>Is the use of Ricardian Equivalence as an argument against >environmentalism legitimate? In the same way that we should be >indifferent to leaving the next generation either a debt and the wealth >to pay for it or no debt and no wealth, can one say that we should be >indifferent to leaving either a healthy environment and no wealth or the >wealth gained from using it up?
The obvious economic argument for environmentalism would be, not that "consuming" the environment is automatically bad, but that we do an inefficiently large amount of it, since external costs are underweighted in private decisions. Hence the claim would be that we are choosing between leaving our descendants a billion dollars in wealth or two billion (say) in environment. -- David Friedman Professor of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.daviddfriedman.com/
