re: kegyll's economics

[LamarYates@aol.com]

Your specialty is evasion of real issues in the name of economics. This is
beneficial to the extent that it discredits economics, which is no science
but a cover for competing ideologies. Your ideology, of course, is the Ayn
Rand brand of liberty to corporations and "superior" people. 

 You say that 
"(1) Mark -- factories aren't located "in a wealthy community" because the
land values are so high that no one could afford to *build* a factory
there. Just as there are no landfills, airports, hospitals, shopping malls,
or any other "nuisance" in the backyard of a high-rent districts."

This is not logically different from what mrobinowitz@igc.apc.org wrote in
the first place. Certain uses of land are undesirable, even dangerous, and
therefore *people* who can afford to live, work, and shop elsewhere do so,
while *people* unable to avoid these locations have to live there. This is
not a neutral and benign "scientific" phenomenon, but involves human choices
and relationships -- ultimately an exercise of power, usually if not always
with government cooperation. (So much for Ayn.) It is environmental racism
and classism. Not slogans, but facts observable by the average ten year old
(provided she or he has not been indoctrinated in an economics class). 

"(2) Factories don't keep effluent on site for the same reasons that people
install toilets, indoor plumbing and septic tanks/or/sewers."

And that reason is that keeping sewage around is a health hazard -- like
keeping effluent around. And, like sewage, if it is taken off site, it must
be handled responsibly off site, since it remain dangerous. Therefore, again,
Mark's point is proven. Or, as we say in geometry, Quod Erat Demonstrandum,
now often translated as "Duh".