This is Just Silly...

Perhaps their rates are going to be higher than they currently are. Also, if you have a single service picking up the garbage, you don't have the option to switch companies.

I had a choice in my garbage pickup and the competition drove the rates down.

 

In response to JuanValdez earlier, I don't see how a truck driving by your house and picking up your trash lends itself to monopoly. If they had to bid for the right to connect garbage chutes to everyone's house, I could see, but garbage pick-up isn't like sewer service or cable television.

 

It may not lead to a monopoly, but I was able to lower my fees in half by switching from one company to a competitor. If the competition did not exist, I have no leverage with my provider.

 

even if they've never enforced the provisions for fines, if they're there, it tends to freak people...the paranoid seem particularly determined to practice their rights to be wasteful. It's about freedom. I think it might even be in the constitution. Thou shalt protect thy right to litter and waste.

 

I think the principle here is that if you already have a trash truck with a couple of guys in it physically on a street to pick up one guy's trash, the marginal cost of picking up the neighbor's trash too is much smaller than the cost of buying another truck, hiring more guys, and sending that truck to the same street. You can also eliminate overhead by not having to track which houses are your customers, who has paid and who hasn't, and so on. So, there are definite advantages in rewarding a monopoly here.

Besides that, there is still competition in the market. The contract lasts a couple of years and then will get bid again. If another provider has a better bid, they'll get the business. It's not a true monopoly -- it's buying in bulk.

 

my guess is the different companies offered different days pickup and some offered two collections per week. The city got several bids for the lowest service 1 collection per week and were given a discount. The people who are most mad are unable to choose which day they cans schedule pickup (what if they prefer to sleep in on sat.) or really want two collection days.

in the end no one cares.

 

Business is not holy.

Business is the routine of the most mediocre members of society and it should be treated as such.

 

Ah, but you forget... Chief Justice Roberts, when throwing decades of established law into the dumpster, said that a corporation is a person. Don't be mean to a person!

 

Progressives for State-Sanctioned Corporate Monopoly

Radley Balko | November 9, 2010

Last month, John Cole complained after his local water company dug a hole in his backyard without his permission. They were installing an outdoor water meter. When Cole asked why he was never told, the workers blew him off, and said they had a right of way. Never one to miss a chance to take a cheap shot at libertarians, Cole wrote:

If libertarians would focus on crap like this instead of all the smug bull**** and contrarian economic analysis, they might actually be able to build their party.

At the time, Mark Thompson correctly observed that Cole's conception of libertarians pretty clearly exists only in Cole's mind. This is exactly the sort of thing libertarians care about, focus on, and obsess over. Most of the successes of the Libertarian Party and of libertarian activists in general have come at the local level.

In any case, jump forward to this week. A Tea Party group in Fountain Hills, Arizona is protesting the city council's decision to eliminate the local market for trash collection. Instead, the town has contracted all garbage collection to a single company.

So here's a tea party group rallying around a local issue. What's more, they're protesting the local government's decision to grant a state-enforced monopoly to a private company. Seems like the sort of thing a good progressive like Cole could get behind, no? Of course not. Instead, Cole mocks the protesters for their pettiness. Stupid rubes. Getting all excited over a local issue while there are pressing, national issues to address. Or as Cole put it, by way of a class-warfare non-sequitur, "This is how the American empire will end. With us rioting in the streets over the right to choose a trash collecter [sic], while the top 5% laugh all the way to the bank."

It's particularly amusing that Cole would evoke income inequality in this post. Perhaps he can explain how a town taking business away from four trash collection companies in order to grant a city-wide monopoly to one brings us closer to his goal of an America where wealth is distributed more evenly. I'm having hard time figuring out how that would happen.

Cole weighed in again later:

Christ on a crutch. This was small “d” democracy in action, not nanny statism or “central planning” or whatever ludicrous term you want to bandy about. A local town council, elected by the citizens, sat around and viewed a bunch of bids for trash collection for their municipality, and then chose one private firm and outsourced it to them. This is not some faceless bureaucrat at the UN headquarters foisting his will on an unsuspecting population. This is not some slippery slope to the erosion of individual rights. This is subsidiarity in action, and if you find it too oppressive or too vulgar an imposition on your personal liberty, you can move, or you can work with like-minded people to elect new town council members and change the contract.

This is why no one with half a clue pays ANY attention to these abstract libertarian principles and the people willing to spend hours upon hours discussing them. The town council picked a company to pick up trash, and the teahadists freaked out and think it is socialism. End of story. The rest of us are pointing and laughing at them, and now you.

*** Update ***

My GAWD. I feel so violated. I’m going through my bills before the Steelers game and I just realized that Allied Waste is contracted to pick up my trash, so my personal liberties have been impinged by the creeping totalitarianism of nanny-statism. To show solidarity with the oppressed Fountain Hills trash protesters, I am going to dress up in my “Don’t Tread on Me” t-shirt, stand at the edge of my driveway at dawn during trash pick-up on Thursday, and throw pocket constitutions at the sanitation workers. We shall overcome, patriots!

Where to begin? First, this issue is a hell of a lot more important to the residents of Fountain Hills than "some faceless bureaucrat at the UN headquarters foisting his will on an unsuspecting population." It affects them directly. They don't like the decision their local elected officials made, so they're protesting it. That too, is "small d democracy" in action. And it's the exact sort of local involvement in which Cole wrongly claims libertarians don't engage. (In Cole's world, though not the real world, "libertarian" and "tea party" are interchangeable.)

E.D. Kain, the lone voice of sanity left at Balloon Juice, tried to point out the errors in Cole's criticism. Most notably, if you think city officials customarily hand out contracts based solely on merit, considering only what's best for their constituents, and only after carefully considering a variety of bids, especially when it comes to sanitation, well, there's a man in a jumpsuit waiting at the diner who'd like to make you an offer that you can't refuse.

Of course, Kain was roundly chastised by Balloon Juice bloggers and commenters for his quaint naivete. How silly of him to actually think through this particular debate; to actually consider things from the perspective of the citizens; to question the idea that the public good, not self-interest, always motivates elected officials when they're granting contracts. This is Balloon Juice. You are to reflexively take the side that provides the most opportunity to mock libertarians and tea partiers. (By the way, my defense of this particular tea party group on this particular issue is in no way meant to imply my broad support for the tea party movement, or Arizona tea partiers in particular—a fallacy Cole regularly employs.)

Cole weighed in again in the comments to Kain's post:

You completely missed the point of my post, then. I’m not opposed to having choice in trash collection.

My point is that it is absolutely insane to blow a ****ing gasket over this issue like what is happening in that town in Arizona. They elected a group of people, they sat around and thought things through, and came to a decision. Don’t agree with it- fine! Elect someone to replace them and repeal the decision in a few years.

But what is insane is to riot about it.

There was no rioting. Go back and re-read the article from the Arizona Republic. There was organized protest. There was speaking out in a city council meeting. There were warnings that voters might hold Fountain Hills officials accountable for this decision next election. Yes, the protest has included some silly and overheated rhetoric. But certainly no sillier or more overheated than you'll find in a typical Balloon Juice post. In general, the protesters seem concerned that granting a monopoly to a private utility company could disrupt the garbage removal service that the people of Fountain Hills apparently believed the free market was providing pretty efficiently.

I don't want to put words in their mouths, but perhaps, perhaps, the Fountain Hills protesters are worried that the lack of competition in trash service could give rise to the sort of complacent service and disregard for customers that might cause, say, a water company with a government-granted monopoly to dig holes in a customer's backyard without first getting his permission.

 

Link?

 

If the end user does not have a choice, its a monopoly. By your logic, we should only have one cell phone carrier,since they all can share the same tower. Lets do away with one of the satellite providers, since they both can do the same service. If there is an Albertsons or Krogers next to each other, one of them should close.

Competition clearly drives prices down. It forces bloated and poorly ran companies to shape up or go out of business. The same principle applies to government. And no, im not advocating that we should privatize every government program.

 

Keep it up Tea Party. If you make a mountain out of a mole hill on every stupid arse issue, like trash pickup, then you'll kill your whole movement in no time. Seriously. Pick your battles.

 

I'm all for competition as long as there is a level playing field, which is one of the problems I have with Republicans, and some Democrats. The Republican Party, under George W. Bush, created a fantasy world filled with goodies for Corporate America and the wealthy. When big business backed Bush, never in their wildest dreams of avarice did they imagine Bush would literally do anything they asked. After all those years, they sorta got used to it. What we have been seeing during this election cycle, especially in the recent midterm campaigns, is nothing less that the beginning, thanks to Judge Roberts, of an immense expediture to buy the congressional support to continue the Bush Corporate Climate. They can't give it up, not if they can buy it. So they are buying it.

 

It's great that the tea party is protesting this actually. There's been so much corruptions with gov't bodies issuing contracts that finally the tea party is making itself useful, even if it's not really their attempt to do that but it might be a side effect.

The city council has thrown out a number of one million, but where does that come from? HOw was it working before with multiple trash companies - what were the charges, what was allied's bid compared to the other companies, why isn't this public knowledge?

Why can't residents opt-out of garbage collection to find their own solution? What is the net tax savings to residents and how do they see it?


Frankly, I think people should be able to opt out of the mandate for health care. Which they are. But instead of a tax penalty, they should be a different penalty. That if they don't have insurance, and they show up at a hospital for treatment and don't pay, the hospital can throw them out on the street.

But the problem is, no hospital woudl actually do that. So the people who opt out are saying, hey, why pay for insurance when we can get free treatment!

It's funny how no one complains about the uninsured getting all the free treatment which raises their premiums.

 

Too bad that is absolutely not reality in any corner of the world.

 

It's just a way for the Tea PartyPoopers to stay relevant. Soon enough, even the so-called Tea Party candidates will begin distancing themselves from the nonsense. Overall, it's a toxic movement.

 

rtsy, that looks like an article about a bbs argument. Who are these random people?

I do agree with the objection about the $1m. It sounds a little pie-in-the-sky. Real savings are likely less. My guess on what's really going on in this town, besides an ideological objection to saving money, is that people don't want to buy all the services the town has agreed to buy, like recycling. They'd rather not monetize the externalities of their trash-making and then just pretend like they don't exist. Then, they can pay with fewer dollars, but more in intangible costs.

I do agree, in general, that competition drives down prices. However, no competition is lost in this contract. The contract was competitively bid and the associated fees for the entire term are set. When it expires, it can be competitively bid again. That the customer is an aggregator instead of a household doesn't impact competitiveness. In fact, competition for the business of an aggregator is more robust (due to its buying power) and better savings can be realized by the individual within it. And, if Allied Waste runs a shoddy operation because they know they've got the business for the next 5 years, you can be pretty sure they won't win the next contract when it comes up. So, competition isn't the issue here.

And, you straw-man my logic. In trash-collection, redundancy can be very inefficient. In cellular service, I don't think (correct me if I'm wrong) the cost of construction and maintenance of a tower is very big for the volume of traffic they carry. So redundancy is not very expensive compared to the potential savings from competition. With grocers, there is a capacity issue -- if the Krogers closed down because of the Albertsons, Albertsons would have to build a second store to adequately serve the customer radius anyway. When there isn't enough traffic to support two store-fronts, one does shut down.

However, to abstract the concept a little, if Houston could somehow get a 5-year contract that would give all Houstonians cheaper cell service than we could get individually, I'd vote yes.

 

So it comes to this... D&D has been called trash often enough in some quarters. So now we have a thread about it!