… is from page 282 of the 2012 revised and updated edition of Steven Landsburg’s classic 1993 book, The Armchair Economist:
Anyway, if environmentalists were as passionate as they claim to be about conserving resources for future generations, I’d expect more of them to oppose the taxation of capital income, the Social Security system, and other policies that encourage overconsumption in the present. The absence of these issues from the environmentalists’ agenda suggests that their stance on future generations is the rhetoric not of principle but of convenience.
This quotation reminds me – if I may be permitted the vanity of saying so – of my very first post at Cafe Hayek.
