“Controlling Pollution” is a single-author lecture-essay in libertarian political economy, delivered at the Foundation for Economic Education and published in The Freeman. Its scope is not environmental science but institutional diagnosis: Sennholz grants, for argument’s sake, that pollution is grave, then asks whether its cause is private enterprise or political control.
"Pollution is a classic example of failure of the private enterprise system."
The essay is organized as a rebuttal to that premise. Sennholz treats the dominant “externalities” argument as a move from real environmental injury to an unwarranted confidence in state administration. He objects not to the existence of pollution, but to the claim that more centralized control follows from it.
Such observations reflect an unbounded faith in the political and bureaucratic process.
His first major conceptual move is reversal: the polluter is not primarily the profit-seeking firm but government as owner, operator, subsidizer, and legal shield. In the section “Who Is Polluting?” he points to refuse systems, public dumps, incinerators, sewer authorities, and navigable waters under government ownership. Lake Erie and the Cuyahoga River become examples of pollution produced or permitted by public agencies rather than by markets alone.
These facts primarily indict government rather than profit-seeking enterprise for our environmental crisis.
The same reversal structures his discussion of air pollution. Sennholz refuses E. J. Mishan’s denunciation of the automobile as a symbol of destructive growth. For him, the automobile is a genuine gain from capitalism, especially for rural and suburban life.
The automobile means high standards of living, great individual mobility and productivity, and access to the countryside for recreation and enjoyment.
Yet he does not deny urban smog. Instead, he relocates its causes in intervention: zoning spreads cities into automobile-dependent forms; public transit deteriorates under regulation, taxation, public authority management, and union pressure; and highways are treated as “free goods,” encouraging congestion and exhaust. His recurring economic principle is that underpriced public services invite overuse.
For no matter who renders a service free or at minimal charges, misuse, abuse, and waste are invited.
The remedy section follows directly from this diagnosis. Sennholz calls not for new environmental bureaucracy but for the withdrawal of state-created causes of pollution: government should stop polluting directly, stop subsidizing polluters, price scarce facilities such as roads, and divest functions it cannot manage without environmental harm.
As government is the prime polluter of our environment we must call on government to cease and desist.
His second major conceptual move is to reinterpret pollution as a failure of property-right enforcement rather than of property itself. Pollution remains possible under private production and consumption, but it persists because law has often exempted owners from the full costs of their actions. In his ideal legal order, ownership internalizes both benefit and burden.
Ideally, the right of property as a market phenomenon entitles the owner to all the advantages of a given good, and charges him with all the disadvantages which the good may entail.
Thus Sennholz’s preferred environmental instrument is not administrative rationing but tort-like liability, damages, and injunctions. Those harmed by smoke, noise, waste, or effluent should be able to sue and restrain the source.
Damaged parties must have their day in court and find relief from any harmful effect of someone else’s property.
The final sections reject popular remedies: direct emission controls are too uniform for varied local conditions; subsidies reward potential polluters; taxes let government profit from injuries suffered by others; “spaceship” recycling technology cannot be planned into existence; and population control subordinates human life to wilderness preservation. The essay closes with an explicitly anthropocentric defense of stewardship: man is part of nature, but his intelligence gives him the task of managing resources for survival and flourishing.
His right to life embodies his right to manage the resources of nature.
The work’s relevance lies in its early 1970s formulation of a free-market environmentalism sharply opposed to the emerging regulatory state. Its core thesis is not that pollution is imaginary, but that political ownership, subsidies, deficient liability rules, and suppression of market prices produce many of the very harms then attributed to capitalism. For Sennholz, environmental repair requires stronger responsibility, clearer property rights, and freer institutions rather than comprehensive planning.
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