Walter Block on Canadian journalist Barbara Amiel:
“According to Barbara Amiel, “a rapacious Asian demand for ivory is creating such terrible killing fields that elephants face extinction by poaching.” She writes this bit of economic illiteracy in Maclean’s Magazine (October 7, 2013, pp. 12-13). Before probing the reasons why this is so totally wrong, here is a bit of background. Barbara Amiel, wife of Conrad Black (and ex-wife of George Jonas, another semi- demi- quasi- libertarian with whom I have also tangled in these pages) is a sort of Canadian equivalent of Ann Coulter: brilliant, beautiful, a gifted writer, conservative, vaguely libertarian on a few issues.
[Lila: Amiel is also a rape apologist and (although she makes a a good point about societal hypocrisy and moral panics) a pedophile apologist, as well. (Steubenville rape case).
The “”vaguely libertarian” bit in Block’s piece could refer to Amiel’s questioning of the “injustice” of the US justice system, for instance, during the uproar over Roman Polanski’s long-standing rape charges, and also, no doubt, on the basis of former husband Conrad Black’s scrapes with the legal system.
Black is of-course a card-carrying member of the power-elite.]
Maclean’s Magazine is a rough equivalent of Time Magazine in the U.S.
Back to the elephants, of which Amiel is very fond; she also states: “The magnificent and highly intelligent elephant has always been treated abominably. Today helicopter gunships shoot them down in Africa and hack off heads for ivory tusks, leaving baby elephants orphaned.” Maclean’s Magazine (September 13, 2013). Why is her first statement entirely nonsensical, and her second, in that context, misleading at best? This is because the demand for ivory has nothing whatsoever to do with poaching. There is a “rapacious” demand for pork, too, on the part of “Asians,” and everyone else for that matter, and yet the pig does not face “extinction by poaching” or from any other source. The same is true for steaks and cows, wings and chickens, etc. There is also “a rapacious Asian demand for” things like cement for building, wood for chopsticks, steel for ships, etc., etc. And, yet, miraculously, there is no shortage, let alone total disappearance of, any of these things.
No, if we want to ferret out the source of the plight of the elephant, we must look elsewhere. Where oh where? I will give Amiel one hint: this difficulty stems from an institution that has played havoc with more, far more, than merely the elephant. Yes, that is it: the government. And how, pray tell, has statism caused grief in this particular case? It is simple. By not allowing private ownership in these creatures (and the same applies to the tiger, the rhino, the whale, and every other species in danger of extinction) the “public sector” has unleashed the tragedy of the commons on mankind, and with it the endangerment of all species that are not allowed to be owned privately.”
And, per Block, Elinor Ostrom, about whom I blogged here, is also economically illiterate, despite….or, should I say, based on… the fact of her winning a Nobel Prize for her work on governing the commons.
I don’t know enough to comment on her work.