By Boulder’s standard of “zero waste,” the City Council’s plan to restrict plastic bag use is garbage. Regardless, such restrictions are foul rubbish. They empower bag bullies to self-righteously trash our liberties.

Plastic bags contribute just 0.4 percent of Boulder County’s municipal solid waste, says a recent Waste Composition Study.  By weight, there’s more than ten times as much recyclable plastic, “clean dimensional lumber,” and items accepted at the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials. Instead of shaking down shoppers, bag banners should wade through dumps to extract these items for reuse or recycling.

Bag restrictions stifle reuse and recycling trends. Consumers reuse plastic grocery bags at home, and restrictions increase sales of thicker, single-use plastic bags. Plastic bag recycling has increased by 50% since 2005, yielding durable plastic and lumber products,reports Moore Recycling Associates. RecycleYourPlasticBag.com lists local places to recycle bags. The City Council should add its meetings to this list.

Meanwhile, durable bags meant for reuse “are seldom if ever washed” and “almost all” contain bacteria, concludes a Loma Linda University study. Just last week MSNBC reported that one such bag spread “nasty … norovirus infections” to a youth soccer team.

Comparing various bag types, the British Environment Agency found that plastic bags had the lowest “environmental impact,” which is most determined by resources required for manufacturing, rather than transport and disposal.

Regardless of which bag is best, retailers have a right to distribute bags, and customers have a right to discard them through voluntary means. Boulder City Council, stop your bag bullying.

If you say government authorities can justly restrict voluntary exchange of a plastic bag, then you’re conceding that can justly restrict any other type of voluntary exchange. You can no longer you can no longer oppose any government action by arguing that it violates people’s right to liberty.

This article originally appeared in the print edition of the The Boulder

The Broncos’ quest for world championships now “starts with Peyton,” says executive VP John Elway.  If you don’t follow the Broncos, should you care?

Yes, say economist Michael C. Davis and psychologist Christian M. End, co-authors of the journal article “A Winning Proposition: The Economic Impact of Successful NFL Franchises.” They find a positive correlation between an NFL team’s winning percentage and local per-capita income.

Last season the Broncos won eight games, four more than the previous season. Professors Davis and End conclude that such an increase correlates a $120 local per-capita income gain, adjusting for inflation.  How do the authors explain this?

They examine the possibility that higher local incomes contribute to a team’s winning, or that team salaries push up the per-capita income, and conclude that neither is significant. Instead, they suggest that winning teams increase local workplace productivity. The authors then present psychology research supporting this effect.

One study found that a team’s victory or defeat affected how ardent fans perceived their “personal competencies on mental, social, and motor skill tasks.” The positive response to a team’s victory is what psychologists call “BIRGing”: basking in reflected glory. The authors note research showing that positive self-regard and mood contributes to job satisfaction and performance. Meanwhile, ardent fans also report lower self-esteem after their team lost.

Janet Lever’s 1969 study in São Paulo, Brazil illustrates the phenomenon: After a popular local soccer team lost, productivity decreased and workplace accidents increased.

Apathetic about the Broncos? Maybe you shouldn’t be.

Thanks to Michael C. Davis for his assistance with this article.
Photo courtesy of TheBigLead.com.

What do you think will help decrease unemployment and underemployment? What role do you think the government can, or should, play in encouraging job growth?

Space aliens attack!  Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman says we need scientists to “fake an alien threat.”   ”A massive buildup to counter” the threat, real or not, would end the economic slump “in eighteen months,” he said. Dr. Krugman unwittingly shows how loony Keynesian economic “stimulus” schemes are.

As an EconStories rap explains: “If every worker was staffed in the army and fleet, we’d have full employment and nothing to eat. Jobs are a means, not the ends in themselves. People work to live better, to put food on the shelves. Real growth means production of what people demand. That’s entrepreneurship not your central plan.”

Repealing parts or all of last year’s health control law [HR 3590] would encourage real growth. One-third of small business owners sited the law’s requirements as the greatest or second greatest “obstacle to hiring more employees,” reports a recent U.S. Chamber of Commerce survey. Three of four business owners “somewhat agreed” that the law “makes it harder … to hire more employees.”

For example, the law compels employers to buy insurance for full-time employees.  In response, half of surveyed employers said they would “change their workforce strategy so that fewer employees work 30 hours or more a week,” reports Mercer consultants.

Is it merely coincidence that private-sector jobs growth stalled after health “reform” passed?  Economist James Sherk shows that in the fifteen months before “reform,” average monthly job growth exceeded 67,000 jobs. Since then, it has plummeted to around 6,500 jobs per month. Don’t blame alien abductions.

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Thanks to Grace-Marie Turner for her article: Repealing Health Care Legislation Will Create Jobs. That’s where I first read about a few of the health care bill references above.

Some might argue that private funding could not have built B-cycle. But as economist Henry Hazlitt would say, B-Cycle “has in fact been built by private capital – the capital that was expropriated in taxes.”  We won’t see the goods, services, and non-profit ventures that never materialize because governments took money by force from people who would have spent it differently.

Potentially expensive bike maintenance may deter private investors from investing in bike-share ventures. As law professor Steve Clowney describes: “No individual bears a significant portion of the costs if they damage a bicycle … users have little incentive to take care of the bikes.”  The New York Times reports that sustaining Paris’s bike-share requires the repairing “some 1,500 bicycles a day,” or seven percent of its fleet.

Or maybe Montreal’s experience deterred investors. Because of high start-up costs, “the non-profit agency that runs the city’s bike-rental program … is running a $31.7 million deficit,” reported the CBC.

Voluntary donations, sponsorships, and investments should fund B-cycle. It should be a revenue source for Boulder and Denver, not an expenditure of taxpayers’ money. For example, they could charge B-cycle for placing “B-stations” on city-owned land.

A version of this article was published in the Boulder Daily Camera on May 21, 2011.

Thanks to Marc Scribner at the Competitive Enterprise Institute for his post on Washington DC’s bike-share program.

The Henry Hazlitt quote is from his excellent book, Economics in One Lesson, which the Foundation for Economics Education has put on-line.

Why tolerate our government’s monopoly on money? Money is a medium of exchange and a store of value. But our government produces inflation-prone fiat money. The Federal Reserve devalues your earnings by effectively printing more bills. The Fed also manipulates interest rates, which promotes economic booms and busts fueled by malinvestment. A million YouTube viewers learned this from the hilarious rap video, “Fear the Boom and Bust.”

Money wasn’t always like this. My 1935 dollar bill says “silver certificate” across the top and “One dollar in silver payable to the bearer on demand” under George Washington’s portrait.  A dollar was a unit of measure — a specific weight of gold or silver. A dollar was a certificate of deposit for a real commodity with stable value over time – independent of its use as money.

If you like fiat money like today’s U.S. dollar, fine. But that’s no reason to support its having a government-granted monopoly on money. Let dollars compete with other monies, such as those backed by previous metals, in a competitive market, as 2009′s Free Competition in Currency Act would allow.

The Boulder Daily Camera published this article on December 18, 2010.

Further reading:

• What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray N. Rothbard. Full text and excellent audio version (you can download the mp3s) on-line at Mises.org.
• “Is the Gold Standard Still the Gold Standard among Monetary Systems?” by Lawrence H. White, Cato Institute Briefing Paper, 2008.

Oliver Stone’s uber-villain Gordon Gekko is back in the new film, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, which (surprise!) features greedy capitalists behaving badly. It might remind you of Avatar, Mission Impossible 2 or roughly a zillion other films in which capitalists destroy the environment, concoct killer viruses, harvest organs, and cover up murder in order to feed their lust of profit. Even when capitalism isn’t the primary target, the representatives of commerce are often flat-out repulsive (think Jabba the Hutt).

Perhaps it’s ironic that Hollywood filmmakers practice what they preach against. Sure he palls around with socialist dictators Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, but there’s no doubt Oliver Stone hopes to rake in obscene profits with his new flick.

See also Alex Tabarrok’s Wall Street Journal op-ed:  Capitalism: Hollywood’s Miscast Villain – Why the film industry is so good at getting business wrong.

(via Christian Toto at Pajamas Media)

A subsidy is a cash grant from the government. … government intervention enables people to obtain money they were not entitled to; the flip side is that someone else is deprived of money he is entitled to, or that he would have had legitimate access to.

In contrast, when someone is given any kind of “tax break,” he keeps money he is entitled to. … if a person retains some of his own money because of a government action, we should not condemn this as a subsidy.

Subsidies should be opposed. Opportunities to keep one’s own money should not.

Needless to say, government can create great mischief by determining who can and cannot keep his own money. If mortgage interest is tax-deductible but rent is not, government encourages home buying. It is not the government’s function to decide the best way to live and then to use the tax system to manipulate people into living that way. …

No one should be begrudged the opportunity to keep his own money. In the face of a discriminatory tax cut, we should point out that it ought to apply to everyone (who pays taxes), and not just a narrow group of taxpayers. Efforts to widen exceptions may not succeed, since that would defeat the politicians’ purpose, which after all is to manipulate private behavior. But at least we can pound home the point that it’s better for people to spend their own money for their own objectives.

Read the whole article: Tax “Breaks” Aren’t Subsidies in The Freeman, published by  The Foundation for Economic Education

Shopping in Boulder could get greener if some local students have their way. Inspired in part by a ban that passed in San Francisco in 2007, New Vista High and University of Colorado students are drafting an ordinance that would prohibit businesses — such as grocery stores — from using petroleum-based plastic bags. What do you think of the students’ idea?

My response, published in the January 16 edition:

If plastic bags are banned, would stores provide paper bags instead? This wouldn’t be “green.”  The Washington Post reports that compared to plastic bags, paper bags require “more than four times as much energy to manufacture,” generate “70 percent more air and 50 times more water pollutants,” and require 85 times more energy per pound to recycle.  In landfills, “plastic bags … take up so much less volume than paper bags,” says archeologist and landfill excavator William Rathje.

Or how about reusable canvas bags?  I use one from Vitamin Cottage, but should I?  Canada’s National Post reported that “two independent laboratories found unacceptably high levels of bacterial, yeast, mold and coliform counts in the reusable bags.” A nice “environment” for groceries. In addition to food poisoning, “significant risks include skin infections such as bacterial boils.”  Don’t forget, washing these bags consumes energy and resources.

And what about poor people?  No more free trash bags. Their grocery bills will go up, as stores will raise prices to cover costs of buying pricey paper bags. Those who use fabric bags would also spend more on laundry to keep them sanitary.

Most fundamentally, banning plastic bags is an intolerant strain of authoritarian environmentalism. It violates the rights of consumers and business owners to live as they please.

The students should promote creative voluntary ways to reuse plastic bags.  For example, as a college freshman in 2001, Tom Szaky founded TerraCycle, Inc. Its slogan: “Send us your trash! We’ll make it into cool products!”

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Not included in the article:

TerraCycle’s totebag made from Target shopping bags.

Should we be forced to fund the “bag police” to stake out grocery stores to make sure they are not (gasp) giving away plastic bags? It would OK to sell them, though.

Other resources:

Paper Grocery Bags Require More Energy Than Plastic Bags, Skaidra Smith-Heisters, Reason Foundation

SaveThePlasticBag.com: Good references, though I do not necessarily support the political causes it does.

Series of blunders turned the plastic bag into global villain, The Times (UK)

Interesting tid-bit on litter and plastic bags from the San Francisco Weekly:

The city’s “Streets Litter Audit” is a fantastically detailed document; it even codifies what brand of cigarettes San Franciscans most frequently dispose of improperly (Marlboros, by a mile). Yet regarding plastic shopping bags, the researchers found more of them on the streets in post-ban 2008 than pre-ban ’07. What’s more, the audit reveals plastic bags comprise only 2.6 percent of the city’s litter; even with the jump in ’08, they were never a major source of litter — just a highly visible one. ….

While the ’08 survey found more plastic bags on the streets than in the prior year, overall litter was down 17 percent. The supervisor also notes that the ban covers only the large grocery stores and pharmacies, which can ostensibly afford to stock costly paper or biodegradable plastic bags — and “that leaves quite a few bags out there.

Government debt. In June Fortune reported that “chronic deficits are putting the country on a path to fiscal collapse.” The United States Government debt exceeds $12 trillion, or almost $40,000 per U.S. citizen. By 2019 it will exceed $17 trillion, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Just the interest on the national debt gobbles up more than 40 cents of every dollar you pay in income tax, reports the Wall Street Journal.

We`ll be poorer. To pay off the debt and interest, politicians will probably raise your taxes, encourage inflation, or both. Those tax dollars could have been used to innovate and create new jobs. They won`t exist. In addition to be being a hidden tax, inflation drives up interest rates, and hence the cost of financing new business ventures with loans.

Last week 11 Senators co-sponsored a “Bipartisan Fiscal Task Force” to “address the nation’s long-term budget crisis.” But earlier this week nine of these Senators (including Michael Bennet and Mark Udall) voted for a pork-laden $1.1 trillion spending bill. Hold on to your wallet — politicians cannot resist buying political favors with your tax dollars.

As economist Frederic Bastiat observed long ago: “Everybody wishes to live at the expense of the state, but they forget that the state lives at the expense of everybody.“

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Thanks to Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek for the linking to the Bastiat quote.

On a related topic, Paul Hsieh of Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine had a “to the point” published in Sunday’s Denver Post in response to the Democrats’ proposed debt-limit hike:

Congress’ plan to cut the deficit by raising the debt limit now, then reducing spending later, is like trying to lose weight by eating a box of chocolate chip cookies now, then promising to exercise next week.

So if you have an opinion that you can express in 40 words or fewer, send it to the Post!

(Thanks to Justin Longo for the pointer.)