A major book revisited
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... « Simple Rules for a complex world » by Richard Epstein, Harvard University Press, 1995, 361 pp.
Some 14 years ago Bruce Yandle handed me over this book and I do advise you read or reread it . Epstein, a famous legal philosopher and a modified libertarian advocates limited government within a set of simple rules based on Liberty ans private property.
In addition to Daniel Silver’s review (Commentary, September 1995) you should have a minute look at chapter 15 “ Environmental Protection and Private Property” whose first paragraph states “Environmetal protection was not a distinct field of law before 1970. Since that time it has become a growth industry and had enjoyed widespread political support that only recently has shown signs of fraying at the edges. One characteristic of the modern environmental movement is its manifest distrust of private law approaches to environmental protection which it finds insufficient to deal with matters of such moral, aesthetic and cultural urgency. The result has been a collection of rules and statutes that quite literally defy convenient summarization....Most of the complexity found inthe present law could be avoided if the simple rules outlined here wera applied rigourously to matters of environmental policy”.
Since 1995 the EU and the French government teamed to turn out hundreds of directives and rules whose costs exceed benefits.
Max Falque
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