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Comment by nanis | Hacker News Reader

The Endangered Species Act is not a good way to protect endangered species. It bars consideration of cost at any level, and basically destroys the property rights system thereby providing incentives to preemptively destroy habitat.

Anyone who wishes to understand effective ways of protecting species needs to think a little about cows and elephants.

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It's not perfect law, but will these proposed changes to the Act result in better protection? Of course not.

There is a consensus among biologists that the Act has been successful to a significant extent. Barring cost consideration at any level does seem unreasonable, but cost consideration can lead to really perverse arguments; more dollars can be had by killing and harvesting and elephant that not, so therefore...etc.

The existence of other methods of conservation beyond this legislation doesn't make for a compelling argument to weaken it, nor does the fact that some people will prematurely harvest timber before endangered birds move in.

> It bars consideration of cost at any level

What would an Endangered Species Act that considers cost look like to you? It seems unlikely "a few thousand owls" versus "a giant iron mine" is ever going to be sustained on cost.

Why aren't endangered species protections treated more like eminent domain? In cases where cooperation is more efficient than completely taking the land, the restrictions can be added to the property deed and the owner compensated.

Putting arbitrary and unpredictable costs on landowners seems like a bad system.

EDIT: by "bad system", I mean "less effective and less fair".

cost ? you mean extinction has a commercial price?

As the poster mentioned, being blind to costs creates bad incentives that are bad for what you are trying to protect.

Right. Every policy has an implicit cost component. If you bar the explicit consideration of cost, you just push the cost comparison to the political domain. And in this political domain, the response to cost excess may be complete repeal of your "but our values are beyond cost!" legislation.

It's better to just include cost up front.

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