At bottom, the American Economy was based on the simple notion that water, trees, minerals, ore, fuel, food, arable soil, and the air we breathe are all endless and free and, by simply paying the federal government for the land these resources are on, one can cut, dig, mine, smelt, or take all one wants and resell them for personal profit. In the South they enslaved people, too, so even the labor was free.
Selling land is basically also how the United States of America raised the start-up capital it needed to become a viable independent country.
Because all of the long-term costs of these extraction industries were (are) externalized, it was a fucking great deal, and that's what the likes of Rockefeller, Mellon, Vanderbilt, Koch, Weyerhauser, and a thousand others did. Sure they were smart and worked hard, but their money largely came from free raw materials and no responsibility to clean up after themselves.
Countless morality tales have been written exhorting young Americans to emulate these hard-working men who cleared the forests and drilled the wells to become "self-made men." This is the basis for the vaunted "American Dream." It's the basis for the idea that one can and should get something for nothing and sell it for profit.
Unfortunately for that Dream, those externalized costs have come home to roost. Turning the slag heaps, dead zones, burning rivers, and deadly weather of our continent back into something like what it used to be is difficult and expensive. And this task is the root cause of much of the anger and resentment of the right wing. And because of widespread depletion it's not really possible to get raw materials free anymore, and that also makes the American Dream feel like it has been stolen.
It's just a lot easier and cheaper to be a bad citizen, and becoming a better citizen is harder and more expensive and people who've been sold on the American Dream feel ripped off.
