Why not, you know, just stop charging for landfill?

As so often the next stage of government activity is created by the last stage of it. The logical solution therefore being to reduce what government has been doing so that we require government to then do less in future.

Illegal dumps in West Yorkshire, Surrey and Kent will be cleared up using taxpayer money, Andy Burnham has announced, as the prime minister promises a new drive to tackle toxic waste.

So the cycle is, currently, that government charges people to landfill waste. At which point some decline to pay said charges and simply dump anywhere. Government has therefore lost the revenues from said charges. Now government must spend more money to clean up the waste dumped without having paid the landfill charges.

It would, we posit, be simpler to not charge people to dump in licenced landfills in the first place so as to not have that second surge of the cycle, having to clear up that which doesn’t pay the charges. We’d not insist here but we think it possible at least that the taxpayer would be the net beneficiary of that plan.

As so often, the solution to governmental problems is to have less government. We recommend said solution.

Tim Worstall