To conservatives and libertarians annoyed at trash strikes: Sanitation systems are socialist. Most of your garbage promotes socialism.
Sanitation systems across the nation are on strike. It started in Boston:
and expanded to the west coast in solidarity:
Since people who are conservative and libertarian often don’t like strikes, which they may see as socialist, communist, or moving in that direction, Today I want to clarify for them: Sanitation systems are socialist and motivate waste, violate Enlightenment thinking and practice, and violate the original intent of the Constitution.
(For liberals and progressives, they are also imperialist, colonialist, and contribute to racism, which I’ll cover in another post.)
First, a personal note: you can improve your life by reducing your garbage by well over 99 percent. Also your health, safety, security, freedom, family, budget, and longevity.
I grew up generating as much or more trash than the average American, which means more than almost anyone who ever lived. I grew up in poverty for parts of my life and I grew up with privilege in other parts.
Though I’m no different than you or anyone else in ability to avoid generating trash, after a mindset shift followed by continual improvement and practice, I haven’t filled a load of trash at home since 2019. Those who haven’t had their mindset shift will respond as I did when I learned of people fitting a year’s worth of trash in a jar:
- “Oh, maybe you can because you’re special or privileged, but I can’t because [rationalizations and justifications]”
- “Oh, I can’t because I’m special”
- “Poor people can’t because [rationalizations and justifications]”
- “It’s easy for you but not for me.”
- “It’s hard so maybe you put that effort in, but few others can so I won’t”
- “There must be some trick”
Sanitation systems are socialist and motivate waste
As a taxpayer, I pay the government to process the waste of people who call themselves limited government, free market, libertarians and conservatives.
They probably consider garbage collection by the government necessary because if people had to pay for their own waste to be taken away, many would just dump their waste. They do so where my mom used to live upstate New York, where Trump signs outnumbered Biden signs by a wide margin. They had to pay by weight to dump their waste at a processing facility and many streams were filled with garbage bags. Actually, any place by the side of the road would do.
For freedom, each person would have to dispose of their waste without hurting others. Before plastic and other poisons that endured beyond human lifetimes, or even civilizations for some poisons, all waste was either benign, like a rock, decomposed eventually, like apple stems and things made out of wood.
Sanitation systems violate Enlightenment thinking and practice and violate the original intent of the Constitution.
From before Adam Smith to not long before today, someone could find value in any piece of waste. As a kid in Philadelphia, my family collected food scraps separately from other garbage and put it out separately. Local pig farmers picked it up for their pigs. Everybody benefited.
Today, we can’t process plastic or many other types of waste without destroying life, liberty, and property. In other words, when the government picks up our waste it does the opposite of one of its basic roles: to protect life, liberty, and property. The original intent of the Founders and our founding documents, as well as centuries of Enlightendigenous thinking and practice, forbid exactly what it does. Contracting the actual work to private haulers doesn’t change this dynamic.
Plus when all pay equally, people lose incentive to waste less. Businesses thrive on replacing labor they’d have to pay for with waste that taxpayers pay to process and suffer loss to life, liberty, and property, as I posted about with pictures in I love where I live but it’s being destroyed, part 1: Takeout instead of food and I love where I live but it’s being destroyed, part 2: Online delivery.
The original intent of the Constitution is for government to prevent me from passing off what will destroy life, liberty, and property to others. It should prevent government from augmenting that destruction, certainly to stop itself and bureaucrats within it from gaining power, size, and revenue from that destruction.
A government that protects life, liberty, and property should prevent me or any citizen from creating or bringing from outside the biosphere into it what no one can prevent from escaping into the commons and destroying life, liberty, and property (including coal, oil, gas, and things they create, like plastic), except what I can ensure I can process so it won’t destroy life, liberty, and property.
I used to think I should only be allowed to use however much plastic I can take to the grave with me (though I prefer my body be put in the ocean or a place it can decompose or be eaten naturally), but plastic will outlive me. I have to be able to account for it through its lifetime, not mine, which could be millennia.
If you think one day we’ll be able to process things that destroy life, liberty, and property today, you have to wait for their invention to benefit from them. For now, even if we could process atmospheric CO2, it would still have to process all the poisons and toxins, not just one.
In the meantime, people using plastic are socialist as are governments that process the waste for them. They also violate the original intent of the Founders and the US Constitution.
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