Brief Thought #2: Freegans and the War on Capitalism

The other day I learned about the existence of Freegans. These are 21st century hippies based in New York City, what I would call ecologically sensitive economists. Or in their own words,

Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. www.freegan.info

They perceive that anything we buy from any company or corporation requires harm to people, animals, or the environment in order to produce it. At the extreme, freegans boycott all capitalistic enterprise and engage in civil disobedience. They forage all or most of their “stuff,” including food, from other people’s throwaways. This includes squatting in abandoned buildings rather than buying or renting. They do this on principle, not because of poverty. In the process, they move radically in the direction of socialism.

I have often pondered the same problems which drive freegans to a fringe lifestyle. In general, how can capitalists be persuaded to act ethically? I recently concluded that they cannot. If you ask a capitalist to run his factories in a way that doesn’t pollute the air or water, or use questionable labor practices, or saturate landfills, he will rightly reply that if he does these things, his competitors will certainly not, and he will not be able to remain in business against his unethical competitors. It is a classical example of game theory and cheating. It doesn’t work unless nobody cheats. It is like a cartel agreement. The alternative is for government to regulate industry to prevent externalities. Of course, one problem is deciding who gets to define the undesirable externalities. Nobody has lived long enough to truly understand the long-term social and ecological consequences of many of the externalities of production. For instance, discarding food may not be so bad if the food composts to create fertilizer for next year’s food crop.

The freegan movement is a natural pendulum swing away from the excesses of capitalist society. If everyone joined the freegan movement, production would halt as people used up the vast quantities of “stuff” which are currently being wasted and discarded. I fear that technology would slow and eventually reverse course until we all reverted to primitive village economies. For many, that is not a conflict. However, I feel that a certain level of mass-production and a certain rate of technological advance is mandatory as the earth’s population advances to a point where a single tsunami could end the lives of a hundred million people. We must learn to subdue the earth (and Venus, et al, if necessary) in a manner that can allow sustainable and ecologically sound expansion. In their extreme rejection of capitalism, the many of the freegans find themselves joining the “zero population growth” crowd with the demographic problems which that creates. To avoid that outcome, productivity and technology must at least keep pace with our need for expansion.

Biblical economics appears to be roughly capitalistic and entrepreneurial, subject to certain land laws. A future project may be to catalog the economics of Biblical Hebrew society and compare them with capitalism and socialism. It would be a most worthwhile economic analysis. Stay tuned.