Trash Collection in the Free Market
Lately I’ve been trying to think of ways to use free market strategies in different ways. I’m fascinated by the simple, yet complex, relationship between supply and demand can be. For instance, we use a lot of corn for ethanol, so farmers want to grow more corn, so they grow less of other crops, so other foods can be more expensive. We’re not growing enough corn, so corn prices rise as well. Corn also gets fed to cows, so scarce corn means higher prices, which equals higher beef prices or a switch to a grassier diet.
And so on.
If you’re interested in these types of relationships, I highly recommend Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt. Lots of neat linkages between things you wouldn’t necessarily associate with each other.
In this same train of thought, I read a great article about taxes in The Wall Street Journal that uses IRS data to analyze how the cut in the dividend tax actually raised tax revenues. As tax rates fell, investors were more likely to target investments that gave dividends and companies were more likely to issue divendends. The loss from lowering the tax percentage was more than made up by getting more transactions to tax.
Let’s try a couple more wacky ideas!
People should recycle. It’s not that hard to separate your plastic and glass and cans and put them in a different container for them to be taken away and re-used.
Yet (at least here in Olathe) it costs me a monthly fee for recycling but I can put as much trash out as I want. Instead, I’d like to encourage less trash and more recycling. So, switch the two. Recycling would be free and you would pay for each bag of trash you put out (maybe you have to use the city-supplied trash bags, for instance.) Suddenly, people are motivated to use less and to recycle more.
If you’ve got any more ideas, I’d love to hear them!
