big (and tragic)
"commons."
Only six of the 20 main cities in Moldavia had a sewer
system by the late 1960s, and only two of those cities
made any effort to treat the sewage. Conditions are far
more primitive in the countryside.
The Aral and Caspian seas have been gradually
disappearing as large quantities of their water have
been diverted for irrigation. And since untreated
sewage flows into feeder rivers, they are also heavily
polluted.
Some Soviet authorities expressed fears that by the
turn of the century the Aral Sea will be nothing but a
salt marsh. One paper reported that because of the
rising salt content of the Aral the remaining fish will
rapidly disappear. It was recently revealed that the
Aral Sea has shrunk by about a third. Its shore line
"is arid desert and the wind blows dry deposits of salt
thousands of miles away. The infant mortality rate [in
that region] is four to five times the national
average."5
The declining water level in the Caspian Sea has been
catastrophic for its fish population as spawning areas
have turned into dry land. The sturgeon population has
been so decimated that the Soviets have experimented
with producing artificial caviar.
Hundreds of factories and refineries along the Caspian
Sea dump untreated waste into the sea, and major cities
routinely dump raw sewage. It has been estimated that
one-half of all the discharged effluent is carried in
the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. The
concentration of oil in the Volga is so great that
steamboats are equipped with signs forbidding
passengers to toss cigarettes overboard. As might be
expected, fish kills along the Volga are a "common
calamity."
Lake Baikal, which is believed to be the oldest
freshwater lake in the world, is also one of the
largest and deepest. It is five times as deep as Lake
Superior and contains twice the volume of water.
According to Marshall Goldman, it was also "the best
known example of the misuse of water resources in the
USSR."6
Factories and pulp mills have been dumping hundreds of
millions of gallons of effluent into Lake Baikal each
year for decades. As a result, animal life in the lake
has been cut by more than 50 percent over the past half
century. Untreated sewage is dumped into virtually all
tributaries to the lake.
Islands of alkaline sewage have been observed floating
on the lake, including one that was 18 miles long and
three miles wide. These "islands" have polluted the air
around the lake as well as the water in it. Thousands
of acres of forest surrounding the lake have been
denuded, causing such erosion that dust storms have
been reported. So much forest land in the Lake Baikal
region has been destroyed that some observers reported
shifting sands that link up with the Gobi Desert; there
are fears that the desert may sweep into Siberia and
destroy the lake.
In other regions the fact that no compensation has to
be paid for land that is flooded by water projects has
made it easy for government engineers to submerge large
areas of land. "As much land has been lost through
flooding and salination as has been added through
irrigation and drainage in the Soviet Union." 7
These examples of environmental degradation in the
Soviet Union are not meant to be exhaustive but to
illustrate the phenomenon of Communist pollution. As
Goldman has observed, the great pollution problems in
Russia stem from the fact that the government
determined that economic growth was to be pursued at
any cost. "Government officials in the USSR generally
have a greater willingness to sacrifice their
environment than government officials in a society with
private enterprise where there is a degree of public
accountability. There is virtually a political as well
as an economic imperative to devour idle resources in
the USSR."8
China
In China, as in Russia, putting the government in
charge of resource allocation has not had desirable
environmental consequences. Information on the state of
China's environment is not encouraging.
According to the Worldwatch Institute, more than 90
percent of the trees in the pine forests in China's
Sichuan province have died because of air pollution. In
Chungking, the biggest city in southwest China, a
4,500-acre forest has been reduced by half. Acid rain
has reportedly caused massive crop losses.
There also have been reports of waterworks and landfill
projects severely hampering fish migration. Fish
breeding was so seriously neglected that fish has
largely vanished from the national diet. Depletion of
government-owned forests has turned them into deserts,
and millions of acres of grazing and farm land have
been devastated. Over eight million acres of land in
the northern Chinese plains were made alkaline and
unproductive during the "Great Leap Forward."
Central and Eastern Europe
With Communism's collapse, word has begun to seep out
about Eastern Europe's environmental disasters.
According to the United Nations Global Environment
Monitoring Program, "pollution in that region is among
the worst on the Earth's surface."9 Jeffrey Leonard of
the World Wildlife Fund concluded that "pollution was
part and parcel of the system that molested the people
[of Eastern Europe] in their daily lives.''10 Evidence
is mounting of "an environmental nightmare," the legacy
of "decades of industrial development with little or no
environmental control.''1l
Poland. According to the Polish Academy of Sciences, "a
third of the nation's 38 million people live in areas
of ecological disaster.''l2 In the heavily
industrialized Katowice region of Poland, the people
suffer 15 percent more circulatory disease, 30 percent
more tumors, and 47 percent more respiratory disease
than other Poles. Physicians and scientists believe
pollution is a major contributor to these health
problems.
Acid rain has so corroded railroad tracks that trains
are not allowed to exceed 24 miles an hour. The air is
so polluted in Katowice that there are underground
"clinics" in uranium mines where the chronically ill
can go to breathe clean air.
Continuous pumping of water from coal mines has caused
so much land to subside that over 300,000 apartments
were destroyed as buildings collapsed. The mine sludge
has been pumped into rivers and streams along with
untreated sewage which has made 95 percent of the water
unfit for human consumption. More than 65 percent of
the nation's water is even unfit for industrial use
because it is so toxic that it would destroy heavy
metals used by industry. In Cracow, Poland's ancient
capital, acid rain "dissolved so much of the gold roof
of the 16th century Sigismund Chapel that it recently
had to be replaced.''13
Industrial dust rains down on towns, depositing
cadmium, lead, zinc, and iron. The dust is so heavy
that huge trucks drive through city streets daily
spraying water to reduce it. By some accounts eight
tons of dust fall on each square mile in and around
Cracow each year. The mayor of Cracow recently stated
that the Vistula River--the largest river in Poland--is
"nothing but a sewage canal.''14 The river has mercury
levels that are three times what researchers say is
safe, while lead levels are 25 times higher than deemed
safe.
Half of Poland's cities, including Warsaw, don't even
treat their wastes, and 41 animal species have
reportedly become extinct in Poland in recent years.
While health statistics are spotty--they were not a
priority of the Communist government--available data
are alarming. A recent study of the Katowice region
found that 21 percent of the children up to 4 years old
are sick almost constantly, while 41 percent of the
children under 6 have serious health problems.
Life expectancy for men is lower than it was 20 years
ago. In Upper Silesia, which is considered one of the
most heavily industrialized regions in the world,
circulatory disease levels are 15 percent higher than
in the general population, cancer rates are 30 percent
higher, respiratory disease is 47 percent higher, and
there has been "an appalling increase in the number of
retarded children," according to the Polish Academy of
Sciences. Although pollution cannot be blamed for all
these health problems, physicians and scientists attach
much of the blame to this source.
Czechoslovakia. In a speech given on New Year's Day of
1990, Czechoslovakian President Vaclav Havel said, "We
have laid waste to our soil and the rivers and the
forests . . . and we have the worst environment in the
whole of Europe today.''15 He was not exaggerating,
although the competition for the title of "worst
environment" is. clearly fierce. Sulfur dioxide
concentrations in Czechoslovakia are eight times higher
than in the United States, and "half the forests are
dead or dying. 16
Because of the overuse of fertilizers, farmland in some
areas of Czechoslovakia is toxic. to more than one foot
in depth. In Bohemia, in northwestern Czechoslovakia,
hills stand bare because their vegetation has died in
air so foul it can be tasted. One report describes the
Czech countryside as a place where "barren plateaus
stretch for miles, studded with the stumps and
skeletons of pine trees. Under the snow lie thousands
of acres of poisoned ground, where for centuries thick
forests had grown.''17 There is a stretch of over 350
miles where more than 300,000 acres of forest have
disappeared and the remaining trees are dying.
A thick, brown haze hangs over much of northern
Czechoslovakia for about eight months of the year.
Sometimes it takes on the sting of tear gas, according
to local officials. There are environmental laws, but
they aren't enforced. Sulfur in the air has been
reported at 20 times the permissible level. Soil in
some regions is so acidic that aluminum trapped in the
clay is released. Scientists discovered that the
aluminum has poisoned groundwater, killing tree and
plant roots and filtering into the drinking water.
Severe erosion in the decimated forests has caused
spring floods in which all the melted snow cascades
down mountainsides in a few weeks, causing further
erosion and leading to water shortages in the summer.
In its search for coal, the Communist government has
used bulldozers on such a massive scale that they have
"turned towns, farms and woodlands into coarse brown
deserts and gaping hollows.''18 Because open-pit mining
is cheaper than underground mining, and has been
practiced extensively, in some areas of Czechoslovakia
"you have total devastation of the land.''19
East Germany. The new German government has claimed
that nearly 40 percent of the East German populace
suffers ill effects from pollutants in the air. In
Leipzig, half the children are treated each year for
illnesses believed to be associated with air pollution.
Eighty percent of eastern Germany's surface waters are
classified as unsuitable for fishing, sports, or
drinking, and one out of three lakes has been declared
biologically dead because of decades of untreated
dumping of chemical waste.
Much of the East German landscape has been devastated.
Fifteen to 20 percent of its forests are dead, and
another 40 percent are said to be dying. Between 1960
and 1980 at least 70 villages were destroyed and their
inhabitants uprooted by the government, which wanted to
mine high-sulfur brown coal. The countryside is now
"pitted with moon-like craters" and "laced with the
remains of what were once spruce and pine trees,
nestled amid clouds of rancid smog."20 The air in some
cities is so polluted that residents use their car
headlights during the day, and visitors have been known
to vomit from breathing the air.
Nearly identical problems exist in Bulgaria, Hungary,
Romania, and Yugoslavia. Visiting scientists have
concluded that pollution in Central and Eastern Europe
"is more dangerous and widespread than anything they
have seen in the Western industrial nations.''21
II. UNITED STATES: PUBLIC SECTOR POLLUTION
The last refuge of those who advocate socialistic
solutions to environmental pollution is the claim that
it is the lack of democratic processes that prevents
the Communist nations from truly serving the public
interest. If this theory is correct, then the public
sector of an established democracy such as the United
States should be one of the best examples of
environmental responsibility. But U.S. government
agencies are among the most cavalier when it comes to
environmental stewardship.
There is much evidence to dispute the theory that only
private businesses pollute. In the United States, we
need look no further than our own government agencies.
These public sector institutions, such as the
Department of Defense (DOD), are among the worst
offenders. DOD now generates more than 400,000 tons of
hazardous waste a year--more than is produced by the
five largest chemical companies combined. To make
matters worse, the Environmental Protection Agency
lacks the enforcement power over the public sector that
it possesses over the private sector.
The lax situation uncovered by the General Accounting
Office (GAO) at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma is
typical of the way in which many Federal agencies
respond to the EPA's directives. "Although DOD policy
calls for the military services to . . . implement
EPA's hazardous waste management regulations, we found
that Tinker has been selling . . . waste oil, fuels,
and solvents rather than recycling," reported the
GAO.22
One of the world's most poisonous spots lies about 10
miles northeast of Denver in the Army's Rocky Mountain
Arsenal. Nerve gas, mustard shells, the anti-crop spray
TX, and incendiary devices have been dumped into pits
there over the past 40 years. Dealing with only one
"basin" of this dump cost $40 million. Six hundred
thousand cubic yards of contaminated soil and sludge
had to be scraped and entombed in a 16-acre, double-
lined waste pile.
There are plenty of other examples of Defense
Department facilities that need major cleanup. In fact,
total costs of a long-term Pentagon cleanup are hard to
get a handle on. Some officials have conceded that the
price tag could eventually exceed $20 billion.
Government-owned power plants are another example of
public-sector pollution. These plants are a large
source of sulfur dioxide emissions.
The federal government's Tennessee Valley Authority
operates 59 coal-fired power plants in the Southeast,
where it has had major legal confrontations with state
governments who want the Federal agency to comply with
state environmental regulations. The TVA has fought the
state governments for years over compliance with their
clean air standards. It won a major Supreme Court
victory when the Court ruled that, as a federal
government enterprise, it could be exempt from
environmental regulations with which private sector and
local governmental power plants must comply.
Federal agricultural policy also has been a large
source of pollution, in the past encouraging over-
utilization of land subject to erosion. Powerful farm
lobbies have protected "non-point" sources of pollution
from the heavy hand of regulation placed on other
private industries.
III. POLICY IMPLICATIONS
These examples of environmental degradation throughout
the world suggest some valuable lessons. First, it is
not free enterprise per se that causes environmental
harm; if so, the socialist world would be
environmentally pristine.
The heart of the problem lies with the failure of our
legal institutions, not the free enterprise system.
Specifically, American laws were weakened more than a
century ago by Progressive Era courts that believed
economic progress was in the public interest and should
therefore supersede individual rights.23
The English common law tradition of the protection of
private property rights--including the right to be free
from pollution--was slowly overturned. In other words,
many environmental problems are not caused by "market
failure" but by government's failure to enforce
property rights. It is a travesty of justice when
downstream residents, for example, cannot hold an
upstream polluter responsible for damaging their
properties. The common law tradition must be revived if
we are to enjoy a healthy market economy and a cleaner
environment. Potential polluters must know in advance
that they will be held responsible for their actions.
The second lesson is that the plundering of the
environment in the socialist world is a grand example
of the tragedy of the commons. Under communal property
ownership, where no one owns or is responsible for a
natural resource, the inclination is for each
individual to abuse or deplete the resource before
someone else does. Common examples of this "tragedy"
are how people litter public streets and parks much
more than their own yards; private housing is much
better maintained than public housing projects; cattle
ranchers overgraze public lands but maintain lush
pastures on their own property; the national forests
are carelessly over-logged, but private forests are
carefully managed and reforested by lumber companies
with "super trees"; and game fish are habitually
overfished in public waterways but thrive in private
lakes and streams. The tragedy of the commons is a
lesson for those who believe that further
nationalization and governmental control of natural
resources is a solution to our environmental problems.
These two pillars of free enterprise--sound liability
laws that hold people responsible for their actions and
the enforcement of private property rights--are
important stepping stones to environmental protection.
FOOTNOTES
[ShareDebate International Editor's Note: this text was
received in electronic form and it was intially scanned
in via an OCR program--it appears as if some uncaught
scanning errors remain in the bibliography. Where they
remain, I have replaced the characters with a '??'. I
did not receive this file direct from The Freeman but
from someone on the Internet who was scanning in their
articles that had blanket reprint permissions attached
to them--unfortunately, I have misplaced his name.]
1. Personal interview with Warren Brookes on April
??, 1990.
2. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons,"
Science, December 13, 1968, pp. 1244-45.
3. Marshall Goldman, The Spoils of Progress:
Environmental Pollution in the Soviet Union (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1972), p. 56.
4. Ibid., p. 162.
5. Peter Gumbel, "Soviet Concerns About Pollution Danger
Are Allowed to Emerge from the Closet," The Wall Street
Journal, August 23, 1988.
6. Goldman, p. ??.
7. Ibid. p. 232.
8. Ibid. p. 188.
9. Cited in Larry Tye, "Pollution a Nightmare Behind
Iron Curtain," The Arizona Republic, February 25,1990.
10. Cited in Mike Feinsilber, "Eastern Europe Fighting
Worst Pollution in World," The Chattanooga Times,
January 17,1990.
11. Tye, op. cit.
12. Marlise Simons, "Rising Iron Curtain Exposes
Haunting Veil of Polluted Air," The New York Times,
April 8, 1990
13. Lloyd Timberlake, "Poland--The Most Polluted
Country in the World?" New Scientist, October 22, 1981,
p. 219.
14. Marlise Simmons, "A Green Party Mayor Takes on
Industrial Filth of Old Cracow," The New York Times,
March 25, 1990.
15. Feinsilber, op. cit.
16. Tye, op. cit.
17. Marlise Simons, "Pollution's Toll in Eastern
Europe: Stumps Where Great Trees Once Grew," The New
York Times, March 19, 1990.
18. Marlise Simons, "Central Europe's Grimy Coal Belt:
Progress, Yes, But at What Cost?" The New York Times,
April 1, 1990.
19. Ibid.
20. Jeffrey Gedamn, "Polluted East Germany," Christian
Science Monitor, March 16, I990.
21. Simons, "Rising Iron Curtain."
22. Comptroller General, Wastepaper Recycling: Programs
of Civil Agencies Waned During the 1980s (Washington,
D.C.: General Accounting Office, 1989), p. 13.
23. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American
Law, 1780-1860 (Cambndge: Harvard University Press,
1977).
***
Dr. DiLorenzo holds the Probasco Chair of Free
Enterprise at the University of Tennessee at
Chattanooga. This article is adapted from a larger
study published by the Center for the Study of American
Business at Washington University in St. Louis and
presented at the Mont Pelerin Society meeting in Big
Sky, Montana, August 22-26, 1991. The Freeman is the
monthly publication of The Foundation for Economic
Education, Inc., Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533. FEE,
established in 1946 by Leonard E. Read, is a
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