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nonsense. No one who contemplates the problem seriously will
regard zero pollution as either a desirable or a possible state of
affairs. We could have zero pollution from automobiles, for ex-
ample, by simply abolishing all automobiles. That would also
make the kind of agricultural and industrial productivity we now
enjoy impossible, and so condemn most of us to a drastically
lower standard of living, perhaps many even to death. One source
of atmospheric pollution is the carbon dioxide that we all exhale.
We could stop that very simply. But the cost would clearly ex-
ceed the gain.
It costs something to have clean air, just as it costs something
to have other good things we want. Our resources are limited
and we must weigh the gains from reducing pollution against the
costs. Moreover, "pollution" is not an objective phenomenon. One
person's pollution may be another's pleasure. To some of us rock
music is noise pollution; to others of us it is pleasure.
The real problem is not "eliminating pollution," but trying to
establish arrangements that will yield the "right" amount of pol-
lution: an amount such that the gain from reducing pollution a
bit more just balances the sacrifice of the other good things—
houses, shoes, coats, and so on—that would have to be given up
in order to reduce the pollution. If we go farther than that, we
sacrifice more than we gain.
Another obstacle to rational analysis of the environmental issue
is the tendency to pose it in terms of good or evil—to proceed as
if bad, malicious people are pouring pollutants into the atmo-
sphere out of the blackness of their hearts, that the problem is
one of motives, that if only those of us who are noble would rise
in our wrath to subdue the evil men, all would be well. It is
always much easier to call other people names than to engage
in hard intellectual analysis.
In the case of pollution, the devil blamed is typically "busi-
ness," the enterprises that produce goods and services. In fact,
the people responsible for pollution are consumers, not producers.
They create, as it were, a demand for pollution. People who use
electricity are responsible for the smoke that comes out of the
stacks of the generating plants. If we want to have the electricity
with less pollution, we shall have to pay, directly or indirectly, a

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high enough price for the electricity to cover the extra costs.
Ultimately, the cost of getting cleaner air, water, and all the rest
must be borne by the consumer. There is no one else to pay for it.
Business is only an intermediary, a way of coordinating the ac-
tivities of people as consumers and producers.
The problem of controlling pollution and protecting the en-
vironment is greatly complicated by the tendency for the gains
and losses derived from doing so to fall on different people. The
people, for example, who gain from the greater availability of
wilderness areas, or from the improvement of the recreational
quality of lakes or rivers, or from the cleaner air in the cities, are
generally not the same people as those who would lose from the
resulting higher costs of food or steel or chemicals. Typically, we
suspect, the people who would benefit most from the reduction
of pollution are better off, financially and educationally, than the
people who would benefit most from the lower cost of things that
would result from permitting more pollution. The latter might
prefer cheaper electricity to cleaner air. Director's Law is not
absent from the pollution area.
The same approach has generally been adopted in the attempt
to control pollution as in regulating railroads and trucks, con-
trolling food and drugs, and promoting the safety of products.
Establish a government regulatory agency that has discretionary
power to issue rules and orders specifying actions that private
enterprises or individuals or states and local communities must
take. Seek to enforce these regulations by sanctions imposed by
the agency or by courts.
This system provides no effective mechanism to assure the bal-
ancing of costs and benefits. By putting the whole issue in terms
of enforceable orders, it creates a situation suggestive of crime
and punishment, not of buying and selling; of right and wrong,
not of more or less. Moreover, it has the same defects as this kind
of regulation in other areas. The persons or agencies regulated
have a strong interest in spending resources, not to achieve the
desired objectives, but to get favorable rulings, to influence the
bureaucrats. And the self-interest of the regulators in its turn
bears only the most distant relation to the basic objective. As
always in the bureaucratic process, diffused and widely spread

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interests get short shrift; the concentrated interests take over. In
the past these have generally been the business enterprises, and