Economic Freedom and Environmental Quality

ment that “we are waking up. ” Americans are “again recognizing the dan-gers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full poten-tial of a great society ” (310). This hopeful statement foreshadowed much of what has happened since then. A president, more appreciative of markets than any in decades, was elected in the United States that year, followed in Great Britain by the choice of a market-oriented prime minister. Ten years after Free to Choose was published, the Berlin Wall fell. In many ways the tide has indeed turned. The work of the Friedmans was one of the reasons. Their impeccably reasoned arguments in favor of economic freedom, start-ing in a big and lasting way with Capitalism and Freedom, helped to gradually bring people in the United States and elsewhere to recognize the importance of economic freedom. In the United States, beginning in the late 1970s, trucking deregulation and the freeing of airline prices from regulation both brought size-able, well-recognized benefits, as did the deregulation of oil prices. In some places, the move toward economic freedom went further. For example, Roger Douglas, finance minister in New Zealand’s Labour government beginning in 1984, was able to cut income tax rates in half, deregulate wide sectors of the New Zealand economy, end farm and business subsidies, and privatize most state-owned enterprises there. The progress made in nations around the world was substantial, and in some respects—albeit in fits and starts—the trend con-tinues. In England, the disasters of postwar socialism were, to a significant extent, reversed during the Thatcher era. M 74 Richard L. Stroup But today there is another, growing force at work in the opposite direc-tion. Against the progress in the understanding of the importance of markets and economic freedom is running a worrisome tide: the growing impact of reg-ulatory juggernauts stemming from environmental policy in the United States. Even as economic regulation in several cases declined, environmental regula-tion has increased