Bread or Clean Air?

Is making money more important than clean air or water?? It is according to one of the justices of a case I read today. He said the following.

"One’s bread is more important that landscape or clear skies."

This argument is usually made by huge corporate entities who are trying to continue their unbridled polluting for the sake of profit and social efficiency. Their reasoning is that some pollution is necessary in order to ensure economic efficiency and growth. If the government were to prohibit all pollution emission, the economy would slow down. That scares market capitalists.

What is fundamentally flawed about the argument is that it fails to address two important points. First, the fact that pollution imposes an incredible health risk to people. To what extent is it okay to harm individuals in order to secure progress and capital? And the second is the earth's limited resources. If corporations are able to pollute in excess, the earth won't be able to produce any bread to buy.

It is ridiculous for people to consider economic efficiency as more important than sustaining the earth's resources and people's overall health.

I think the government should impose strict regulations on how much companies can pollute. If the regulations curb economic efficiency -- so what -- the regulation creates an incentive for the company to innovate and create new, sustainable solutions, which is exactly the type of thing of which America needs more. And if they can't innovate, they die.