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For the past 50 years, Americans have turned to the federal government to solve pressing environmental problems like air and water pollution and climate change. Major environmental policies have helped improve environmental quality to varying degrees, but these policies also have resulted in negative consequences, such as high costs, inefficiency, violations of property rights, or environmental degradation. By applying public choice theory to the evolution of federal environmental policies, we can understand how negative consequences have arisen from seemingly good intentions. Public choice theory rejects the romantic notion that government officials work solely for the public good. Legislators and bureaucrats are rationally self-interested individuals who try to make themselves better off, like all people. Because legislators are interested in reelection and maximizing their power, they respond to special interest groups and lobbyists who can benefit them. Legislators often codify special benefits for certain companies or industries within environmental legislation and choose winners and losers, regardless of the economic or environmental outcomes. Environmental policies distort markets, altering the price signals that communicate what people value and imposing higher costs on taxpayers and consumers. Legislators often write environmental laws vaguely, giving bureaucrats wide discretion on how to implement the laws. Bureaucrats often write environmental regulations quickly and without scientific evidence or limited economic considerations, making many of the regulations costly and ineffective in many cases. The number of regulations also grows each year, raising compliance costs while the marginal benefit of these regulations continues to decline. Major federal environmental policies have had negative consequences, but experts have debated whether these outcomes were or were not intentional. Key politicians and bureaucrats may want to keep the current flawed laws in place because either they or their friends benefit from the status quo. Regardless of the intentionality or unintentionality of these negative consequences, large-scale federal environmental policies have provided decades of evidence that even the most nobly intended laws have significant drawbacks of which the public should be aware.

AbstractIn multilevel marketing companies (MLMs), member-distributors earn income from selling products and recruiting new members. Successful MLMs require a social capital structure where members can access and mobilize both strong and weak social ties. Utah has a disproportionate share of MLM companies located in the state and a disproportionate number of MLM participants. We argue that Utah's dominant religious institutions have led to the emergence of a social capital structure, making MLMs particularly viable. Utah is the most religiously homogeneous state; roughly half its population identifies as members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church). The LDS Church's institutions foster a social capital structure where (almost all) members have access to and can leverage social capital in all its forms. LDS institutions encourage members to make meaningful social connections characterized by trust and reciprocity with other church members in local neighborhoods and across the world.

This book provides insights into the politics and economics surrounding electricity in the United States. It identifies the economic, physical, and environmental implications of distorting energy markets to limit the use of fossil fuels while increasing renewable energy production and explains how these unseen effects of favoring renewable energy may be counterproductive to the economic interests of American citizens and to the protection of the environment.