THE PENTAGON IN THE DESERT

After years of search I finally have it, the picture that tells the story of capitalism vs. socialism better than a thousand words. Many thanks to all of you who tried to help, even if unsuccessfully, and particular thanks to the two readers who succeeded: Michael Colpitts of Raynham, Mass., who found the reference (Mission to Earth: LANDSAT Views the World, NASA, SP, 1976, p.8), and Herbert Sauer of Boulder, Colo., who supplied the photo from the none too accessible source. The photo I saw in Science in the mid-70s was clearer and unobstructed by clouds, but this one will do to make the point.

What turned the area round the pentagon into desert was common (tribal) ownership of the land, which belonged to everybody, and therefore to nobody. The animals grazed as much as they could on the common non-property.

Environmental problems are not "often" caused by the absence or violation of property rights: they are always and exclusively caused by them. The story of the profit-greedy corporations raping the land is unadulterated brainwash; any such corporation is not very profit-greedy, for it will soon go bankrupt by killing its own goose. Who do you suppose takes better care of the forests - Weyerhaeuser or the US Forest Service?

And beyond: the Weyerhauser corporate bureaucracy or the in-dividual guy who owns a forest and has only a few employees? And still beyond: the guy who has only a few employees or the one who has none at all? (Coming next century: computerized forest management . . .)

If the environment is raped and ravished, it is by those who speak of the biosphere as "the thin layer that belongs to all of us" (Ralph Nader); they are the educated spokesmen of the ignorant tribes who turned the Sahel into a desert.

The obvious and most drastic example is the ruined environ-ment of the Communist block, and I won't bore you with the obvious. Instead, let me point out a recent and unparalleled event in American politics: the big flap and repeal of the Catastrophic Health Care Act. Since when does the US taxpayer object to the goodies his generous government lavishes on him from the equivalent of the Sahel, the US treasury?

Since an act proposed that he steal from himself directly. When the old steal from the young (e.g., in Medicare), they gratefully accept it, just as the young accept it gratefully when they steal from everybody else (e.g., in education); and Congress lives by taking its cut as intermediary in the numerous and varied thieving transactions. But this time the old screamed, whaddaya mean pay for it ourselves? Ourselves.?!?

Never before has Congress and President retreated head-over-heels in such dumbfounded terror as when this devastating tempest hit them.