>Bob shoplift from a store. How does the insurance company stop him from shoplifing from the store again?
When did I say an insurance company would stop a shoplifter? Whether or not Walmart will physically confront a shoplifter or not (I'm pretty sure I've seen cases in the news where they have), that's their business, but as far as I know there's nothing from precluding them from doing so.
>But private 3rd party citizens do NOT have the ability to use force on others.
Sure they do. I assume you're talking about laws here. I can't speak for the laws of every state, but most allow the the use of force in self defense or even to prevent theft.
Regardless of the laws of any given jurisdiction, is your argument that there is a market failure because the law prevents a business from taking action?
>I'm saying that the County is using taxes to pay for the Dump (and similarly, raising a "bag tax" to discourage the use of plastic bags is a good thing). And according to you anarcho-capitalists, you guys typically consider the forceful removal of money from the private citizenry to be immoral.
>I'm defending the use of taxes to solve this market failure. Because taxes are NOT a function of a free-market economy. You should know the basics of your own argument dude
You keep referring to an alleged market failure but you have failed to identify one. In your example the dump is a public institution, thereby excluding the possibility of a market failure.
The term you're looking for is actually negative externality. I am very familiar with the subject. I know it well enough, in fact, to know that if you're going to refer to a "market failure" you have to actually be discussing the market. Your example is dependent upon a commons and/or publicly owned enterprise, ie. not a market.
Yeah, there are positive and negative externalities. And both are examples of specific market failures.
And no. Plastic Bags cost $0 from the grocery store under normal circumstances. If it weren't for the bag tax of $0.05, I wouldn't be paying (or being discouraged) to use recyclable bags. Why would I buy a $1.00 reusable bag if all the plastic bags are free?
On the other hand, if plastic bags cost $0.05, then the reusable bag becomes useful within 20 trips to the grocery store (moreso, because in my experience, the reusable bags can hold two or three times as much. So maybe only in about 7 trips or so it makes up for it).
This reduced pollution and overall created a better situation for my municipality. Most importantly, the bag tax works as far as getting rid of plastic-bag pollution.
If you were actually familiar with the argument, you'd have made a sane counterargument by now. But instead, you've only claimed that this bag pollution example is "not a market failure" or "not an externality".
I do get that you want to play with definitions all day long, but I'm going to hammer this point until you come up with a cohesive argument.
---------------
If you disagree, please tell me the free-market approach. And explain why the free-market approach failed to occur for 40+ years straight (ie: until the creation of the bag tax).
Hint: there's no free-market enterprise who is going to be able to make money while cleaning up polluted rivers. In particular, no one can "profit" from the cleanup of the The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
Very few people are even discouraging the use of plastic bags and plastic water bottles that contribute to the pollution.
Come on man, the environment is the CLASSIC market failure. The easiest way to deal with it is to incur a minor tax on plastic goods that end up in the patch, to discourage its growth.
Your entire argument is that there exists a subset of the world which has been forcefully maintained as "owned by everyone", ie. a commons; the commons exists by compulsion and operates in a matter which is entirely contradictory to the way a market works; in no way would a sensible person confuse a commons as being part of a free market; then when things don't work out well for the commons you want to call it a "market failure". It's a complete misnomer. It's a mind boggling definition. The markets didn't fail. The commons failed. And because the commons failed it's somehow a good idea to punish the market.
But I get it, you didn't come up with the examples or the theories. The pseudo-economists did. I'm merely exposing the shallowness and contradictions of their theories.
You talk about "playing with definitions" but that's the entire point.
The cost of the bag is irrelevant. The cost of disposing the bag is irrelevant. The important facts are that the dump is a commons. That's it.
You ask for the solution and I have already told you the solution. Privatize the commons. It solves the entire problem. In this case you do not even have to privatize all the roads, national parks, oceans or anything else. In this case if the dump was privatized and municipalities did not try to take control of it through onerous regulation, your plastic bag disposal problem would be entirely solved.
>And explain why the free-market approach failed to occur for 40+ years straight
First of all I wanted to say thank you. Thank you for not saying "explain why the free-market failed for 40+ years straight". Your question acknowledges that you recognize that the free market did not fail but rather the free market approach was not attempted.
Why was it not attempted? I don't know. Not being very familiar with history of municipal garbage collection across countless jurisdictions, it would be hard for me to expound on their history and evolution. Similarly I don't know all the reasons why bad laws are passed and remain. I don't know why prohibition, despite its wondrous failure in the 1920s and early 1930s, continues in kind today. I could provide some anecdotes, but it wouldn't be the full picture.
But I do know if you look at the history of the world, free markets are a new concept. Free markets have brought incredible prosperity to the world. I know that, from the big picture, the world is trending towards more open and free markets. Perhaps in my day I'll see the widespread privatization of the dump.
When did I say an insurance company would stop a shoplifter? Whether or not Walmart will physically confront a shoplifter or not (I'm pretty sure I've seen cases in the news where they have), that's their business, but as far as I know there's nothing from precluding them from doing so.
>But private 3rd party citizens do NOT have the ability to use force on others.
Sure they do. I assume you're talking about laws here. I can't speak for the laws of every state, but most allow the the use of force in self defense or even to prevent theft.
Regardless of the laws of any given jurisdiction, is your argument that there is a market failure because the law prevents a business from taking action?
>I'm saying that the County is using taxes to pay for the Dump (and similarly, raising a "bag tax" to discourage the use of plastic bags is a good thing). And according to you anarcho-capitalists, you guys typically consider the forceful removal of money from the private citizenry to be immoral.
>I'm defending the use of taxes to solve this market failure. Because taxes are NOT a function of a free-market economy. You should know the basics of your own argument dude
You keep referring to an alleged market failure but you have failed to identify one. In your example the dump is a public institution, thereby excluding the possibility of a market failure.