Understand that politicians were in charge when your country was pillaged, which is unsurprising.
Who's most likely to prioritise the long term health of an area of land?
The owner, who may plan to pass it on to his children, or sell or leverage it is as a valuable asset; or a politician, who has just a few years in power to do favours for friends, and give them anything that isn't nailed down?
Democracy is the tragedy of the commons; which is not good for the commons. Monarchy would be an improvement.
The free market can't provide nature, and the state can't provide nature.
Nature's not a service or product, though.
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Do you mean to say that commercial over-development was not the result of market forces then? Politicians are surely at fault for not doing their job of regulating things. Things were not regulated well enough and this happened. How would a free market prevent that?
Well let's look at the data. Has a private investor ever created something like a natural reserve? Has the corrupt government created something like a natural reserve? To me it seems that the data is in on that and person that wants their land to have value is unlikely to leave it being a forest and is likely to develop it. When everybody who owns property works to develop it with no restrictions and all possible property is privately owned, you end up with over-development. So no need to talk about tragedies and so on, we can be pragmatic and if you want to be pragmatic, I think you should concede that as bad as government might be, there are things that governments do that are valuable that are unlikely to be achieved through market forces.
Now that's an unpopular opinion :P Have dictatorships proven to be more efficient than democracies? You know, there are dictatorships around, if you don't like democracies, you could probably more to a dictatorship if you really wanted to, but when the question is posed like that, I'm sure you would quickly start appreciating the value of liberty and democracy.
But one has a much better record at preserving it and that is of value.
Does that make it any less important? What, we move to a free unregulated market and give up on everything that is not marketable as a service or a product and dub that a good thing?