Don't know how this person escaped my attention up to now because he sure is a piece of work:
Legalizing the trade in ivory and other elephant products would provide additional resources. In essence, elephants need to be treated like cattle. Their owners---or the equivalent, such as villagers living near elephants---need to benefit from the animals’ preservation. Noted Bulte and van Kooten: “When trade is allowed, the characteristics of elephant stocks as an asset are obviously different, because living elephants represent a growing and valuable source of future ivory. Hence, in the long run, trade in ivory may well promote elephant conservation.”
This is a textbook example of everything that is truly heinous about glibertarianism: First, the idea that there's no intrinsic value to anything on the planet unless it can be monetized, then privatized; second, the idea that the only way you can get people to behave in an ethical manner is to essentially bribe them, with money or land or elephants or whatnot; and third, that unless a law induces 100-percent compliance, then the law is useless and should be done away with, and forget about why the law was ever enacted in the first place. There's just no concept of The Commons with these people, which is richly ironic considering that they make their homes and earn their fortunes in a place called the United States. Then again, when you labor in the service of some of the most awful people our Republic has ever produced, guess it's not such a stretch to suppose you'll advocate some genuinely awful policies.
As an aside, it never seems to dawn on these brilliant scholars that if elephants could be successfully "harvested" like cattle, the chances are good that there would be thriving elephant ranches all over sub-Saharan Africa. The fact that there aren't should speak for itself---but then again, acknowledging reality deprives you of the opportunity to advance a contrarian argument.
(Via.)
---Baron V
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