Michael Lissack to take steps designed to mitigate those impacts. On the basis of the impact statement and the comments of interested parties, a central government agency was to determine whether the proposed action met environmental standards. The manufacturers who polluted the air and water passed a cost inherent in their for-profit manufacturing processes on to the rest of us, who were then expected either to put up with acid rain, dirty air, and dirty water or fork out our own money to abate those nuisances. Before the new environmental laws, manufacturers were allowed to “externalize” their costs by making other people pay costs that were properly the manufacturers’. Deferring environmental costs in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century by allowing nature to absorb pollutants permitted the United States to accumulate industrial capital, but in the sixties we became aware we could no longer rely upon nature’s resilience alone. Because A does not want to pay to clean up B’s mess, we have spent the years since trying to make B and B’s customers pay for their own mess. By the early 1970’s, it had become apparent that parties to the review process -environmental interest groups, developers, and industrial firms, among others - had earned how to use social protest, informal strategies of political influence, or resort to the courts in order to manipulate the review process for their special purposes. It became increasingly likely that an in- terest group opposed to a development, such as an industrial firm, halfway house, or waste disposal facility, could readily block it, even when there was broad public consensus that some such development was publicly desirable. It is now twenty years after that realization but still the problems remain and the process has not been streamlined. Another failure of accountability has occurred where the government itself is providing services. A blind spot of postwar American liberalism has been its failure to understand that a monopoly or cartel administered by a public authority is at least as likely to be backward and abusive as one administered by a private company. “It is one of the enduring paradoxes of American ideology that we attack private monopolies so fervently but em- brace public monopolies so warmly,” write David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, the authors of Reinventing Government. Both kinds of monopolies are likely
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