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Newsom to criminalize not recycling
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"I said put in in the blue bin..."
Gavin Newsom is going to tell us what to do with our trash. We’ll be forced to sort and recycle our refuse or else he’s going to ticket and eventually kill us (seriously – don’t pay your tickets, resist your abduction by police, and you’ll be seeing the business end of a service weapon).
Whether you think that recycling is valuable or not (I vote not) should not have anything to do with this discussion. The point is a simpler one – the police should have nothing to do with any recycling program for the same reason that the police shouldn’t be in charge of getting you to change your underwear. It is none of their business.
This is the kind of petty tyranny that infuriates most libertarians and often separates us from the rest of the political spectrum, marking us as crazy, impractical or unable to see the forest for the trees.
At first blush the criticism has legs; we are living through a recession, a war on drugs, a war on terrorism, a war on Iraq and a war on Afghanistan. Our currency is being debased, our domestic police force is being militarized, and our civil liberties are under attack. Why am I harping on and on about something as harmless as recycling?
That question has been asked and answered before, in a classic 1968 article by E. W. Dykes entitled “Demunicipalize the Garbage Service.” Describing being chided by friends for holding seminars on issues like municipalized garbage pickup when weightier issues such as war were at hand, he had this to say:
The challenge might just as well have been put in terms like this: "You are a second lieutenant. Your platoon is surrounded. Your ammunition is gone. Two of your squad leaders are dead, the third severely wounded. Now, Mr. Libertarian, let’s see you get out of this one with your little seminars."
My answer: "Demunicipalize the garbage service."
Now, wait, before you cross me off as a nut. I have a point. That second lieutenant is a goner. And so is the prospect of lasting peace until man learns why it is wrong to municipalize the garbage service…
We will never end wars if we do not, at the minimum, understand why the garbage service should be removed from the jurisdiction of the police force, that is — government.
The point he is making is a good one - my breif synopsis hardly does it justice, and it is well worth a read in it's entirity. War is a state activity. Many would say that war is the health of the state and the ultimate expression of government, the naked use of force. Stopping that use of force on an international is extremely unlikely until we recognize its immorality on a local level. Telling the government to leave you alone when they order you to suit up and kill is as important as denying the government legitimacy when they assume the right to control what you do with your trash.
Government enforced recycling? What a load of garbage.
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