In the Grist interview mentioned below, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. also claims to be, first and foremost, a “free marketer”. When asked whether the “culprit” in environmental degradation is “free-market capitalism,” Kennedy answers:

No! The best thing that could happen to the environment is free-market capitalism. In a true free-market economy, you can't make yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without enriching your community. In a true free-market economy, you get efficiencies and efficiency means the elimination of waste. Waste is pollution. So in true free-market capitalism, you eliminate pollution and you properly value our natural resources so you won't cut them down. What polluters do is escape the discipline of the free market. You show me a polluter, I'll show you a subsidy -- a fat cat who's using political clout to escape the discipline of the free market.

Kennedy continues:

Laissez-faire capitalism does not work, particularly in the commons. Individuals pursuing their own self-interest will devour the commons very quickly. That's the economic law -- the tragedy of the commons. You have to force companies to internalize costs. All of the federal environmental laws are designed to restore free-market capitalism in America in this regard. . . . . I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I'm a free-marketeer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market and I say, "We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same way you are internalizing your profit." That's what the federal environmental laws allow us to do: restore real property rights in America. You cannot get sustained environmental protection under any system but a democracy. There's a direct correlation around the planet between the level of tyranny in various countries and the level of environmental degradation.

Kennedy correctly notes that pollution and other environmental problems tend to result from the lack of market institutions – not from “market failures.” But the idea that federal environmental laws somehow “restore free-market capitalism” is sheer lunacy.

If federal environmental laws sought to reinforce market institutions, their primary function would be to clarify property rights in environmental resources and assist property owners in the enforcement and protection of their rights. Instead, major environmental laws impose myriad requirements on businesses and individuals with little regard for the actual environmental impact of specific activities and whether those activities infringe upon the property rights of others. If federal environmental laws respected property rights, than rights holders would be able to allow the degradation of their own property, so long as it did not infringe upon the equivalent rights of their neighbors. In such a framework, pollution is the imposition of waste or other residuals upon the property or person of another without their consent, and government would not impose emission restrictions where emissions have minimal impact. Groups like Riverkeeper, with which Kennedy works, would not file suit to enforce the picayune details of effluent permits that have little relationship to water quality. Rather, like the Anglers’ Cooperative Association, they would enforce riparian and other rights in rivers and streams, and enter into binding agreements with upstream polluters. (For more on how such a framework might work, see here, especially part IV.)

Of course, Robert Kennedy has little interest in the free market or protecting property rights. Rather, he is a “faux market environmentalist” and partisan defender of the federal environmental regulatory bureaucracy, and has attacked each and every effort by the Bush Administration to modify, reform, or streamline existing regulations, no matter how minor (often committing errors in the process, as I document here). “Free marketer” is just a convenient label to soften his hard ideological stance.