The 108th Congress should
- take back the regulatory authority
it has delegated to the Environmental Protection Agency;
- transfer responsibility for the
safety of chemicals to industry;
- address the question, What is an
acceptable level of risk?
- reexamine the acceptable risk level
it set in the Food Quality Protection Act; and
- strip the EPA of its research
functions.
Consumers may pressure a
corporation to remove 99% of the pollutants it discharges into the
environment. The cost of removing the remaining 1% may be many
times greater than the cost of removing the first 99%. Is the cost
worth the risk? The Free Market, hearing the input all consumers,
based on the collective knowledge of hundreds of millions of
Americans, is better equipped than Congress or its bureaucracies
to decide on the value of cleaning up the remaining 1%.
For more information, see Price V. Fishback's review of CALCULATING
RISKS: The Spatial and Political Dimensions of Hazardous-Waste
Policy, by James T. Hamilton and W. Kip Viscusi (THE
INDEPENDENT REVIEW, Winter 2001).
Also see CUTTING
GREEN TAPE: Toxic Pollutants, Environmental Regulation and the Law,
edited by Richard Stroup and Roger Meiners, foreword by W. Kip
Viscusi (The Independent Institute/ Transaction Publishers, 2000).
For TOXIC
TORTS BY GOVERNMENT by Bruce Benson, research fellow at The
Independent Institute.
Click
here for a related speech to the California Mining Association
by Alex Tabarrok, research director at The Independent Institute.
next: Global Warming
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