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[ad]In a recent post I covered and elaborated on some of the points in an article I had published on mises.org February 4th discussing the Swedish recycling scheme. This kind of article is obviously scarce in the market for environmental discussion – it immediately became the third most Digged article in Digg’s environment category. And it has been a reason for discussion on numerous discussion forums, and the object of commentaries on blogs and ezines. I have also received plenty of comments by e-mail.
What strikes me about almost all of these comments is the total lack of interest in what I am trying to say. Rather than attacking the main point in my article, that recycling schemes based on force and power don’t work and that they are generally very bad ideas (for multiple reasons), most commenters seem to conclude that I am against recycling or against the environment.
It thus seems my article created quite a big market for straw men.
I readily admit that the point about coercive systems might not be very clear for anyone reading the article. The reason for this is not my inability to express myself using English (which has been insinuated), even though it is my second language, as it is a conscious choice. The article was written for publication by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. The institute is very clearly pro-freed markets and anti-government; in other words, the audience is already aware of the moral problems of government and would not be interested in an introductory course in the moral costs of coercion.
The article therefore doesn’t focus on this fundamental statement as much as it describes the Swedish government-enforced system for recycling to further elaborate on the general point that coercion is wrong.
This is probably one of the reasons so many seem to just not get what it is I am saying. But I suspect it isn’t even half of the reason; environmentalism is more of a religion than it is a science – if you do not whole-heartedly believe in all governmental measures to protect the environment, you simply don’t care about the environment. I do not need to elaborate on the philosophical fallacies in drawing such conclusions. Let us instead have a look at one of the most outrageous statements on my “opinions” about the environment.
I don’t intend to discuss statements such as “Bylund is against recycling” or “Bylund doesn’t care for the environment” (usually expressed in terms of “Bylund wants everybody to destroy the environment”). Such statements are nothing but stupid, and when reading the article without the intent to find support for one’s bias, it should be pretty obvious that they are totally groundless. Instead, I would like to address a very interesting anti-market argument that has been expressed in different forms in a number of places. I’ll quote one of the more clearly articulated commenters:
The Swedish recycling policies, as Bylund describes them, place responsibility on the individual for their waste products. He maintains that such a system of personal responsibility is extremely socialist and bad for the market: “Imagine a whole population spending time and money cleaning their garbage and driving it around the neighborhood rather than working or investing in a productive market!”
So personal responsibility equals socialism, because the government is making Swedes assume responsibility.
I find this comment interesting in many ways, partly because of the masterful use of contradiction to “prove” that my opinion (as it is described here) is… well, crazy. I call it “masterful” because I think it is: it is completely unfounded and obviously based in total ignorance of who I am and what I stand for, but it is so simple and clear a critique that anyone can see what a nut job I am.
It is also interesting in how it turns most of the concepts on their heads, calling it “personal responsibility” to be forced at the barrel of a gun to do something and saying that I think it is [state] socialism to take responsibility. In a sense, the comment is totally correct while being totally wrong and at the same completely miss the point of the article. It is right in the sense that I do consider the current Swedish recycling scheme [state] socialism and that I am totally against any such (i.e., [state] socialist) schemes.
But it is totally off the scale in claiming that to be forced to do something is the same as assuming responsibility. As a matter of fact, I am strongly in favor of private and personal responsibility and there is no doubt in my mind that people would have to take full responsibility for their trash in a free market (and I am for that too).
In a freed market (call it a free society, if you will) there simply wouldn’t be anywhere to put your trash except for in your own garden, and people definitely don’t want to live in a dump. So they would want to get rid of the trash, and for such a service they would have to pay – and such services would likely be cheaper the more efficient the garbage collector would be in taking care of the “problem.” And the more can be turned around and sold in the market, the more profitable the business would be.
But to get to this point you need to understand how the market works and reason in multiple steps. Most bloggers and commenters “out there” lack both of these qualities. Instead, they tend to apply their faulty statist logic on my reasoning (if you don’t have a clue, go with what you know…): if I am against a state-enforced, coercive system for recycling it is concluded that I am against recycling; if I am against government force used to make people take care of their trash in a certain way, it is concluded that I am against people taking care of their trash.
Being convinced by fallacies being truth, most seem to conclude the opposite is also true. Their conclusion that I am against recycling per se means I would like to see the environment destroyed; the conclusion that I am against people taking care of their trash means I want people to be able to (indeed, they should) throw their trash wherever they see fit, without any thought of consequences. My being convinced that the guns of government cannot be used productively, interpreted as my disbelief in private responsibility, leads to the conclusion that I want everybody to be able to act without ever having to take responsibility or face the consequences of their actions.
This would be as far from my real views as one can get. Actually, this latter statement is similar to the actual state of affairs in the Soviet Union (in other words, a lot of government) just before it collapsed under its own weight, rather than any market I am aware of. As a matter of fact, the beauty of the freed market is that it is based on each individual acting and making the choice to act – and with each individual having the same right to act, there is no way of avoiding the consequences of one’s actions. Personal responsibility is absolute in a freed market; it is only possible to avoid taking the consequences of one’s actions through directly making someone else take on the costs. That would mean force, which, in turn, would call for a counter-action and increased costs as a result – perhaps even destroyed reputation and therefore increased costs for acting in the future.
As a market anarchist, with political, philosophical, economic, and moral views somewhere between agorism and mutualism, such a system of total personal responsibility for one’s actions is the very basis of any sound and moral society. However people voluntarily agree on cooperating to distribute or assume collective responsibility is fine; the only thing that isn’t fine is forcing someone else to bear the costs of one’s actions. And this is exactly what the government does. On a daily basis.
I think the main problem I have with your reasoning is that, without making trash-collection and recycling mandatory, it’s much cheaper for people just to dump everything in their back yards. People who turn their yards into their own personal dumps impinge on the rights of their neighbors to live in a sanitary community in good health without rats and the bubonic plague.
I highly doubt you’re suggesting we make trash disposal voluntary. It has to be mandatory. If it’s going to be mandatory, then giving mandatory trash disposal over to private enterprise means those businesses will benefit from an artificially high market value for their services, because anyone who doesn’t pay them goes to jail (Unless your suggesting businesses won’t take advantage of the situation and give their coerced customers the fair market value.).
If trash collection is mandatory, and cannot be privatized because of this, then recycling must also be mandatory because it keeps the taxpayer-funded waste-management service cheaper for everyone. If your system is more expensive and inconvenient than our American system, then you need to take it up with your local government.
Making garbage disposal voluntary is unfeasible, and privatizing a consumer product the government mandates the use of is unjust.
Until a few years ago my city didn’t have mandatory trash pickup. I paid to have my trash removed anyway because, simply, it’s trash & I didn’t want it around my house. The rates were reasonable because there were many haulers available & they all wanted my business. I wasn’t happy with my service at one point, so I switched, easily, & went on with my life. Presumably some people hauled their trash to the dump themselves. I don’t recall any trash heaps in anyone’s yard, probably because I live in a neighborhood with civilized people who are at least concerned about their property values, if not their own health.
Then a few years ago the city decided to impose it’s own trash collection scheme on us to “make it more efficient.” Now it costs more & the city’s haulers frequently leave a mess behind. So, Ryan, your argument doesn’t fly with me.
Also when I had to pay by the bagful I composted more. Now I’m more likely to just throw it away. So much for the environmental justifications.
“NO PRODUCT OR SERVICE SHOULD BE PROVIDED AT THE BARREL OF A GUN. GOVERNMENT IS NOT HERE TO PROTECT AND SHOULD BE ABOLISHED” Marc Stevens http://www.adventuresinlegalland.com
Ryan, we have mandatory trash collection, and people STILL fill their backyards with it. There are STILL rats, there is STILL disease, and there will ALWAYS be dirty, filthy people. I remember a TV news special once about a woman with a genius IQ who taught at a university whose house was filled with garbage, as well as her backyard. Her neighbors tried to use the force of government on her, and because of her amazing legal abilities to represent herself in court, they failed. Maybe that’s a bit of an extreme example, but you try getting a corrupt government to make your life more pleasant and see how far you get.
There’s a supermarket I go to where I always grab a basket to do my shopping rather than a cart, because they are all chained together, and you need a quarter to operate one. I remember how livid I was that they would charge me for using a cart, so I simply refused. Until one day, when I needed to get a lot of stuff, I went looking around the parking lot for a spare one, hoping someone didn’t care about returning it, when I happened to read the sign at the cart return. The quarter is RETURNED to you when you RETURN the cart to its rightful place and lock it with the other carts.
In other words, Ryan, the supermarket has ELIMINATED wild carts banging into people’s parked cars, thereby eliminating any good excuse for leaving your cart out in the open. All those irresponsible f***s who don’t return their carts are the ones that are charged a quarter, not I. An enterprising teenager who remains alert and attentive could very well find himself getting some free quarters simply for returning someone else’s cart. (Let’s face it, there’s always going to be some d*** who doesn’t even care about the quarter he was charged!) The free market has an answer to dirty neighbors, wild carts, and everything else less pleasant about society. The government has not.
I live in a large urban environment, Chicago. The city’s trash and recycling monopoly sucks big time, just like its mass transit monopoly, its protection/security monopoly, and every one of its other monopolies. The garbage and recycling receptacles in the alley behind our apartment building are generally overfilled and overflowing by about 1-2 days before the garbage collectors are designated to show up, making them a certain attraction for rats and assorted other rodents. (I’ll never forget driving into the alley one night and my headlights catching a sight of what appeared to be a a rat–or some kind of rodent–that I swear to god looked about as big as a small dog.)
Now, why is this, I wonder? Could it be due to the fact that the users are not paying any market-determined price as they use the trash receptacles, and therefore have no incentive to self-regulate their own trash? And could it be because the city must necessarily ration trash collection to 1 or 2 days per week, since it’s attempting to provide the service for “free” to its users?
It’s just like the old libertarian joke about putting government in charge of the Sahara desert: It probably wouldn’t be long before the desert ran out of sand. Inversely, putting the government in charge of trash collection only results in more trash and more rodents.
Oh, the environmentalist irony.
My dear Mr. Bylund, forgive me for showing up late as usual to your wildly arousing party. I confess I only just stumbled upon it, already half drunk, I might add, on some bullshit Syrah served about as cold as a bottle of Night Train.
In any case, it’s very clear to me at a cursory glance that you’re a man of obvious erudition, able to flense through even the flabbiest of rodomontade, of which recycling is surely among the most blubbery. It turns out, however, that there is an even simpler and more foolproof argument against recycling, and that argument is this: if something is tenable, it won’t need to be legally enforced or subsidized.
“Scavenging,” as recycling was for many centuries called, has always existed among humans, and for that reason, it has never needed to be forced. In the words of this country’s foremost rubbish expert, Dr. William Rathje, of the University of Arizona, in his fine, fine book Rubbish: “As long as mankind has been throwing away trash, others have sifted through it.”
Indeed, Miss Priss believes that the biggest thing responsible for spawning this entire ersatz recycling “movement” (if you’ll permit me the use of your own felicitous phrase) is the almost total ignorance that exists about just how much recycling spontaneously occurs in the private sector — i.e. a great deal. Miss Priss herself has written about this at length in her own recycling article, which precedes yours by over half a motherfucking year, at least, and for which she’s still fending off that dog Authority still slavering at her throat. In fact, while I’m thinking about it: all you environmentalists and other neo-Marxist pigs out there, back the fuck off Miss Priss! You’re on the wrong side of the argument, and all the tortuous equivocations, and all interminable circumlocutions, and all the specious ratiocinating in the world won’t change that.
In closing, my dear Mr. Bylund, my advice to you, which you are of course free to take or leave, is simply this: don’t let your meat loaf. At the same time, however, don’t let your hotdog stand. And please, sir, for God sake keep on keeping on.