… is from page 76 of Thomas Sowell’s 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates (emphasis added):
We all want clean air and water, don’t we? The only problem is that there has never been any such thing. No water and no air has ever been 100 percent pure, at least not since Adam and Eve made the wrong decision back in the garden. There are different levels of impurities with different levels of consequences.
No one wants to breathe air full of sulphur or drink water with sewage in it, so it makes sense to remove some impurities – but not every trace of everything that every hysterical crusader can think of. There are wells being shut down by the government because they have traces of chemicals more minute than you can find in a bottle of soda or a can of beer.
Any one of us could make the air in his own home cleaner by installing all sorts of costly filters and we could eliminate many impurities in water by drinking only water that we distilled ourselves. But we don’t do that, do we? We think it is too costly, whether in money or in time.
Only when we are putting costs on other people do we go hog wild like that. Making us pay is one way to make us think.
