The telling quote in a Tribune-Review story detailing how the City of Pittsburgh’s new plastic ban bag has left businesses and customers alike confused comes near the end of the dispatch from the city councilor who sponsored the law.
“I understand everyone’s frustration, especially when you’re being told to do something and it’s not your own choice,” she said.
Especially when it’s something as addlepated as this single-use plastic bag ban that applies to some plastic bags but not others, applies to some products but not others, applies to some people but not others and applies to some businesses but not others.
Oh, and if you want a bag at all, you must either provide your own reuseable one or purchase a former bagsona non grata paper one for a dime.
And now, Allegheny County Council has taken up consideration of a similar ban – a ban that is counterintuitive to simple reason, basic logic, elementary economics and fair play.
Listen to some of the same city councilor’s further bumfuzzled discombobulation:
“Whether it’s fast food you pick up at a counter or through a drive-through, if it’s holding loose food like fries or hash browns or something that isn’t fully packaged and the bag is the thing keeping it safe from the outside world and contamination, then of course a 10-cent fee shouldn’t apply to that bag,” she said.
But wait, the ban does apply for drive-through or take-out food that is wrapped or packaged in a way that makes an additional bag “handy, but it’s not necessary,” she added.
The City Council sponsor further stated that when a restaurant is looking to provide a paper bag for a 10-cent fee, workers should ask customers whether they’d rather pay the fee or take their items without a bag.
“They can then hopefully make the choice that’s best for them,” she said.
Never mind that with this ban on single-use plastic bags – that, of course, have multiple and repeated uses — city government has taken away consumer’s ability to make “the choice that’s best for them” — by substituting its own choice, right?
As Albert Jay Nock, the seminal American libertarian of the early 20th century, reminded:
“In proportion as you give the state power to do things for you, you give it power to do things to you.”
The plastic bag ban is just the latest in a long line of “The State” putting it to you.
Oh, and Allegheny County Council? No thank you, ladies and gentlemen, we don’t need another.
Colin McNickle is communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).
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