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Did you ever change the oil in your own car?

What did you do with the oil 30 40 or 50 years ago? The responsible thing back then was to have a 55 gallon or 33 gallon drum in your garage, and accumulate your used oil until you had enough that a commercial recycler would accept it. Obviously, there would be issues with having that amount of oil in a residence, but that was the responsible thing to do at the time.

Nobody did that of course. Used motor oil was poured down the drain, put in the trash, or just poured on the ground somewhere. That's what my grandparents generation did. That's what my father's generation did. Even I did it when I was a kid. Even after all that was obviously illegal (right around when I was a teen), it continued because there was no practical way for a consumer to dispose of small amounts of oil, and the responsible way to deal with it had it's own set of problems. When I learned what I was doing was polluting, I tried to find some place to take our old oil in vain. Unless we had a drum full of the stuff, nobody wanted to take it even if we paid them.

Now almost nobody improperly disposes of used motor oil. Why? Because just about every auto parts store, and most cities or counties will accept it from consumers in small quantities.

You could say the solution should have been to either stop changing your own oil, or be personally responsible for your old oil, just like you can say the solution is not to smoke or to be personally responsible for your butts.

The reality is, when you make "doing the right thing" easy, you get near 100% compliance. When you make it difficult to impossible, you get almost no compliance.

Pointing this out about motor oil disposal doesn't make me an advocate of polluting the environment. Pointing this out about cigarette butts doesn't make me a proponent of littering. Realizing that human nature is what it is, and that laws and policies should recognize this and work around it is a hallmark of conservatism. The founders didn't pretend we were all angels, they observed human nature and built the Consitution with human nature in mind, wisely realizing that if you either ignore or go against human nature, you are doomed to failure.

Why am I even bothering to have this discussion with you? Because some day, some statist city council person is going to approach you or someone like you and say something like "You know what AnglePark, you pick up a lot of cigarette butts. How about I create department of cigarette butt control, and hire two or three overpaid armed enforcement agents with lifetime pensions? Oh and we'll need a few supervisors paid even more. But you'll have less cigarette butts to pick up. After all, littering is illegal"

And then another level of permanent police state, permanent bureaucracy, and permanent loss of freedom will be layered on top of all the exisiting layers put there for similar reasons, and our taxes will all go up again, never to come down.

I'm hoping that you or someone else reading this will go to that council person and say something like "Shouldn't we eliminate the barriers to smokers responsibly disposing of their cigarette butts before we use the power of the state to fix a situation that didn't exist before - a situation another government agency created? And then, when we've made compliance easy, we can worry about those who won't comply"

Because as night follows day, if we suddenly made it illegal for parts stores to collect used motor oil from consumers, people would start pouring their oil into the environment again, legal or not, responsible or not. And the only thing another enforcement agency that goes against human nature is going to accomplish, is squandering more of our treasure and freedoms while the groundwater still gets polluted by used motor oil.

We have better than 100 years of experience dealing with smokers and accomodating them. Nobody had to force businesses to put ashtrays in, and nobody had to force smokers to use them. Tossing your butts used to make you a paria in the world of smokers. What changed? Government regulation.

7 years ago, we had a smoking room in our building. It had it's own self-contained filtration system and no one outside that room could tell people were smoking inside. Ashtrays were on the walls and everyone used them.

When it was nice weather, smokers went outside where there were ashtrays near the loading dock. Nobody, employee or visitor, tossed their butts on the ground - had they, they would have been ostracized. Now there are cigarette butts all over our parking lot from visitors coming in (I was the last staff person to smoke, and I quit over two years ago), realizing they can't legally walk near the facility )thanks to the signage) with their cigarette, and not having any means to dispose of their butts (thanks to the law). (And in case you haven't noticed, most cars these days don't even have the option of ashtrays if you wanted to special order them - you have to find some sort of half-arsed cupholder-based solution). Cigarette butts are everywhere despite smoking trending down.

Having seen the before and after, it's pretty easy to see the change wasn't caused by a sudden dearth of personal responsibility. People are the same as they've always been. What changed is the recent belief that we could regulate without consequence or consideration of reality.