One of those George Monbiot questions we can answer

George illustrates one of those basic limitations to government regulatory - heck, any type of - power:

To give one example, it is hard to explain why a large portion of the lucrative waste disposal industry has been ceded to organised crime in the UK while successive governments look the other way. Might they have been, in effect, legally bribed?

No, it’s that government is trying to do too much here.

One of the methods by which government fails is when it tries to do too much. The reason the plans gang agley is that people simply won’t follow them.

Thus we gain, at the milder end of the spectrum, the Laffer Curve - tax people “too much” and they work less. At the stronger end the Soviet Union was an entirely planned economy - and large portions of economic activity were simply illegal and therefore unplanned. Folk just would not obey the rules laid down.

This applies to anything and everything - make those rules, for whatever it is, too strict and the black market will arrive. This is true of cigarette taxation leading to the £14 pack, it is already partially true of vapes and it will be wholly true of the upcoming attempts to ban smoking by age group and so on. Rules that are “too tight” create scofflaws.

This is just one of those things which limit government power. That the humans being governed will only follow said laws, rules, regulations, to a point and no further. Sure, sure, we all really should obey the law, we are a democracy and so should be bound by those in common decisions. Yet we don’t and that is what places those limits upon what can be centrally done.

The reason the illegal waste disposal industry is lucrative is because the laws upon the legal version make said obeying of the law highly expensive. So, some to many simply do not obey them. This isn’t a good idea, obviously and the answer is to have looser laws overall but which gain general acceptance from the population.

Or, to put it more simply. Handing over the writing of waste management laws to the sort of anal retentives who make a duck’s sphincter look relaxed isn’t the optimal solution. Because people just won’t obey such rules.