Markets and law

the case of environmental conservation

Hillel Steiner

pp. 43-58

in: Michael Moran, Maurice Wright (eds), The market and the state, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1991

Abstract

Markets have, of course, always had their critics. And though the past two decades have witnessed an unprecedented global resurgence of market advocacy and the rapid dismantling (through privatisation and deregulation) of commerce-restricting legal provisions in countless countries, there is one policy area that has emerged as a formidable redoubt from which those critics have proved particularly difficult to dislodge. Notwithstanding the singularly abysmal environmental record of the Eastern European command economies, it seems to be widely accepted — even by Mrs Thatcher — that environmental values must be statutorily insulated from determination and allocation by competitive market forces. The world must be forced to be "greener" than sovereign consumers apparently would allow it to be. Why?