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  • New Jersey’s Plastic Bag Ban Backfire, Explained

    There’s a famous scene in Seinfeld in which George passes on a TV pilot deal with NBC, only to later accept for less money than originally offered. 

    “In other words, you held out for less money,” Jerry says after George tells him the deal. “You know the basic idea of negotiation, as I understand it, is to get your price to go up.” 

    The scene comes to mind after learning about New Jersey’s recent attempt to save the environment by banning single-use plastic bags in grocery stores.

    A new study published by Freedonia Custom Research confirmed that New Jersey’s law, which went into effect in 2022, backfired badly. 

    While the state’s ban — which, unlike those of other states, also prohibited single-use paper bags — led to a more than 60 percent decline in total bag volumes, it also had an unintended consequence: a threefold increase in plastic consumption for grocery bags.

    How this happened is no mystery. 

    The massive increase in plastic consumption was driven by the popularity of heavy-duty polypropylene bags, which use about fifteen times more plastic than polyethylene plastic bags.

    “Most of these alternative bags are made with non-woven polypropylene, which is not widely recycled in the United States and does not typically contain any post-consumer recycled materials,” the study explains. “This shift in material also resulted in a notable environmental impact, with the increased consumption of polypropylene bags contributing to a 500% increase in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions compared to non-woven polypropylene bag production in 2015.”

    Needless to say, this was not the result proponents of the policy had hoped for. Doug O’Malley, the director of the group Environment New Jersey, said in 2022 that the goal of the policy was to “initiate a culture shift” by reducing plastic waste and pollution. Instead, the policy has become the butt of jokes.

    “This ought to be the motto of the climate lobby,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board quipped. “We don’t help the environment, but we feel good about it anyway.”

    New Jersey’s economic backfire deserves some mockery. As the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman famously pointed out, policies must be judged not by their intentions but by their results. And the results of the policy were dismal. 

    But it’s also important to understand why the policy failed. There are several explanations, but the best place to start is the policy’s flawed assumptions.

    Policy makers assumed the heavy-duty polypropylene bags would be better for the environment because they can be used over and over again, unlike the single-use plastic bags. The problem is, evidence shows that few people actually do this.

    As early as September 2022, the New York Times had identified a major problem with the ban on single-use plastic and paper bags. People were accumulating far too many of the heavier-styled polypropylene bags. 

    Indeed, the Grey Lady showed pictures of numerous shoppers who’d accumulated mountains of shopping bags. One problem was that delivery services were using the reusable bags to deliver groceries to consumers. As a result, instead of having a bunch of single-use plastic or paper bags they could save or discard, consumers had a plethora of heavy-duty reusable bags they could save or discard. 

    Though many people no doubt just pitched the bags, some people kept them to “avoid waste.” A man the newspaper interviewed named Brian Otto had 101 of them. Nicole Kramaritsch of Roxbury had 46 stuffed into her garage. A woman from Whippany had 74. 

    “I don’t know what to do with all these bags,” the Whippany woman told the Times.

    A second problem was that consumers didn’t like using their reusable bags over and over, which resulted in mass amounts of waste.

    The Times quoted a professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability who explained that a typical reusable polypropylene bag must be used “at least 10 times” to offset the additional energy they require compared to a typical plastic bag. 

    But the Freedonia study found that, on average, reusable polypropylene bags are used “two to three times before being discarded, falling short of the recommended reuse rates necessary to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions generated during production and address climate change.”

    The study doesn’t say why consumers typically only use a bag a few times before throwing it away, but it’s important to understand that consumers aren’t behaving irrationally in doing so.

    An abundance of research stretching back decades shows those reusable plastic bags tend to carry bacteria, some of which can be dangerous. 

    New York banned single-use plastic bags years ago to “reduce waste and protect the environment,” but the state’s health department concedes reusable bags come with a trade-off. 

    “When you carry food or other items in these bags, they may leave behind germs like E. coli or Salmonella,” notes the Department of Health. “If the bags are not properly washed and dried before they are used again, these germs remain and can make you sick.”

    Many consumers likely determine it’s safer to pitch their reusable bags after a few uses rather than risk getting sick. And while some might clean their bags over and over to keep using them, perhaps more shoppers determine it’s not worth their time and energy. 

    Energy is a key word here. As sustainability engineers point out, cleaning reusable bags also requires resources, and not trivial amounts. 

    “Don’t always assume that reusable is the best option,” says Dr. Shelie Miller, an environmental engineer at University of Michigan’s Center for Sustainable Systems who co-authored a 2021 study titled “Environmental payback periods of reusable alternatives to single-use plastic kitchenware products.” 

    “Our study,” Dr. Miller added, “showed that some reusable alternatives never break even because it takes more energy, and generates more greenhouse gas emissions, to wash them than it takes to make the single-use plastic item.”

    The outcome of New Jersey’s ban, as well as the research conducted by environmental engineers like Dr. Miller, is a perfect illustration of an economic truth.

    “There are no solutions,” the economist Thomas Sowell once observed. “There are only trade-offs.” 

    Sometimes the trade-offs are good; sometimes they are not, as in New Jersey’s case. But every action or policy comes with countless secondary consequences. Indeed, even though New Jersey’s ban harmed both consumers and the environment, it was not without positive secondary consequences for some. 

    It turns out that the ban on single-use bags, which must be purchased, was a boon for manufacturers and grocery stores.

    “An in-depth cost analysis evaluating New Jersey grocery retailers reveals a typical store can profit $200,000 per store location from alternative bag sales,” the Freedonia study asserted; “for one major retailer this amounts to an estimated $42 million in profit across all its bag sales in NJ.”

    Ignoring the secondary consequences of a policy and focusing solely on its primary intended consequences is what the famous economics writer Henry Hazlitt identified as one of the greatest fallacies in “the dismal science,” and what separates a bad economist from a good one. 

    “The bad economist sees only what immediately strikes the eye,” the Economics in One Lesson author wrote. “The good economist also looks beyond.”

    Still, there’s an even bigger economic lesson that can be gleaned from the Garden State’s quixotic effort to improve the environment through its clumsy ban. It’s one of economic humility. 

    “The curious task of economics,” the Nobel Prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek wrote in The Fatal Conceit, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.” 

    Economic systems are complex, virtually infinitely so. And the great lie of the 20th century was the hubristic belief that economies could be effectively administered through the centralization of decision-making, wielded by a small number of politicians and bureaucrats.

    The effort to centralize economies was manifested most obviously in the rise of socialist systems in the 20th century, dozens of which failed miserably (and universally) and brought about widespread economic dysfunction and oppression.

    But as the economist Ludwig von Mises pointed out, centralization did not just plague command-style economies. It also afflicted mixed economies that increasingly—and naturally, in Mises’s opinion—are pulled in the direction of statism. 

    “It is in the nature of a system of government control of business to aim at the utmost centralization,” Mises observed in Bureaucracy. “In voting for government control of business the voters implicitly, although unwittingly, are voting for more centralization.”

    This pull toward centralization stems from an idea, Hayek observed: the notion that man possesses the knowledge to plan economies effectively, which breeds a “fatal striving to control society.”

    This is in stark contrast to the lesson of Leonard Read’s famous essay “I, Pencil,” which channels a message of economic humility in its recognition that, despite all of man’s grand feats, no person in the world could engineer something as simple as a lead pencil.

    The miracle of the pencil (and billions of other products) is not a triumph of government or central planning, but of the invisible hand of capitalism, which involves billions of people working in voluntary concert together.

    When we break from this model, we end up with policies that achieve results like those in New Jersey. 

    One can practically hear Jerry Seinfeld: “You know the basic idea of a ban on plastic grocery bags, as I understand it, is to get plastic consumption and greenhouse gasses to go down.”

    This article originally appeared in The Daily Economy. 


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Editor at Large of FEE.org at FEE.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Banning Skittles Might Seem Trivial. It’s Not

    My 9-year-old son and his teammates often buy Skittles at wrestling tournaments. Their theory is that eating them before matches gives them energy — especially certain colored ones.

    “The red ones make you kick a**,” one boy told me. (I told him that’s good but that he shouldn’t use that word.)

    As it happens, Skittles has been in the news lately. Proposed legislation in California would ban the candy , which was first introduced in North America in 1979. At issue are several chemicals most people have never heard of — brominated vegetable oil, red dye No. 3, propylparaben, titanium dioxide, and potassium bromate — that critics allege are dangerous.

    “Why are these toxic chemicals in our food?” asked health advocate Susan Little. “We know they are harmful and that children are likely eating more of these chemicals than adults.”

    Candy companies said the claims have no merit, pointing out that none of the ingredients have been banned by the Food and Drug Administration.

    “Food safety is the No. 1 priority for U.S. confectionery companies,” said a spokesman for the National Confectioners Association. “Chocolate and candy are safe to enjoy, as they have been for centuries.”

    Many parents might be shocked by claims that Skittles is harmful, but they shouldn’t be. The war on Skittles is part of a broader effort to control what products consumers can buy.

    That gasoline-powered car you drive? Sorry, it’s an existential threat to the environment. Those large sugary drinks you enjoy with your New York-style pizza? Not a chance . The plastic straw you’re using to sip those drinks with? Also harmful to the environment. And don’t even think about buying a gas-powered stove .

    This is the trendy new strain of anti-capitalism . It’s designed to protect humanity by regulating what you consume — everything from what you eat and drive to the size of your house and how many calories you get to take in each day. The ideology is detailed in German author Ulrike Herrmann’s bestselling book Das Ende des Kapitalismus (English: The End of Capitalism).

    Not all of these efforts have yet been realized, of course. Many, such as California’s ban on the sale of gas-powered cars, are scheduled to go into effect years from now.

    Nor does all anti-capitalism look the same. Some proponents want to eliminate meat consumption to save the planet (in parts of Europe, this is primarily being done through emission regulations). Others seek to protect public health by eliminating foods or food ingredients they deem harmful, as in the case of Skittles.

    But notice the common theme: In both instances, they get to choose, not you. This is what truly matters.

    “The most basic question is not what is best, but who shall decide what is best,” the bestselling economist Thomas Sowell has observed.

    Banning Skittles might seem trivial, but it’s not. It’s an assault on limited government and the idea that consumers should be free to decide for themselves what to consume. It’s a battle over who is sovereign in society and gets to decide what is produced: consumers or planners.

    And that’s what the Skittles fight is really about: politics, influence, and power. Indeed, proponents of the legislation admit they don’t think California’s bill will pass, but they hope it will draw the attention of the FDA.

    “I think its purpose, which is valuable, is getting the FDA to look again at these chemicals and possibly to reevaluate its entire system for reviewing food additives,” UCLA School of Law professor Diana Winters told the Guardian.

    Unlike Winters, I won’t decide for you whether you should eat Skittles. I have no idea what brominated vegetable oil even is. But I do know that tens of billions of Skittles are consumed each year, and children are doing OK. I’m aware of other government bans on perfectly safe candies .

    So yes, I’ll allow my son to keep eating Skittles before his matches. As far as warnings from public health experts, I put as much stock in those as claims that the red Skittles help him “kick a**.”

    This article was originally published by the Washington Examiner.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. (Follow him on Substack.)

    His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times. 

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


  • Congress’s 4,155-Page Omnibus Bill Is a Symbol of American Decadence

    On December 20th a handful of Republican senators shuffled before an audience of reporters prepared to issue fiery polemics on the year-end omnibus bill which sat, heavy and ponderous in all its eight-ream absurdity on a wheeled cart before the five-senator assemblage.

    “DANGER: $1.7 trillion of hazardous debt” read one of the mock-hazard signs decking the cart. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul declared the bill an “abomination,” while Utah Senator Mike Lee skewered the unseemly pressures to freeze it into law by proclaiming the process “legislative barbarism.”

    Every year it happens with textbook repetition: Washington politicians procrastinate in releasing a colossal expense prospectus for the following year which unfailingly runs thousands of pages, requests billions of dollars, and is granted mere hours of scrutiny before being thrust to a congressional vote. The process is riddled with partisan intimidations and shrewd slandering. Democratic politicians trot out folksy pleas about supporting struggling Americans, to which, naturally, passing the bill is postured to achieve. Most Republicans cave to its smothering inevitability; a minority bitterly protest.

    The omnibus bill earns its name from its practice of absorbing a collection of smaller bills into one vote. You might be tempted to call this government efficiency, but think again. In reality, it’s the gateway of legislative sloppiness and profligacy. And you might be tempted to believe Washington’s Christmas tradition is paternal benevolence for the common man but this too is a smokescreen. If our political overlords actually cared for our future in the manner of responsible stewards they would not bankrupt the nation. They would not smuggle dozens of silly congressional pet projects into our legislative initiatives. They would not make a mockery of the political process by demanding decisions on bills scarcely proffered hours of review. They would not egregiously spend money we did not have. They would not thoughtlessly shovel funds to any hungry bureaucratic mouth in the country. They would not insult American taxpayers by destroying our currency, snowballing our debt, and wrapping it all in a veneer of charity and Progress. Grim and apocalyptic though this indictment may be, it is nevertheless the bitter truth.

    As Americans, we have become numb to the money-gobbling maneuvers of the bureaucratic machine. We hardly flinch at billion-dollar price tags, not because we do not cognitively register such a number as large but because we feel detached from its significance. We do not feel connected to its consequences. We don’t even feel particularly sure about what the spending figures should be, so bewildered by the dizzying complexity of contemporary American politics are we. We put our fingers to the glass and watch but we cannot seem to stretch our fingers out and really touch the harrowing reality of a $1.7 trillion bill or a $31 trillion in national debt. Such numbers fail to disquiet our consciences. Why?

    Here are a few potential reasons.

    1. Nobody talks about fiscal conservatism anymore. Republicans love to rhapsodize about this fixture of their intellectual tradition but few are those who actually extend this principle from token rhetoric to the necessary scolding and refashioning efforts of current regimes. No matter whether they claim democratic or republican status, administrations do a sordid job of expenditure restraint. This equivalence between the parties is sobering indeed, indicating that the majority of republicans do not know how to defend small-government and balanced budgets with any authentic confidence. You might hear “fiscal conservatism” sprinkled throughout the campaign trail for its old-fashioned appeal and knack for attracting votes, but it is no longer practiced by those in Washington. Longtime champion of fiscal restraint Sen. Rand Paul has made entreaties for years that are drowned out by the opportunism and apathy swarming the Capitol.
    2. Nobody is sure why fiscal conservatism even matters: Government money has been lamentably scrubbed of morality. It bears no qualms about tempering its quantity or maintaining its quality due to an ethical contract with the people. Money has no scruples attached to it anymore. The modern conscience conceives of it as a hollow instrument; a neutral tool to get from A to B. But what is money really made of? Where does it get its value? In what ways can it be a wonderful thing and in what ways can it equally be a dangerous thing? Few care to mull these questions.
    3. Nobody quite feels the consequences of reckless spending yet: Because we raise debt ceilings with impunity and have thrown that old burden of balancing budgets out the window, we stay disconnected from the ramifications of fiscal hedonism. It is hard enough for politicians to make difficult choices that affect life beyond their term limits, because where’s the motivation in that? And so, money becomes this distant, untouchable relic that no one wants to poke at.

    And so, not only have we lost a certain emotional reaction to government spending (i.e. an instinctual discernment of when it hits a threshold of moral questionability) but we have also lost an intellectual grasp of it (i.e. an understanding of why extravagance cannot persist in perpetuity.) All of this adds up to a mass desensitization that leaves us dangerously acclimated to an environment that pretends money is a plaything and not actually the beating heart a civilization.

    Here are some of the ways in which this unlucky acclimatization has occurred:

    1. Money added is rarely scaled back: In government, addition is the path of least resistance. Subtraction has poor incentives, can be politically painful, and sounds mean and parsimonious to us Americans who see government as our rightful pursestrings and sympathetic caretaker.
    2. Added bureaucracy is rarely reviewed or pruned: More money inevitably feeds more bureaucratic cubicles. Bureaucracy is a curious animal: one that has a considerable appetite for more money and workers and administrative projects, but one that also has a deadening effect and leaves decay in its wake. In this way, bureaucracy has always bizarrely appeared to me as a life/death personification. If one thing is for sure, it will seek to justify its existence and once breathed form by taxpayer dollars, will lunge for more funds to legitimize its continuance.
    3. Law becomes more complex and disorienting: As sentences rain from keyboards and paper churns from the printer and more thousand-page legal monstrosities are produced, we end up building on a (new-ish) toxic American tradition of unintelligible, byzantine law. The less lucid and graspable the law is to the public, the less accountable government becomes—and the more fuzzy the political vision of the masses grows. After all, do we even know what laws were passed in the year-end omnibus bill? More worryingly still, do our politicians even know? Is this state of affairs normal? Would we call it a natural progression? I would warn against this particular temptation: the temptation to believe that increasing complexity is a sign of sophisticated progress, of governmental fine-tuning. It is not. It tangles with its serpentine requests and chokes with its punishing demands. And it throws a veneer of precision and compassion (owing to its seeming charity) over it all. As a general rule of thumb, when edicts becomes more profuse and complex and fail to remain concise and coherent to the public, they are unequivocally not serving the masses. (They are probably serving the elites.)

    What does one see when they gaze upon a 4,155-page bill? A symbol of American decadence. A pile of legal jargon so exhaustive its efforts look undeniably frantic. This utter excess inspires notions of blind mania. What are we doing and why? Is there any principle behind governmental motion? Are there any scraps of real thought or prudence? Or is the impetus merely zombie-like bureaucratic appetite? No matter how comprehensive and caring we would like our present government to appear, the rot cannot be fully concealed. An eight-ream bill is no sign of legislative nobility. It is an insult to the common people. It makes for a ridiculous picture of thoughtless excess. It just looks stupid at first glance. This intuitive, gut-level reaction is important. It’s the embarrassing truth of our attempts at managerial sophistry laid bare. It’s worth mentioning that empire decline is marked by an apathetic watering-down of principle, by money deterioration, and by administrative overextension. Check, check, check.

    The larger government grows, the more money it absorbs; sure. But the less functional it becomes too. It ossifies, and its vibrant principles start to decay under the dead weight.

    Once a certain threshold in size is reached (and who’s to say exactly where that is) organization lapses into oppression. Vibrancy lapses into atrophy. And decent functionality lapses into chaotic disarray. The lesson?

    Overreach and you snuff out life. Congress’ proud 4,155-page creation is a post-empire emblem if there ever was one. Do not be fooled by the legislation’s size: it represents a floundering American system, not a vibrant one.


    Lauren Reiff

    Lauren is a writer of economics, psychology, and lots in between. To read more of her work, follow her on Medium.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.