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NOTE 8. Municipalized Trash: It’s Uncivilized

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Chapter 8. Municipalized Trash. It's Uncivilized. September 14, 2009.

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Driving into work today, I saw garbage bins overflowing and city dumpsters spilling out with trash.

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It stinks. It's disgusting. It's uncivilized. It's probably dangerous to some extent.

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It's a holiday, so of course the government workers charged with picking up this nasty

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refuse can't work, even though construction workers and private firms are busy bees taking

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advantage of the extra time.

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It's true with house trash, too.

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Pickup is once per week, on schedule, and there is nothing you can do to make it more

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frequent.

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It's part of the master plan, don't you know, and if you make more trash than the

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and the once-per-week pick-up can contain, that's your problem, not the city's.

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The very fear that people have about private trash collection, that trash will pile up

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and no one will do anything about it, turns out to be a regular feature of government

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trash collection. But we look the other way. Why?

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Before getting to this, let us first establish that garbage is a serious issue.

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W.M.F. Buckley, his head full of schemes for threatening populations with nuclear annihilation,

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once chided libertarians for bothering with such petty concerns as trash collection.

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It is only because of the conservatives' disposition to sacrifice in order to withstand

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the enemy, wrote Buckley in 1961, that libertarians are able to enjoy their monasticism and pursue

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to their busy little seminars on whether or not to demunicipalize the garbage collectors.

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Ah yes, little seminars. Seminars about such things as avoiding the plague. Humanity has

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some experience with the results of failing to dispose of trash properly, and that experience

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was deadly. Plague swept the ancient world every fifty years or so, spread mainly through

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through the lack of good sanitation.

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The Black Death in Europe might have been avoided with better sanitation and a decent

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system for disposing of trash rather than letting it pile up in the streets.

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History's fight with the plague in the developed world came to an end at the time of the rise

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of capitalism in the late Middle Ages, and no surprise there.

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With the accumulation of capital came innovation and trash disposal, since living in sanitary

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conditions and staying alive turns out to be something of a priority for people.

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This is why the largest advances in garbage collection came about during the Industrial

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Revolution.

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And yet, here we are in 2009, with trash piled up on the streets and stinking the high heaven,

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Bags full of raw animal parts, chickens, pigs, cows, fish, baby diapers stuffed with waste,

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rotting eggs mixed with sour cream dip from game-day parties, piles that are right now

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being scavenged by roaches and rats. This in a town that prides itself on its tidiness.

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And we put up with this for the same reason that we put up with lost mail, potholes in

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and the road, dilapidated schools, depreciated money, and a clogged court system, because

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these services are monopolized by the government.

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Now you can make all the public goods arguments you want about roads and courts, but trash

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disposal is not rocket science and could easily be handled by the market.

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Everyone wants trash removed and the sooner the better.

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That means there is a market demand for the service.

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There is money to be made. The only way to keep something like this at bay is to make

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it illegal.

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If markets were in charge, trash pickup would surely be more than once per week. We wouldn't

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have to drag our trash bins out to the curb. In fact, we would be faced with several or

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many options for trash pickup. If we made more trash than we should, we wouldn't get

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Angri Notes from the City Government The private pickup companies would be thrilled.

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We might be paying by frequency or pickup or perhaps by the pound.

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That would be for the market to decide.

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In fact, trash pickup services might actually be characterized by, perish the thought, innovation.

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Just as they were in the early part of the 20th century when trash pickup was mostly

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private.

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Our houses might be directly connected to underground trash transmission services that

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would whisk it all away in an instant.

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Our kitchens might have highly effective trash chutes that would zap away trash as we made

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it.

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But because of this ghastly tradition of municipalizing trash pickup, or we might call it Sovietizing,

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the entire industry is stuck in the past, utterly impervious to improvement and modernization.

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We get our news through fiber optics, walk around with tiny wireless phones that can

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instantly connect with anyone, anywhere, and shop digitally with any vendor in the world.

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But when it comes to trash, we are still relying on once per week, strictly scheduled pickups

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by tax-funded workers driving monstrous old model trucks.

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In my town, even the trash cans are paid for and owned by the government, as if the private

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Sector has yet to figure out on its own initiative how to make a tub for holding things.

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So why does this system persist?

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I asked a few people about this, and the answer usually came down to some system of graft.

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Powerful people make the trucks, manage the landfills, and dole out the contracts.

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Perhaps so, but why do we put up with it?

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It seems like a preposterously unobjectionable plan.

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Between the system to private ownership and competition, and thereby innovation.

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I don't mean just contracting out, I mean abolishing city trash pick-up and letting

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private enterprise completely take over.

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There is just no way that the existing muck would persist, for it offends every aesthetic

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sensibility and it may pose a ghastly health risk.

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As for the old conservative claim that libertarians are insufficiently worried about the Soviet

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threat and too worried about garbage collection, note that the Soviet Union is gone and the

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garbage problem is still with us.