Many new restaurants have few to no tables. Single-use packaging costs less than rent for the space for tables, a dishwasher, people to wash dishes, etc. They don’t have to pay for cleaning anything.

We taxpayers pay those costs. We suffer their pollution we didn’t consent to.

Since the packaging takes resources to make, in polluting processes, and the waste poisons the rest of us, they destroy life, liberty, and property for personal benefit, the opposite of a free market. A government-run sanitation department is socialist and creates perverse incentives.

I could go on about polluting and depleting undermining democracy, but in this post I want to show the pictures I took when I went for a walk Saturday morning. I wasn’t looking for trouble. I just saw a lot of pizza boxes from the several trendy pizza shops that deliver most of their food to people to take out. They carry their slices a block or two and drop off the boxes they used for a few minutes on the sidewalk.

Why not? Someone will pick it up. They didn’t ask for the box. What are they supposed to do, not order pizza? That deprivation would be too much to ask.

And what is the pizza place supposed to do, not make money by not serving customers who can eat on the street, surrounded by garbage?

What have we come to as a society, where we eat surrounded by garbage, creating more garbage, and call it fun?

I love my neighborhood, but it’s covered in garbage. Yours probably is too. The people covering it in garbage mostly don’t live here. They’re tourists and people who live nearby. Why should they bother keeping someone else’s neighborhood clean?

Love your neighbor as yourself seems no longer part of American culture. I miss it, even if my taking responsibility for how my actions hurt others makes me un-2025-American.

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EDIT: August: If I took pictures of every pile of pizza garbage, I’d run out of space and time but I can’t help taking a few pictures. Here’s one where seconds after I took the picture, a woman lay another box.

A block later. The box has a little rhyme on it. Why not make garbage cute? Someone else suffers from the pollution in making and disposing of it, not us, right, so we might as well enjoy ourselves.

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