Book contents
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 How Capitalism Saves the Environment
- 3 Capital Investments Create Their Own Political Economy
- 4 Bloated Capital
- 5 The Case for Environmental Taxation
- 6 What Should Be Taxed?
- 7 Generating Environmental Knowledge
- 8 Looking Before Leaping
- 9 Conclusion
- Index
9 - Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2021
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Capitalism and the Environment
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction
- 2 How Capitalism Saves the Environment
- 3 Capital Investments Create Their Own Political Economy
- 4 Bloated Capital
- 5 The Case for Environmental Taxation
- 6 What Should Be Taxed?
- 7 Generating Environmental Knowledge
- 8 Looking Before Leaping
- 9 Conclusion
- Index
Summary
While Adam Smith did not name it, he identified capitalism as something profoundly different, something that would break feudalism, and something that would generate wealth previously unimaginable. To argue that something so transformative could happen without royal edict or conscious purpose, driven only by self-interest, was heretical. But it is a big and consequential mistake to leap to the conclusion that capitalism is “natural” and self-executing. It became a canard that all capitalism needed was “free” markets, unspoiled by government interference. Markets depend upon rules and institutions for governance. Capitalism is more than markets alone, and requires more by way of governance. Even in Smith’s eighteenth-century England, there still had to be “tolerable administration of justice.” Capitalism was then, is now, and will always be dependent up the selective coercion of legal rules and institutions. For example, the enforcement of promises requires the coercion of courts, or at least norms broad enough to be institutional in nature.
- Type
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- Information
- Capitalism and the EnvironmentA Proposal to Save the Planet, pp. 225 - 243Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021