The Worst Kind of Conservatism

What's 'Conservative'?

This past year the good people of Quincy, where I live, elected a new, Republican mayor after many years of Democrats at the helm.  

Mayor Moore, a young, energetic man, first came to my attention by going door-to-door to all the homes in his city ward, drumming up support, first for his aldermanic election, and then for his mayoral race.  

This enthusiasm followed him into office, where he advocated transparency and accountability, promising that residents would get a report card on the workings of their government.  This admirable politics was accompanied by a privatizer's zeal, economically speaking, notably the scuttling of a stalled investment in hydro-electric power on the Mississippi river.  A developer had offered to pay the city a large annual sum in exchange for a 40-year lease on two hydro-electric dams.  Moore thought this wasn't government's role and let a $5 million investment, that had hit repeated snags, go.  

I soon thereafter read in the local paper that he had focused his privatizer's attention on the city's trash/recycling budget, and applying the same political philosophy, suggested that private contractors be asked to bid on what had traditionally been done by city workers.

With bids revealed, town hall meetings were held in order to gauge public opinion.  The citizens of Quincy were not happy.  The shock of seeing the flat rate that everybody would be asked to pay, compared to the progressive rate that had effectively been payed (the richer pay more taxes and so, in effect, pay more for pickup) was too much.  There was also the key issue of recycling.  Since Quincy sells garbage bag stickers that must be placed on each trash bag set out for collection (the .50¢ per bag helps defray costs), the tradition had been that those who recycled more paid less than those who threw their aluminum cans out with their broken dishes.  Moore's privatizing would remove this incentive to recycle.

The matter remains unresolved as of this writing, but does expose the difference between real and phony conservatism.  

A true conservative, whether Democrat or Republican, immediately sees that recycling should be encouraged and progressive taxation is preferable to a flat rate.  It's only the 'conservative', more interested in toeing the party line (privatization is always the better answer), that would question the conserving of resources, not to mention asking everyone to pay their fair share in affordable taxes.

The most likely resolution to the issue, among those proposed so far, is to raise the price of trash stickers to either $1.00 or $1.50 a piece to encourage even more recycling (the price has not been raised in over 20 years).  This would make the trash/recycling process solvent.  It would, however, diminish tax progressivity, as pickup would be funded partially or wholly with stickers instead of predominantly with tax revenue.  So, perhaps the $1.00 price for stickers is the answer.