The Problem with Socialism by Thomas DiLorenzo

Author:Thomas DiLorenzo [DiLorenzo, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

SOCIALISM’S ENVIRONMENTAL NIGHTMARES

The environmental perils of government ownership are even more pronounced under socialism. The collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s and early 1990s provided a glimpse, for the first time in decades, of the environmental conditions in such closed societies as socialist Russia, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere. What emerged was a tragic story of grotesque environmental destruction.

Small groups can use property communally, and through the threat of fines and social ostracism, make it work—the sort of thing you see in homeowner associations and community clubhouses. But when property is owned communally on a large scale or by the government and treated as a free resource, it will inevitably be abused because no one has either the motivation of profit or even the simple pride of ownership to care for and maintain the land for future profit or future generations; it is simply something to be used now. In the Soviet Union, such socialist attitudes and policies led to an environmental scandal of epic proportions exposed in books like Ecocide in the USSR.5 A typical example comes from the Soviet Union’s exploitation of the Black Sea.6 To meet government-issued five-year plans for housing and other construction, builders extracted gravel and sand from around Black Sea beaches (and knocked down a lot trees to do so). Because there was no private property, no value was attached to the gravel, or to the trees, or to the shoreline. Because the gravel was “free,” contractors hauled away as much as possible—before someone else did. The result, of course, was massive erosion of the beach. Between 1920 and 1960, the Black Sea coastline shrank by half, the area was scarred by hundreds of landslides every year, and hotels, hospitals, and a military sanitarium collapsed into the sea as the shoreline gave way.

For similar reasons—a lack of private ownership, no commercial incentive to be good environmental stewards, the stifling of economic and technical progress that comes with socialism—water pollution was catastrophic in socialist Russia. The West has had its fair share of environmental problems, including river pollution, but nothing like what went on behind the Iron Curtain. Effluent from a chemical plant killed almost all the fish in the Oka River in 1965, and similar fish kills occurred in the Volga, Ob, Yenesi, Ural, and Northern Divina Rivers. Most Russian factories discharged their waste without cleaning it at all. Mines, oil wells, and ships freely dumped waste and ballast into any available body of water. Only six of the twenty main cities in Moldavia had a sewer system by the late 1960s, and only two of those cities were successful in actually treating sewage. Conditions were far more primitive—and polluted—in the countryside.

The Aral and Caspian seas had been slowly disappearing during the socialist era as huge quantities of their water were diverted for irrigation. Since untreated sewage flowed into their feeder rivers, they were heavily polluted as well. Near the end of the socialist era in Russia, some government authorities there predicted that by the end of the century the Aral Sea would essentially become a salt marsh.

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