Take the issue we were discussing when my correspondent weighed in on the value of picking only clean fights. In January, the Sierra Club filed suit in Hawaii to block a three-year promotional campaign funded by the state tourism board. The suit argues that Hawaiian law requires an environmental impact study before the state can spend money to attract more tourists. Although the state law has previously been applied only to land use and building projects, its scope isn't specifically limited. The Sierra Club thus argues that since more visitors could damage Hawaii's environment, the promotional campaign shouldn't be allowed to proceed without considering the effects of more tourists.
No big deal, right? It's just a dispute over some pork-barrel spending, "corporate welfare" at the local level. "If the Sierra Club wins their suit," said the analyst, "the only precedent set is that programs we as libertarians otherwise don't like--tourism promotion funded by states--are going to get the same level of environmental scrutiny that other government undertakings get. I certainly am not going to lose sleep over that."
Unfortunately, the Sierra Club's agenda has absolutely nothing to do with corporate welfare. Suggesting that the issue is subsidies is like pretending that Juliette Beck is fighting for better IMF fiscal policies. The Sierra Club is trying to get travel declared a form of pollution. "Nearly 7 million tourists descend on Hawaii's beaches and roads and natural areas each year," says Jeffrey Mikulina, director of the group's Hawaii chapter. "Whether an extra million would be the straw that breaks the camel's back needs to be examined."
The Sierra Club chapter in Hawaii isn't just against state spending to promote tourism. It's against more visitors in general. Like Beck, Mikulina is concerned about "the notion of boundless growth." His chapter opposes not just the marketing program but, for instance, any revision in the state's 39-year-old land-use law that might make it easier to build hotels and resorts instead of farms. When land-use reform came up last year, Mikulina had a simple message: "The environmentalists' reaction is, `Don't touch it.'"
The Sierra Club's suit is certainly incremental, reinterpreting a particular law to curb a particular government activity. A victory would not declare travel illegal. But the Sierra Club is a savvy organization that understands how to build a policy base gradually, step by step. It is working to move law and public opinion toward the assumption that autarky is the natural, proper state of society, and that mobility is suspect, something that must be justified and defended. The Sierra Club may also be smart enough to realize that by attacking subsidies it can get some potential opponents to sit out the debate, just as anti-immigration activists in California made it hard to attack Proposition 187 by framing it as an anti-welfare measure.
But the principle at stake in Hawaii is not business subsidies. It is freedom of movement--a cause worth losing sleep over. And, once again, it is also economic growth. The two issues are inextricably linked with each other and with individual freedom in general.
Business subsidies are wasteful and unfair. But they do not, in our era, represent a systemic threat to liberty. No pro-subsidy ideology is on the march. But those like Mikulina and Beck, who see human mobility, human ingenuity, human pleasure, human life itself as a form of pollution--those who seek to hold the world in stasis lest human action change it--do pose a fundamental challenge to individual freedom and social progress.
Letting these ideas go unchallenged because we might sully ourselves with dirty issues is irresponsible. By waiting for perfectly clean opportunities to apply our principles, we risk losing them altogether.
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