Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming

by Naomi Oreskes

research shows that regulation is an effective means to stimulate technological innovation. That is to say, if you want the market to do its magic—if you want businesses to provide the goods and services that people need—the best way to do that, at least in terms of pollution prevention, appears, paradoxically, to be to mandate it.

But as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin sagely pointed out, liberty for wolves means death to lambs.

To acknowledge this was to acknowledge the soft underbelly of free market capitalism: that free enterprise can bring real costs—profound costs—that the free market does not reflect.

DDT imposed enormous external costs through the destruction of ecosystems; acid rain, secondhand smoke, the ozone hole, and global warming did the same. This is the common thread that ties these diverse issues together: they were all market failures. They are instances where serious damage was done and the free market seemed unable to account for it, much less prevent it. Government intervention was required.