> "Free market" economics does not capture this destruction of value.
Oh, but it does. It turns out that people who own land take care of it, so that it keeps producing. People who own timber land tend to manage it so it continues to be productive.
Destruction happens with government owned land.
For a related example, why are we not running out of cattle, hogs, and chickens, despite slaughtering them on an epic scale? And why are we running out of fish?
They might take care of their land, but they don’t generally care what happens to other peoples land. So excess fertilizer creating dead zones downstream? Well sucks to be them I guess. Markets are not good at pricing in externalities such as those
A proper function of government is to internalize the externalities (with fines or taxes).