Extrinsic Cost Pirates

The Cliven Bundy fiasco is very telling.  Bundy doesn't want to pay the grazing costs for government-owned and subsidized land he's been using, and then ex-post-facto, denies the existence of the federal government entirely, and got a lot of support from the Tea Party Channel: Hannity, Fox News, etc.  Now it turns out he is also sort of disappointed that he can't own slaves, and thinks the slaves had a better life than their freed descendents.  It's true that the descendents of slaves in America have a much harder life than the average white person but I doubt many would willingly go back to it.  This was a step too far for even the most ardent Tea Partier, and Bundy's few days of being a hero are over.

The uniting theme of these two is that Bundy wants to foist his costs onto someone else.  The federal government, by enforcing EPA and other regulations on the land Bundy wanted to use without cost, are keeping the land healthy.   Note that they didn't actually kick him off at first--they just reduced the number of cattle he could run on it, and billed him for it.  Same thing with slavery.  The slaves are working at considerably less than market rates, and can be made to do things that a worker would not, such as work in toxic environments.  A worker would get hazardous duty wages and probably all sorts of protection.  Economists call such costs, for which the beneficiary does not pay, extrinsic costs.  Of course Bundy wants to get away without paying his costs.  But if everybody does that, we're soon all reduced to living in caves.

A lot of America was built on extrinsic costs, exploited by pioneering businesses, supported by an enthusiastic government.  For example, the pioneers who settled the west, the stage coach and railroad lines that transported them and their goods, etc., exploited resources that were already there.  At first, ruinous exploitation seemed trivial and harmless--there was so much land it seemed impossible to cause consequential damage.  But before long, there were enough settlers that their destructive techniques were causing consequential harm.

Fundamentally, what the Tea Party and their supporters want is to get away without paying extrinsic costs.  One of the important roles of government is to support such things.  Many extrinsic costs are extremely indirect: Most businesses could not exist without a substantial level of education to its founders and employees, the vast majority of which was paid for through taxes.  Roads, traffic controls, police.  Government does a very large fraction of the pure research that created the computer and semiconductor revolution, the space race, biotech and many more industries.  Laws that protect the environment by protecting it from abuses of dumping, pollution, etc. The Tea Party, whether they know it or not, is advocating for the rights of Extrinsic Cost Pirates to exploit--our land, our government, our people, and deny that they are doing it.