Young environmentalists embracing free trade
Re: Are environmentalists embracing free trade?, August 1
As a college student involved in many environmentalist groups, it seems to me that the Green movement, particularly its younger members, is warming up to free trade.
It’s apparent that many government interventions in the economy are doing great harm to the environment, and the tariffs on Chinese solar panels are only the most recent example. The federal government has been subsidizing the fossil fuel industry for decades, making it harder for alternative energy sources to compete. The nonsensical ban on domestic hemp production requires American companies to import it from abroad, driving up the price of eco-friendly hemp-based paper, textiles and food products. The list goes on.
Today’s young environmentalists, who will be leading the major Green groups in a few decades, certainly recognize that environment is often served better by the free market than by the government.
Sam Tracy
Arlington
Pick your governmental restrictions
Re: “Restore the draft? What would Milton Friedman do?” July 31
Milton Friedman opposed the draft and “compulsory national service” for being akin to slavery. Yet the same Milton Friedman was the foremost champion of having government force all taxpayers to support religious institutions through school voucher plans. Friedman opposed one form of government restriction on freedom while favoring government action to violate every citizen’s religious freedom.
Isn’t government interference with our precious religious freedom also akin to slavery? Milton Friedman was a very strange guy.
Edd Doerr
Silver Spring
Congress can’t please everybody
Re: “Who is the real laughingstock here?,” Aug. 1
Fritz R. Kahn expressed a very understandable frustration in his letter to the editor, in that government isn’t solving the problems he wants solved. However, his stating, “It is Congress that has been a total failure these past three and a half years,” only perpetuates the very existence of the root cause of his frustration. Congress represents the interest of each pocket of the nation, a nation of 310 million people. Considering the ratio of that to 535 representatives and senators, disagreements will inevitably result in stalemate, especially when those two chambers stand split between the two major parties. For more action and less stalemate, we should ask why we look to the federal government to solve so many problems.
Diversity does not only run skin deep. It incorporates culture, religion, values, and of course beliefs in how government should work across all of the nation’s respective locales. For ideas to survive the tug of war between Left and Right, we must start taking issues out of hands of the federal government and turn them over to the states where legislatures can more likely reach agreements more expediently, effectively, and relevantly to the people they effect. Social Security reform, Medicare revision, agriculture subsidy review, and other issues alike would stand a far better chance of actually happening. Also, states can’t print their own money, so they have to confront debt issues more timely rather than procrastinating to the point of failing ever to do so.
Brian Wrenn
Washington
