Influenced by out-of-touch environmentalists, the Los Angeles City Council committee moved forward last week with plans to phase out and ultimately ban paper and plastic bags in Los Angeles, reports Breitbart.
You will only be able to use reusable bags, which WaPo reports are often breeding grounds for bacteria that can be harmful to people’s health:
Nearly every bag examined for bacteria by researchers at the University of Arizona and Loma Linda University found whopping amounts of bugs. Coliform bacteria, suggesting raw-meat or uncooked-food contamination, was in half of the bags, and E. coli was found in 12 percent of the bags.Thus, a move to reusable bags will result in the regular washing of such bags, which, of course, means more work for consumers, more use of soap and water (which one would think would cause a fit by environmentalists.)
Bottom line: The call for a ban on bags demonstrates no understanding of basic economics and the cost benefit decisions made by consumers and retailers. Throwaway bags are used because they are convenient. And, if the free market were allowed to operate in the refuse disposal industry, there would be no externalities associated with the use of disposable bags.
What we have here is more proof that environmentalists are anti-human. Ban bags, ban furs, stop growth, they won't be happy until they have us all walking around naked at the North Pole.
As Lew Rockwell put it :
Today we face an ideology every bit as pitiless and messianic as Marxism. And like socialism a hundred years ago, it holds the moral high ground. Not as the brotherhood of man, since we live in post-Christian times, but as the brotherhood of bugs. Like socialism, environmentalism combines an atheistic religion with virulent statism. But it ups the ante. Marxism at least professed a concern with human beings; environmentalism harks back to a godless, manless, and mindless Garden of Eden..
If these people were merely wacky cultists, who bought acres of wilderness and lived on it as primitives, we would not be threatened. But they seek to use the state, and even a world state, to achieve their vision...
The environmental movement is openly anti-human and virulently statist. Is it any coincidence that the Nazis exalted animals, nature, and vegetarianism above humans, civilization, and civilized eating, or that our environmentalists have an air of green goose step about them?
The environmentalists must be opposed — if they will excuse the expression — root and branch. But it will not be easy
Here in Austin they already passed such a bill, last month: http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/cityhall/entries/2012/03/02/austin_passes_bag_ban_1.html
ReplyDeleteYes, Austin has passed a plastic-paper bag ban, it is insidious. I immediately thought of the reusable bag contamination issue. Also, for seniors or others messing with reusable bags it is difficult to carry them back and forth to the store, not to mention each bag is too heavy to carry, as greater number of items are typically placed in a smaller number of bags. Interested me they also banned Paper product, as degrades quickly, believe the argument used was takes a lot of energy to make them, saves trees, they still fill up landfills. Notice how this stuff becomes a Fad and is picked up by multiple localities once they find out their buddies are doing it. Finally, I believe it is another method to extract money from end-users as some localities are still continuing use of plastic-paper bags, but mandate a per bag (or per visit) fee, with 'naturally' a cut going to the locality. The whole measure stinks, and again is foisted on the masses, most of whom likely do not want it, by a few control freaks.
DeleteHow many times have some of us walked out of a gas station or convenience store with one item in a disposable bag, only to immediately throw the bag away after leaving the store? I believe that the high use of disposable bags has less to do with convenience and more to do with a lack of consumer information about the true cost of goods--consumers often take disposable bags because they mistakenly believe that they are "free", instead of understanding that disposable bags are a part of the organization's variable costs, and hence contribute to the total cost of the products they want to purchase. I was living in Shanghai, China when the Shanghainese government instituted a law to curb throw-away bag use for similar environmental and consumer concerns. But instead of banning the use of bags by retailers, the law required businesses to charge for each bag as a separate cost item instead of including them "free" with a purchase. Consumers were still free to purchase throw-away plastic bags (at a nominal cost of a couple of cents), but nearly overnight I saw consumers bringing reuseable bags to the store instead of opting to buy the plastic bags. This was an interesting economic-based intervention that led to changes in consumer behavior by making the cost of goods more transparent.
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