Reblogged:Leftists Recycle Corporate Go-Alongs

[Gus Van Horn blog]

News bulletin to American corporations: You never got (nor ever will get) credit for going along with virtue signaling.

The latest case in point? Recycling.

Now, picture this with three times the bins, a stop watch, and an air horn. (Image by Ingo Hamm, via Unsplash, license.)

The New York Times has just come out with a slanted, disingenuous opinion video titled, "The Great Recycling Con." Its subtitle says just about all you need to hear: "The greatest trick corporations ever played was making us think we could recycle their products." But do go ahead and view the video, because it is short -- and shows how brazen that assertion is with its own reporting. (Chutzpah? Stupidity? Who cares?) Said reporting reveals how confusing government regulations are about labeling items as recyclable.

This is not to let corporations entirely off the hook -- See below. -- but the very idea of focusing a substantial amount of blame onto corporations for the futility of recycling is ridiculous, in light of the incessant media drumbeat, "activist" hectoring, and government jawboning for same over the past several decades. The role the corporations do have to play is neither small nor entirely innocent, but it is understandable: With the government on the side of recycling and most people being both misinformed and on the moral defensive against this wasteful practice, many companies understandably decided to "go along to get along," much as American railways did back in the 1800's, when they paid monetary bribes to remain viable:

[W]hat could the railroads do, except try to "own whole legislatures," if these legislatures held the power of life or death over them? What could the railroads do, except resort to bribery, if they wished to exist at all? Who was to blame and who was "corrupt"--the businessmen who had to pay "protection money" for the right to remain in business--or the politicians who held the power to sell that right?

But look what happened: It was the railroads who got the blame for playing a game they didn't create. And now, American companies are getting the same treatment after their attempts to morally bribe environmentalists by racing out to label everything as recyclable -- and even though they followed the very laws the environmentalists put on the books.

The corporations thought they were buying goodwill with these labels, but all they got was blame at a later time -- recycled from the very fact that they used the labels at all.

Perhaps, one day, business leaders will learn that a better plan is to oppose government regulation as the immoral ordering-around that it actually is. In the meantime, let me point out another video that deserves even wider circulation than that made by the New York Times: Pen and Teller's demolition of recycling -- which is hosted by BitChute -- from their series, Bullshit. They make many of the same arguments I made in a piece on recycling, but in more entertaining form. My favorite part is when they time people on a patently absurd nine bin system -- that they all profess to support -- and blow air horns when they make mistakes.

Doing the same thing during the New York Times video would make it practically impossible to follow.

-- CAV

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