Pollution is a Corporate Subsidy

This weekend’s New York Times gave us insight into a problem that links economics and ethics in a very meaningful way. The first is the story of Treece, Kansas, where residents are seeking a government buyout and relocation of their town which sits on contaminated soil. Their sister town in Oklahoma, separated from Treece by a gravel road, has already received a Federal buyout and all but a handful of their 1,800 residents have been relocated. You see, this area was the epicentre of a vast mining district, rich in lead, zinc and iron ore. After the last mines closed in the 1970’s, the towns were left sitting on a toxic waste-dump of lead tinged dust, contaminated soil and sink holes. The second is a well researched and written report on the state of the nation’s drinking water which showed that one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet federal health benchmarks in other ways including carcinogens in the tap water of major American cities.

How do the above stories relate to ethics and economics you may ask? The answer is simple. Companies choose to disobey laws or utilize mining and manufacturing processes that pollute, in order to save money and earn higher profits. They do not attach any monetary value to ethics when decision making, they recognize only cold hard cash. Why should the public care if these industries pollute as long as it keeps corporate costs down and thereby, hopefully, keep consumer’s costs down? Because pollution is a government and private citizen subsidy to industry. As long as companies pollute at will in an effort to keep their costs down, either because there is no regulation or regulations are not being enforced, government and private citizens will have to pick up the cost of their pollution. The two stories outlined above are prime examples. In the latter, people have to pay to have water hauled in to their property because their drinking water is not safe. The cost of health care for individuals escalates, and it is impossible to put a price on human life cut short by preventable disease.  In the former, the government (a.k.a. taxpayer) is picking up the tab for re-mediating the sites and relocating residents.
Taxpayerfunded cleanup of toxic industrial sites directly subsidizes the corporation that was allowed to pollute for years because it was cheaper than putting in the controls and looking after the toxic by-products of their industrial process. Regulation and the enforcement of regulation, something that makes breaking the rules more expensive than following them, is the only answer to these problems. Human nature has proven that it cannot be trusted to do the right (ethical) thing on a consistent basis, if it is more profitable not to. 

Taxpayers should be demonstrating in the streets that their hard earned tax dollars are being used to subsidize companies that break the law, render their personal property worthless or cause them physical harm(something that adversely affects the average person), instead of protesting that government should not offer public health-care (something that would  benefit the average person).  I believe that this bears witness to the power that corporate special interests wield in the United States today, as they have convinced the average citizen that their well-beings are completely inter-dependent.