One of the objections people often make to the idea of private enterprise as a solution to government inefficiency is The Argument from Incredulity.
It’s not an argument at all, actually, just a harrumph and a guffaw: we cannot have free-market police, or fire suppression, or . . . garbage collection!
But of course all those things are successfully managed in the private sector.
No media outfit has a longer history of pointing this out than Reason magazine. So when the editors of Reason brought us Joe Lancaster’s “Government Waste Monopoly Pits Private Dumpster Business Against Garbage Bureaucrats,” yesterday, I hope they took a moment to revel in a little nostalgia. For this is the kind of story that made Reason what it is today, one of the best sources for retail political economy.
The tale tells of Steven Hedrick, an Arkansas man who put together a business renting out dumpsters — like you often see on construction sites, but smaller — which he would haul away after customers filled them. He built the business without ever going into debt, and then . . . came the government.
“[I]n April 2022, the City Council in Holiday Island passed Ordinance 2022-004, which required all residents and businesses within the city to contract with the county sanitation authority, Carroll County Solid Waste (CCSW), for trash pickup and disposal services,” Reason informs us. “Anyone using private companies would have to switch, and anyone who did not have contracted trash service would have to sign up.”
And Hedrick’s little business must be . . . dumped.
What this is, at base? Sheer bigotry: preferring monopoly government to competitive private services.
For those of us who’ve been reading Reason for decades, it sports a familiar smell.
Just not a good odor, for the drive to monopolize everything stinks.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Incredulity Doesn’t Cut It”
The drive to monopolize is driven by the misunderstanding of profit, and its necessity in signaling for the most efficient use of capital. No good or service was ever not first supplied be the private market except world war and nuclear weapons, and those I could have done without.
A typo was corrected after initial publication.