Evanston ("the city that cares too much") is in the middle of a burning controversy. The Eco-fascists are all in a tizzy over whether to tax or ban disposable grocery bags.Now, you may remember that Evanston's unofficial motto came from a Chicago Tribune article about Evanston's treatment of the homeless. It appears that no other city in America was so welcoming to the homeless. The town of Evanston had more shelters and soup kitchens per capita and offered more generous benefits to the homeless than any other city in America. Pretty soon, word filtered out nationwide and within a fairly short period of time, indigents from all over the country were flocking to Evanston in defiance of Milton Friedman's admonition that there was no such thing as a free lunch. It seems that Evanston had created its own demand for goods and services for the homelessness, and it has become quite a little cottage industry in that town.
Well, the good, responsible folks in Evanston are at it again. I assumed that if we dutifully put our plastic and paper bags, glass bottles and used newspapers in the recycling bin, and wheeled it out to the curbside and paid the special fee for the recycling guy to pick it up, we would satisfied our responsible green duty. Apparently, this is not good enough for Evanstonians. Evanstonians want to ban disposable bag entirely or, at minimum, punish users by taxing them.
No one has really put forward an estimate of the magnitude of the problem. No data has been put forward to demonstrate that we are gagging on disposable bags. Nor has anyone quantified how many people are actually likely to comply and stuff dozens of little canvas bag in their trunks in the event of a spontaneous grocery trip. I suspect that there are a vast quantity of males in Evanston that are just like me, and, rather than displacing their golf bags in their trunks with eco-friendly canvas shopping bags, they will trundle up the road to Wilmette to do their shopping, thus increasing their carbon emissions, negating all the eco-benefits of this measure. In addition, if even 10% of Evanstonians pick up and shop elsewhere, this will represent a material decline in sales for most merchants, and that doesn't even take into account folks like me that don't live there but stop to pick up groceries when I pass through. And this says nothing about the job loss to the companies that supply paper and plastic bags, and the companies that supply things to the companies that supply things to companies that make paper and plastic bags.
But none of this matters to the liberal mind. They know what is good for all of us. Inconvenience, cost, job loss, and unintended consequences matter not to them (see, e.g. our policy on Ethanol). If disposable bags are banned, we don't even know what the real benefit will be, other than the liberals in Evanston will have satisfied themselves that they are being ecologically responsible, at least in their own minds.
None of this is to suggest that all environmental regulation is nonsense. But it needs to be sensible, and be supported by real cost/benefit analysis, with a real eye on unitended consequences. Moreover, regulations need to be reviewed periodically to determine whether the premises underlying the original analysis still holds. The eco-facsists conveniently overlook all of this and simply want to impose their will and take lifestyle choices away from us. Lightbulbs, toilet tanks, microwaves, grocery bags... no product choice is too small for them to demand a say over, and no measure of impracticality can dissuade them.
And, by the way, what in the world will liberal Cub fans be placing over their heads at Wrigley Field by the end of the season?
