Rush Limbaugh and his ilk often rail against government interference, and express their deep abiding love for the free market.  Have you ever wondered what our country would look like, if those pesky government agencies were closed, and the invisible hand of the marketplace were given full rein? 

I think it would look a lot like this award winning (and gut punching) photo essay by a Chinese photographer.  He documents scenes of appalling industrial waste in China, juxtaposed with the people trying to live there.

This photo essay crystallized a lot of what I have been thinking recently.  Rush Limbaugh and his ilk are constantly protesting "meddlesome government."  They want less government, fewer hands guiding the market, let the invisible market forces decide what's right.  Because we will all vote with our dollars, and everything will magically turn out right.

Well, this photo essay is an example of what actually happens when a government refuses to intervene on behalf of its people, or the environment.  When an economy favors business over people, and gives a free reign to any company that wants to do anything.  Just look at those smokestacks! The pipes pumping raw sewage into the Yangtze River!  The industrial waste being openly dumped upstream from a town's drinking water collection point!

This is the free-est free market available.  And look what's happened.  The problem is that human life has no value to the free market.  Only dollars talk.  Now the anti-interventionists would have you believe that this would never happen in reality.  In reality, all of the townspeople would get together and not buy things from the stinky plant that had plopped itself down in their back yard.  And the stinky plant would go out of business.  Problem solved!

Unfortunately, this isn't how the world works.  In fact, this kind of thinking is how we got into this financial mess in the first place.  

In fact, this kind of thinking is also how we as a country are directly responsible for a lot of these Chinese environmental catastrophes.  Many of those factories and plants are churning raw minerals into consumer goods, which will be shipped to America and sold for pennies on the dollar compared to what they would cost if they were made domestically.  China's waste is subsidizing our cheap way of life.  

All we're doing is shoving the costs - financial and environmental - onto China.  Which is a problem, because China doesn't exist in a bubble.  Its effluent poisons our oceans, as well.  Its toxic rain blows across the Pacific and spreads across the United States like a plume of death.  I only wish that was an exaggeration.

This photo essay is an excellent example of the free market gone awry.  That level of pollution would never happen here in America.  Wanna know why?  Because our government won't let it happen.  We have standards, and monitoring, and a legal system which allows citizens to sue corporations.  Sure, we have corporate polluters and mismanagement of funds and corruption.  But nothing like what would allow these scenes to take place - not here, anyway.  Other countries?  Sure, bring it on!  And hey, who wants some cheap consumer electronics?