Actually I’ve been watching the media a bit and Ron Paul has been on the media answering questions quite a bit and he has been doing a pretty good job of portraying his position.

The one thing I think the media got him on, and the one thing I disagree with Ron Paul on, is the environment.

Ron Paul says that the constitution doesn’t give the federal government the authority to regulate the environment, that the combination of state/local law and tort law (ie: people suing entities for environmental damages by suing them for the harm that such environmental damages cause people and the liability that such lawsuits impose. An example would be BP being sued by fishers for the oil spill or someone suing a coal refinery for their respiratory problems) is sufficient.

I agree that the constitution doesn’t give the federal government the authority to regulate the environment and thus it is unconstitutional for the federal government to do so. However, the founding fathers were around before our current pollution emitting technology was as widely used as it is now (or even existed). States that pollute more can benefit from cheaper production than those who don’t and so they have an incentive not to pass strict pollution laws, yet their pollution harms states that don’t pollute as much. It would be difficult for those who live in states that pollute less to successfully sue those who live in states that pollute more without some sort of federal oversight (ie: in the form of laws that can impose some interstate liability) facilitating the process. Pollution is an interstate problem and so it doesn’t make sense to treat it as an intrastate problem like as Ron Paul suggests. and so I think the constitution needs to be amended to give the federal government limited power to regulate the environment.

Free markets assume that people are self interested and self interested people don’t care much about the environment (and even if most people do care enough about the environment to minimize how much pollution they cause, all it takes is a few selfish people to ruin the environment for everyone else).

Another problem is that states (and businesses) could have incentive to hide their pollution from other states (and the public). It’s difficult to detect who’s polluting and how much of each type of pollutant each entity is emitting unless someone has the authority to conduct the necessary inspections (ie: on private property). IMO, that should be the governments job (and that includes the federal government as well).

Thirdly, animals and trees can’t sue for the environmental damages caused to them (and it’s difficult to detect the impact that businesses are having on these things, and ultimately on us in the long term, unless someone has the authority to conduct the necessary inspections). Again, the constitution that the founding fathers set up made sense back when the founding fathers wrote it, but, when it comes to pollution and technology, we live in a completely different world today than we did back then.