Strike-The-Root.com | On June 22nd, 2009 the city “workers” of Toronto , Ontario went on strike. Since then, the trash has been accumulating and the city reportedly is beginning to stink! After centuries of man’s need to control individuals that they group into packs, society still insists on the draconian method of force and subsidizing unproductive institutions in order to solve economic or social problems – solutions that do not solve the problems and cause greater social and economic problems in return.
The citizens of Toronto consistently have their wages plundered by men with fine hats whose self-legitimized claim to serving the public is actually organized like the mafia or some other organized gang. The gang of government servants has its own dress code, gang signs – which are often presented as authority-granting seals – and they even have their own territories. Gang territories, demarcated under the auspices of jurisdictions, are strictly enforced by fear of reprisal from competing gangs or by an agreement of mutual benefit derived from their continuation of the existing jurisdictional cartel. The Federal gang is the largest, most extortive and ruthless of all gangs. If any other gang would dare to overstep its boundaries and meddle in the affairs of the Federal gangs’ jurisdiction, there would be a battle over “turf”!
The gang that dominates Toronto , that peace-loving city of Ontario , is having some troubles with a sect of its members–the Solid Waste Management Services gang, a.k.a. the trash collectors. Solid Waste Management’s members have been conspiring with another Torontonian gang, the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), and they want to muscle in on some of booty that the Toronto Municipal gang has been plundering from public. The two sects struck a deal: Solid Waste Management agreed to refuse to collect the public’s trash, and in exchange CUPE will muscle Toronto Municipal for some more of the public’s money – not themselves with the laws of supply and demand when it comes to pricing the value of the labor itself. The money will be divvied up between Waste Management and CUPE. The worst thing about this inter-gang uprising is that the community members are the real victims. Eventually Toronto Municipal will come to a truce with Waste Management and CUPE, by way of some sort of concession, which will of course be paid for by more extortion in the form of higher taxes levied against the community at large. In the meantime, Torontonians also suffer from mounds of stinky trash piling up, and no choice but to stick with the gang-controlled monopoly. They unfortunately have to pay taxes for services they are not receiving and will undoubtedly not be reimbursed their money.
At what point will people finally understand that government monopolies are the worst gangs to handle serving anything to the public and that government monopolies combined with union warfare literally Stinks! It would be nearly, if not completely impossible, to find a private company that would violently refuse to take your money in order to serve you. On the contrary, private companies would even compete to serve you. Consider the above situation in the context of a free market where companies would compete for your business.
While government-controlled monopolies are a disincentive to innovation, companies in the market would be continually incentivized through competition to serve as many customers as possible. The only way to win customers in the market is by satisfying the customers’ particular needs, for example, price, quality, convenience, etc. If customers become dissatisfied with a particular company, they will search for a company that better fits their needs. If enough customers become dissatisfied and switch to another company for the goods or services that they need, then the company will have to change to win back customer confidence, or the company will have to end its operations. Even in this case, the customer benefits.
When a company goes out of business, its assets are liquidated in order to pay off any outstanding obligations; in the case that a company has no outstanding obligations, any positive gain on asset sales will likely be distributed among the company’s owners. When a company goes out of business, the former customers then patronize the remaining companies, or any new companies that may have entered the market due to the increase in demand. The liquidated assets are acquired by companies to be put to use. These assets are obviously cheaper for companies to buy up since the expediency of liquidation often places companies in a situation where time is more valuable than any higher gains that may be made bartering in the market. This forms an incentive for companies to buy the assets and expand operations with the expected intention of winning more customers. Democracy wins in the marketplace; the citizens have spoken, and companies responded to their demands.
In Toronto , this is not what is happening. The Toronto Municipality holds a monopoly that is subsidized and where true prices to the customer are muddled beneath the bureaucratic quagmire of municipal budgets, resource allocation departments, and the like. Customers never know how much it costs them individually for the specific service of trash collection, and they also are unaware of the unseen options that they do not have because of the municipal monopoly. Companies are simply not allowed to compete for their business – this is gang turf! If one individual produces a minimal amount of trash, are they charged the same amount as an entire family? What about the individual that has a week, where they put no trash out to be collected – should they have to pay for a service they did not utilize on that particular week? Surely there is no defense of the government monopoly in this instance, and it cannot be conceived as being more efficient than the market’s handling would be. Read More
