Sudden Change: Harris Drops Previous Plan To Ban Plastic Straws

P. Gardner Goldsmith | September 11, 2024
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Is it consistent to be consistently inconsistent?

In accord with her claim to CNN’S Dana Bash that - despite stark and glaring flips on positions such as fracking, immigration, and government run health care - her “values” (said values left undefined, of course) were unflinching, Vice-President Kamala Harris (D) again has changed course on a previous position.

This time, it’s her prior zealotry for a federal ban on plastic straws.

GB News’ George Bunn reports that Harris’ previous performance-art on the artificial “issue” of plastic straw litter is, as some say in political parlance, “no longer operative," explaining that “Speaking at a CNN town hall meeting in 2019, the Vice President said: ‘We do need to ban the plastic straws.’”

Here was that moment:

Ahh, yes. The “WE” of collectivism. That’s the pronoun of forced inclusion, meaning that you are part of HER plans, whether you consent or you don’t.

Adds Bunn:

“However, her campaign has now said the Democratic nominee has changed her mind and ‘doesn’t support banning plastic straws.’"

How kind. And how wise… Clearly, similar to the manner in which many of us suffered under the toweringly arrogant and vile tax parasite Anthony Fauci, her positions reflect the vaunted “science” that simultaneously must remain unquestioned, even as it can be politically malleable, to fit any narrative they desire.

In fact, it seems as if her positions can be so “malleable,” some folks in the Harris camp are implying that Americans just shouldn’t take her seriously.

But her “values” don’t change…

“A Harris campaign official told Axios: ‘She cast the tie-breaking vote on the most consequential legislation to combat climate change and create clean energy jobs in history, and as president, she is going to be focused on expanding on that progress.

She joked even then about how crappy paper straws are and the need to come up with better eco-friendly alternatives.’"

Of course, joking about “crappy paper straws” has no bearing on her stated desire to ban plastic straws. That’s not an honest “out,” since the two positions are not mutually exclusive.

A stuffy politician still can favor punishing people who use or offer plastic straws, while, at the same time, wanting the central government to favor something other than paper straws.

Harris fans might claim that this flimsy excuse for her rhetorical change, this silly attempt to revise history, reflects -- as Bernie Sanders has claimed -- “political pragmatism,” which is another way to say, “stop questioning her flip-flops and walk on, undaunted, to your socialist future.”

But, if it reflects political pragmatism – i.e. a trashing of former promises and pronouncements, depending on whether those promises and pronouncements can give her political power – could there be something we still can learn about the actual issue, regardless of her finger-to-the-wind memory-holing?

To start, one can read about the cleanliness differentials, the convenience differentials, and the potential health downsides of paper straws versus plastic straws, and then one can see the recent Reason piece by Christian Britschgi describing the downward trend in the furor to ban plastic straws.

In that piece, he notes:

“The straw panic, as Reason first reported in 2018, was kicked off by the research of then-9-year-old Milo Cress, who created the viral statistic that Americans use 500 million straws a day. More credible estimates from market analysts put the country's straw usage at less than half that.

The straw bans that Cress' work inspired (but which he did not endorse) never made much sense as a policy.”

There’s a big problem with adopting the belief that there ought to be a “policy” in the first place – but we’ll touch on that in a moment…

“As best we can tell, straws make up a tiny fraction of America's plastic waste, which in turn makes up a tiny share of global plastic waste. Banning them reduced consumer convenience and personal freedom, but produced no actual environmental benefit.

People's frustration with paper alternatives to plastic straws eventually saw support for straw bans subside. By 2020, the policy had become synonymous with liberal overreach. Conservatives and freedom-lovers rallied behind plastic straw use.

The Trump campaign even started selling Trump-branded plastic straws and singled out Harris' support for straw bans in attack ads.”

But this all exists within a collectivist worldview. The entire argument about plastic straws and other waste in oceans or elsewhere embraces the idea that what some people might see is a “crisis” or “problem” must be seen by all as a “crisis” or “problem.”

This, in turn, embraces the idea that some people can overrule others on things that have personal perspectives mixed in.

But people often have different views on resources, waste, and their needs.

For example, in some locales, for some people, bricks and clay are preferable over wood for construction, because the former are more plentiful and use fewer resources than the latter.

Even for individuals, certain raw materials might be more attractive than others at different times. During the fall, a person might want to use nearby trees to build a slaughter-shack in order to handle his freshly-killed game, but, during the winter, he might want to use that wood as fuel for a fire in his home. I do not have the moral authority to tell others how they should value the things they want to use in their lives, and that includes their preferences over straws.

Which lets students of economics see that this Harris flip-flop is not just about her inconsistency, and not just about the lack of any constitutional power to “ban” plastic straws or fine people for using them or making them or selling them.

It’s about economic decision-making, the Golden Rule, and private property.

To amplify this point, I’ll refer to a conversation I had with a student about precisely the “plastic straw problem.”

Basing her argument in favor or banning plastic straws on the original canard promulgated by nine-year-old Milo Cress, she told me the straws were a “problem.”

So, I asked her how she knows that and can use that term, and she replied that the plastic straws were harming ocean life and, along with other refuse, were taking up vast swathes of the ocean.

And I said that, regardless of whether those claims are true, one still cannot know if this is a problem, and she found that shocking. It seemed clear to her that litter such as what we were discussing, litter that might threaten wildlife and the cleanliness of ocean zones, was a problem.

So I asked her to think about the word, "problem," and then think in terms of economics. Because economics is based on personal valuation. There are innumerable “problems” in the world, but each person has limited resources, and limited time, to address them. Each person might have a different perspective on what needs addressing, when it does need it, and to what extent.

Only by recognizing that subjective human beings are defining what is a “problem” can we see that, morally, I do not have the authority to define for someone else what is HIS problem. I might like ocean life and think that a certain level of pollution is a disaster, while another person might put less importance on the ocean space and want to have clean drinking straws to use in hospitals…

I asked her to consider what markets allow us to do. They allow each of us to exercise our own preferences and show those preferences in our purchases. The price information we express is mixed with what other people express, and all of it allows others to adjust their behavior.

Related: Dishonest Colbert Claims Only Criticism Of Harris Is She's Anti-Plastic Straws

But if private property rights over land and water, and private property responsibilities regarding trash disposal, are negated by government, that system breaks down.

Because most trash is handled by collectivist systems called cities or towns, few of us actually sees a real price-point attached to getting rid of our refuse. In turn, those collectivist systems often discard that mass of collective trash into oceans, which governments have prevented from being split into areas of private ownership.

And since PEOPLE are the only ones who can adjudge what they personally think is a problem that takes precedent over other problems, this collectivism prevents anyone from rightfully saying that the ocean litter is a problem.

If human beings were allowed to make claims over sections of the ocean, they could make claims over others polluting those areas. Different owners might allow trash to be dumped in their areas, but if that harmed wildlife or habitat owned by neighbors, they would be liable. As a result, we would see actual property owners able to make claims, and we could see fewer pollution “problems” because there would be a disincentive to harm the oceans.

Because of collectivism on the collection end and a lack of private property claims on the possible receiving ends, none of us really knows how much it costs to discard our trash, be that trash filled with plastic straws or other items.

Thus, all of the blather about plastic, paper, or other refuse being a “problem,” and all the collectivist desire to “solve” the problem with a one-size-fits-all edict the likes of which Harris once pushed...

They don’t address any problem, because no one has been allowed to properly define "problem" or take on the personal responsibility for it.

That's the lesson of collectivism, in a nutshell. It never works, despite being clothed in a lot of warm and fuzzy terms like “we” – terms that mask the gangland aggression, terms that negate personal valuation, property claims, and responsibility.

It's doubtful that Harris ever will explore these facts. Instead, she will cackle and claim your life and preferences are to be subsumed, negated, and vilified, and everything she and many other politicians says will be dependent on polls and attempts to win political competitions.

Talk about trashy.