Principles
Free Market Environmentalism (FME) is an approach to environmental problems that focuses on improving environmental quality using property rights and markets. It emphasizes three important points:
- Markets, property rights, and the rule of law are fundamental to economic growth, and economic growth is fundamental to improving environmental quality. There is a strong correlation between treatment of the environment and standards of living.
- Property Rights make the environment an asset rather than a liability thus giving owners an incentive for stewardship.
- Markets and the process of exchange give people who have different ideas and values regarding natural resource use a way of cooperating rather than fighting. When cooperation supplants conflict, gains from trade supplant negative-sum games.
Read more about this topic: Property And Environment Research Center
Famous quotes containing the word principles:
“The chief lesson of the Depression should never be forgotten. Even our liberty-loving American people will sacrifice their freedom and their democratic principles if their security and their very lives are threatened by another breakdown of our free enterprise system. We can no more afford another general depression than we can afford another total war, if democracy is to survive.”
—Agnes E. Meyer (1887–1970)
“Though the ancients were ignorant of the principles of Christianity there were in them the germs of its spirit.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“In child rearing it would unquestionably be easier if a child were to do something because we say so. The authoritarian method does expedite things, but it does not produce independent functioning. If a child has not mastered the underlying principles of human interactions and merely conforms out of coercion or conditioning, he has no tools to use, no resources to apply in the next situation that confronts him.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)