THE OPINIONS ARE HIS OWN

I really don’t care to know how much garbage, in tons, I personally generate each year. I’m sure it will be enough to cover the earth to a depth of several feet. I’m pretty sure you’d have to include in my tons and tons of garbage all the magazines and newspapers that have carried the stories about garbage and that I have thrown away in a fit of pique.

After all, creating garbage is the one aspect of American life we can count on being accepted by the Third World. McDonald’s move to Moscow is just a ploy by the CIA to cause the Russians to use up all their available landfill sites.

Now, the upheaval in Eastern Europe shows that a centrally planned economy won’t work. Why then do the governments of the United States and Texas and Dallas try to frighten me into recycling my garbage with tales of inundation? This is central planning to achieve an economic end (saving the cost of new landfills) and it won’t work.

If governments want to put the population into a fervor of recycling, then recycling will have to be market-driven just as everything else in our system is supposed to be.

For example, governments themselves use enormous amounts of paper. Look at all the tax forms and postage stamps they print. Look at the number of communications you got from your congressman last year. How much of that was printed on recycled paper? Governments ought not to print on anything but recycled paper. That would create a market for the stuff and then recycling would make economic sense.

Even garbage has to make economic sense. Free market sense. It’s the American way. Other nations please copy.