I live in an exurban neighborhood in a small town in Western New York. It’s a nice area, right on the edge of sprawling farm country to the west. Moving here was a big change from sun-soaked Phoenix, and even more so from our place before that—in Los Angeles, right on the edge of sprawling gang territory to the north. And east … and west.
Big to small, urban to semi-rural, loud to quiet, sunny all year to cloudy and cold for more than half.
One of the smaller changes we encountered was private trash pickup. I just took for granted that garbage collection was just one of the many things that governments monopolized. The cities of Phoenix and LA certainly did.
We moved into our house, started getting utilities switched into our name, and, wait … we actually get to choose from among competing trash services? We can compare prices? Read reviews? Ask our new neighbors which they prefer? Amazing!
And we won’t get taxed an indeterminate and ever-increasing amount for unreliable monopoly trash service? Something for which we have no recourse, except to “vote the bums out” … in favor of new bums who won’t change a thing?
What sort of magical place had I moved to?
Okay, so I don’t want to overstate my case. The county in which we live monopolizes just about everything else, and it has one of the highest effective property tax rates in the country. And I also know that trash service is one of the easier services to move from government to competing private firms. (Easier than, say, the sewers.)
But hey—let’s take the win.
Anyway…
We checked the prices—the guys with the blue bins were way cheaper than the guys with the green bins. We looked around—more houses had blue bins than green. Sold! We went with the blue-bin guys.
For the first fourteen years—oh goodness, has it been that long?—we had no cause to regret the choice. Their prices have gone up, but no more so than the green-bin guys. They continue to be cool about the occasional extra bag or object that doesn’t quite fit in the bin. They would’ve only charged us ten bucks to take away our dead washing machine, but a scrapper got to it first.
But then, over the last year, something changed. The trucks started showing up later and later. Calls are frequently routed to an answering machine. Special pickups are delayed—sometimes by weeks.
“We’re backed up,“ they say.
This is a really clean neighborhood. There’s no HOA—everyone just behaves themselves. Everyone’s yard is nice. People plant pretty flowers. There are many beautiful trees. So, an old couch at the end of a driveway for three weeks sticks out like a sore thumb.
The homeowners—who take pride in keeping things nice—are embarrassed. One took to our neighborhood Facebook group to apologize. We were all understanding. Everyone knows what’s happening.
Then someone said, “Hey, there’s a new trash service.”
Enter the orange-bin guys.
I don’t know much about them. Our next-door neighbors (the same ones from the tree incident) just switched. Apparently, they’re offering a great introductory rate.
Will they be as good? Will they be better? Will they keep their prices low? I don’t know.
Will we switch? Will we wait and see how others in the neighborhood like them? We haven’t decided yet.
Private is always better.
That’s the beauty of the market—we get to choose.
Private firms are subject to market forces, which produce far better results than those achieved by any imposed monopoly government.
Private companies have to deal with competition. Everyone is trying to offer the best service at the lowest price.
Government officials have the opposite incentive. They want job security. They want more revenue. They could try to increase their efficiency, but the incentives to do so are weak, because it’s easier to raise taxes, and you cannot really stop them from doing so.
If your reply is “that is what elections are for,” you haven’t really been paying attention. Incumbent re-election rates are sky high. Local taxes rarely go down. In our town, if we vote NO on the school budget, they’ll just keep holding the vote again and again until we vote YES. The budget never goes down, and it always gets approved. The house always wins.
(When I was doing research, one resource I found cited “democratic accountability” as a point in favor of government trash collection. Comedy gold!)
Private firms, by contrast, have the incentive to innovate. If they fail to do so, or if their quality drops … well, there are always some orange-bin guys waiting to fill the void.
Private firms are also less likely to charge you for something you don’t need. They can’t force you to buy their services, and they offer customers different levels of service depending on what they want.
Governments don’t adjust the taxes you pay for trash service, even if you use less of it, or produce virtually no trash at all. Everyone is forced to be a ‘customer.’ Everyone pays.
One objection to private trash collection is the phenomenon of “truck congestion”—multiple trucks driving through the same neighborhood. That has really never felt like a problem here. The blue-bin guys drive past the houses with green bins, and vice versa. Garbage trucks are always noisy, but they’re never here for long. Bada bing bada boom.
Noooo thanks.
Now, let’s compare our efficient, friendly, and self-correcting free market in trash pickup with something stupid this local government does: leaf pickup.
This is the northeast—there are lots of deciduous trees. A single mature maple might drop 100,000 leaves in the autumn. That’s great in the woods. On a lawn, not so much. The leaves have to go somewhere.
So, the town ‘offers’ (read: forces you to pay for) a leaf pickup service. Twice in the fall, they send around a big truck that looks like Noo-noo, the vacuum cleaner from Teletubbies. If your leaves are in a nice row at the end of your grass, parallel with the street, it hoovers them up. If not, it passes you by.
In order to get your leaves into that row, you have to rake or blow them there.
But what if you don’t have any trees in the front yard? What if they’re all in the back? It’s way too much work to move all those leaves to the front. At that point, it’s easier just to bag them.
What if you don’t have any trees at all? Why should you have to pay for a leaf service?
What if you do have leaves, but you like to put them into orange bags with jack o’lantern faces on them as an extra Halloween decoration? Why should you have to pay for the big Noo-noo vacuum if you don’t need it?
What if you have trees that don’t drop their leaves on schedule? Our neighbor has one weird tree that clings onto its leaves until December … long after the leaf pickup dates. (I should know—most of its leaves fall in my yard.)
Central planning doesn’t work.
Government planners simply cannot think of all the different permutations. They lack local knowledge. They’re never as smart as they think they are. They come up with ideas that suit some people okay and others not at all, and make everyone pay for it. Then they pat themselves on the back and keep their jobs whether they’re good at them or not. And when they retire in their late 50s, they collect a pension that their neighbors have to keep working into their late 60s to pay for.
If leaf collection were privatized, we would find out whether people really want it. What services would they pay for? What signals would they send to the market?
Maybe some would pay for a service similar to that which this town offers. Maybe some would pay extra to have a mini Noo-Noo deal with the leaves in the back yard. I guarantee some would just keep their money and deal with their leaves in their own creative ways.
It’s just leaf pickup. It’s just trash pickup. These are minor things in the grand scheme. Still, they are examples of a much bigger problem. Government isn’t better at anything. Government is a thief.
Let’s stop mincing words. Leaf pickup is stupid. It’s also theft and extortion, whether you have leaves or not.
At least garbage pickup is private here in my small neighborhood. I guess I should be grateful for that.
