Only dumbs would think that pure, unregulated capitalism wouldn't be a truly epic disaster. Imagine what the world would be like if there were no environmental regulations.
Adorable. And it gets more adorable every time you convince yourself that environmental regulations are about moral restraint, saving baby seals and murdering Hummer drivers.
Now I'll tell you how the real world works. In a free-market libertarian system, which relies heavily on civil law, people sue one another constantly for damages. This never really happened did it? What free market are you imagining we lived in?
Environmental regulations are useful insofar as they prevent chaos in the lower courts and they reduce the need of appeals courts to set the lower courts straight. Eco regs also reduce the ability of businesses to thwart civil proceedings by paying off the judiciary and legislature.
We don't have a free market in this country. Not for pollution. Not for healthcare or other insurance or anything else. The government and businesses have been meddling from the get go. Sadly, the government has never really been interested in protecting the market from business coercion. Instead, they hope to enforce a different kind of politically correct coercion.
Environmental regulations allow basic human rights of having access to clean water and clean air, rather than dying an early death because they're too polluted.
