Albuquerque Libertarian Examiner: Pollution and statism are destructive siblings
There are two actions which I think demonstrate a lack of responsibility more clearly than any others: "soiling your own nest" (littering or polluting) and promoting statism.
In the case of littering or otherwise polluting, you obviously have a right to do anything to your own property that you wish. As long as your filth stays on your own property. If it blows onto another person's property, or in the case of chemicals, gets into the air or groundwater, then you have harmed the other individuals. You have an obligation to make it right.
To carelessly allow your waste to trespass, and do nothing about it, is a sign of a terrible lack of responsibility on your part.
In the same way, statism is allowing your own lack of responsibility to trespass into the lives of other people. Statists leave a wasteland of "laws" and regulations wherever they roam. Instead of taking responsibility for their own lives, and cleaning up their own messes, statists would prefer to make "one-size-fits-all" rules that everyone would be forced to live under, unless the guilty party can bribe the state, of course. It is as if they believe that since they have no self-responsibility, no one else possibly could either.
The two sometimes cross paths. Statists who falsely call themselves "environmentalists" use the state in order to force people to clean up their own mess, yet conveniently overlook the fact that the state is the worst despoiler of the natural world there has ever been. Nothing is less qualified to pass judgment on "pollution" than is government.
Accept your responsibilities to clean up your own messes, whether they be environmental or moral. Don't pollute and don't support the state.
