Heinlein's Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the market, and ecological scarcity

One side comment to the posts below celebrating the centenary of Robert Heinlein's birth. A number of the articles pointed to his The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as a pivotal text in the libertarian movement (broad libertarianism, not merely its narrow electoral party). This is of course correct. A number of these essays likewise correctly point to the free market ideas of that novel - in particular, There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.

Does it bear pointing out, however, that The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress ultimately revolves around the failure of market mechanisms? That the revolution that the Professor urges is necessary not on account of markets but on account of a much more fundamental, deeply Malthusian ecological crisis? I read the thing a couple of years back, for the first time since childhood - out loud to my daughter, no less. What caught my attention especially was the Professor arguing that not only could Luna not afford to ship grain to Earth at a "fair" price - because of the increasing scarcity of water on the Moon, it could not afford to so at any price. Grain shipments in effect shipped fantastically scarce Lunar water to Earth, and it could not be shipped the other way. There could only be a short term market in grain=water. Mike confirmed the worst in a series of computer projections.

The central political premise of the book, in other words, the fact which above all argued for violent and bloody revolution, was an ecological premise, a premise of ecological scarcity, not the market as such. This is hardly to denigrate the book's market oriented libertarianism, but the central political fact, at least as far as the Professor was concerned, was not in order to promote a market but in order to end one that would end in ecological catastrophe. Which was, by the way, surely a reason why so many of my radical environmentalist friends of the 70s and early 80s - Amory and Hunter Lovins, for example - were fans of the book.

Update: Wtanksley in the comments makes a good point:

Free market and ecological preservation/conservation are not contradictory. Historically, the worst abuses of the environment have taken place in dictatorships of one stripe or another. When the people who profit or lose from the use of a resource own and control the resource, they tend to shepherd its use.

In the book, the environmental disaster was caused by a government that owned all the property, set all the laws, and ruled all the people without consent. That's pretty much the extreme version of communistic socialism.