A Conservationist's Dream

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I have left the below comment at Nick Johnson's blog:

No system is more advantageously responsive to damage from waste than capitalism. Karl Marx explicitly lists the waste disposal industry as among the most profitable industries under capitalism and stresses the pressure on capitalists to curb waste.

Whichever economic system we have, we shall have to shape and control it politically. I prefer being required to politically shape and control capitalism to any other economic system. This is why I have come to appreciate Keynes, who, I think, had a similar attitude.

The overly popular insinuation that capitalism is particularly prone to catastrophes of waste and environmental degradation is contrary to fact and, indeed, logic.

Loosely speaking, capitalism is the invention of systematic and effective waste reduction. Once we are agreed what to us is waste and what sort of degradation we wish to avoid, there is no economic system that is able to support us more powerfully in our conservational aims than is capitalism.