The Seattle City Council, always ready to plumb the depths of shallowness, is patting itself on the back with near-orgasmic ecstasy as if its ordinance banning plastic bags is the next Magna Charta.By unanimous vote and effective July 1 (subject to an expected signing by Mayor Mike McGinn), the council outlawed plastic shopping bags at grocery and other retail outlets and imposed a five-cent-per-bag fee on paper bags supposedly to encourage consumers to go exclusively to reusable bags. Exceptions were made for politically-correct farmers markets and food banks and, in the case of the paper-bag fee, food stamp shoppers. Apparently, their plastic bags aren’t the trouble – only those from for-profit retailers are heinously sinful.
A similar ban in 2008 was decisively rejected by voters the following year.
What’s the trouble? We’re told the plastic bag is the bane of all existence, costs Seattle taxpayers millions and kills whales. We’re told this with a straight face.Councilman Mike O’Brien, the ordinance’s chief sponsor, said in a Facebook conversation on the issue that plastic bags cost Seattle taxpayers $2.5 million in handling and landfill costs, but he didn’t offer supporting data or a link to any. News reports tell of a dead whale washed up on a beach with 20 bags in its stomach, but no mention was made as to what else was in its stomach or what caused its death.
In other words, with bigger fish to fry – U.S. Department of Justice criticism of the Seattle Police Department; a public school system rife with corruption and so crappy it runs through superintendants more often than I run through socks; an increasingly kid, family and business-unfriendly city and a hell of a lot more real issues affecting real people – Seattle focuses on the trivial.
There goes your free supply of car litter bags, doggie don’t-don’t retrieval and storage (until the first trash can) devices, lunch sacks, bathroom garbage can liners and, for me, photo storage containers. Of course, you can still BUY plastic bags for these purposes – thanks for increasing the cost of living in Seattle. Guess folks will have to smuggle free ones in from Shoreline or Tukwilla.Another reason for shoppers to skip Seattle and go somewhere not hell bent on making their retail experience a more expensive hassle. No detailed mention was made that I could find of the cost to consumers, taxpayers and others of banning bags.
What I seriously object to is the loss of the right to choose. Instead of educating people about plastic bags and possible problems associated with them, or ramping up recycling efforts, blunt-object government regulation is again employed.
When O’Brien says “The hope is by passing this legislation; we can help shift behavior and get more people to use reusable bags instead of disposable bags,” I see goose stepping bag police getting in the face of citizens and frisking them for contraband bags. I don’t want government shifting my behavior – I want to make my own behavioral choices and be responsible for their consequences.
What’s wrong with letting the free market decide the fate of plastic bags? If they’re so dangerous and bad for us, won’t people eventually and FREELY cause them to disappear? Or has the case for getting rid of them either not been made or not there to be made at all?
According to a San Francisco study cited in The Wall Street Journal, plastic bags take up less landfill space than chewing gum or cigarette butts. Seattle banning those? The reality is that bags are visible and get blown about. So what – so do newspaper pages – is a ban on printed newspapers in the offing?
Some contend reusable bags are themselves even more environmentally unfriendly bordering on a health risk for cultivating E. coli bacteria. Out of the frying pan and into the frying pan?
Progressive thinking focuses on external bling at the expense of substantive values. Skittering about as the bagman (pun intended) for every dopey cliché and cause de jouras you try to be all things to all people causes you to end up being nothing to nobody. Seattle City Council, welcome to nothing.
When confronted with liberty, freedom, personal responsibility and market choice, progressives and their pals dismiss them as abstractions or unrealistic since hyper-regulation of everything that moves is the only answer.
I’m content to trust people to make their own choices, even on the issue of Western Civilization-ending plastic bags.
Scott St. Clair is a former investigative journalist with Washington State’s Freedom Foundation. He blogs for the Victoria Taft blog from his hideout in New Jersey.
Scott St. Clair is a former investigative journalist with Washington State’s Freedom Foundation. He blogs for the Victoria Taft blog from his hideout in New Jersey.
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