It’s still early in the year, but we’ve already found a strong contender for Stupidest Take of 2021. It’s courtesy of Joakim Book, the Koch-y covid and climate denier, who you might remember from October, when he wrote about how selfish it is for parents to bring their monstrous children into public places like coffee shops where he’s trying to work in the sort of privacy, peace and quiet one apparently expects when one leaves one's own home. (Book’s feelings about children would have probably been better addressed by talking it through with a therapist, but we digress…)
In a blog post for the Cato Institute's HumanProgress project, the anti-human-child writer explains that “those who care about nature” should stop with the “mass mobilization” and instead simply marry into wealth and then buy up and conserve land.
Now, Book doesn’t exactly say it like that. Instead, he frames it as (well-deserved) praise for Mrs. Rosalie Edge, whom he describes as a “New Yorker of the Gilded Age who married into wealth, and a veteran suffragette who in her 40s and 50s discovered a love for birds and conserving the environment.”
With her wealth and passion, she set up Hawk Mountain Sanctuary to try to save the hawks, which were being decimated by hunters, as Pennsylvania had offered a $5 bounty on hawks, because they were considered a nuisance by farmers. Book claims this “illustrates that trusting the government to be our climate savior is rarely appropriate” and then immediately goes on to praise “markets and property rights,” as though it weren’t a free-market policy that was driving the hunting of the hawks in the first place!
But no, the problems caused by dogmatic deference to the free market are also apparently solved by the free market. Instead of working for policy that protects species, Book offers a couldn’t-be-simpler solution for “those who are concerned with blue whales being hit by ships…: buy the threatened species.” Then when one gets hit, you can “charge the shipping company with destruction of property.”
Of course! How simple! Environmentalists, why haven’t you yet purchased an endangered species and then tried to sue whoever hurts it? Surely there’s no reason to think that the corporations who have profited off of the destruction of said species would ever be able to afford to buy it themselves or, you know, hire fleets of lawyers to fend off any claims brought against them by the “owners” of the species.
Though perhaps he does have a point, in that rich people’s wealth should absolutely be redistributed to improve the environment. However, either Mr. Book doesn’t realize he’s proposing what is essentially a privately-paid price on pollution, or doesn’t care that he would lambast his own supposed solution as socialism if anyone else presented it.
While Book’s take is obviously a very, very stupid one, it is instructive. As Mr. Book’s “just buy a cleaner environment” suggestion shows, the only thing dumber than organized denial’s free-market fetishization and more laughable than their bad-faith policy obstructionism are their actual, genuine ideas for policy.