ecoRI News reports that some larger chain stores in Barrington are reacting to the town’s ban on disposable plastic shopping bags by searching for the line at which bags are no longer considered disposable:

CVS and Shaw’s are promoting their thicker plastic bags as reusable. Shaw’s currently offers free paper bags and charges 10 cents apiece for the plastic bags. CVS stopped using paper bags altogether and this year shifted to free plastic bags.

Town Council vice president Kate Weymouth claims the thicker checkout bags defy the intent, if not the letter of the ordinance. In an e-mail to supporters of the ban, Weymouth wrote that the town’s ordinance relied on boiler-plate language from other bans across the country.

She wrote that the oil, gas and plastic industries fear losing revenue from the bans, so “they have legally worked around the language of these bans, and in ours specifically, by producing a thicker ply plastic, sticking handles to the top and stamping them with the word ‘reusable.’”

Well, good for them.  If only do-gooder progressives would start learning how incentives work.  Somewhere, in Barrington, a family that would otherwise drive its station wagon home full of thin plastic bags is now driving their SUV home filled with thicker plastic bags.

The council vice president’s response is instructive.  Inasmuch as they are characterized by their faith in government, progressives have a strange reverence for the government’s decrees (at least when those decrees align with their ideology).  The biggest incentive that they may be missing, though, is the incentive to stop taking the law seriously when it becomes too meddling and dictated.

The other day, I described two understandings of government and democracy: one seeing government as a means of relieving citizens of the need to build their lives around protection of their own rights (especially through violence), and the other seeing democracy as a means of making people feel like they have both buy-in and a means of acting peacefully to change the regime when they disagree.  (Digression: Arguably, these were jointly benefits of representative democracy, once, but with the expansion of government and the deterioration of politicians’ willingness to abide by their own laws, the principles are separating.)

The question that Ms. Weymouth should consider is why these companies — or anybody, at this point, really — should care one bit about “the intent” or the spirit of the law.  They don’t feel represented in the government, and they feel the direct burden of its decrees while doubting that the intent will have a real, positive effect on outcomes.

I’ve said it before:  We’ve reached the point, in this country, that one complies with the law simply to stay out of jail, not because the law deserves our respect.

The government’s war on children’s lemonade stands has been the subject of much mockery on the right for years, but here’s a new one:

You may have seen one of these little bird house turned mini-libraries in your neighborhood. They’re a lovely idea. Simple, no fuss, and quite fun. Donate a book, borrow a book. Nothing to sign, no due date, no late fees, just common courtesy.

Conor Freidersdorf of The Atlantic explored the ridiculous trend of “shutting down” unregulated community book sharing.

At the first stop, of course, this is a story of excessive government, but the Legal Insurrection post linked above brings out a key consideration that’s often overlooked: “The Leawood City Council said it had received a couple of complaints about Spencer Collins’ Little Free Library.”  Not only do people contribute to the creation of invasive zoning laws, but they exercise them, too.

What our current approach to government does, in this country, is to allow the curmudgeons to project their old remonstrance for the kids “to get off of my lawn” across the street, allowing them to tell them to get off of their own lawns.  To be clear, people should have a right to develop communities that are free of just about anything they find offensive.  It’s safe to say, however, that the rest of us have become too tangled up in our political philosophies to stop the curmudgeons from giving themselves far too much power.

We need to push back, even if it means getting into ridiculously heated battles over silly matters in local government.

As Robert Samuelson describes him in a Washington Post essay, Mancur Olson should be made the official patron economist of Rhode Island, or something:

Although an economist, Olson revolutionized thinking about the political power of interest groups. Until Olson, conventional wisdom held that large groups were more powerful than small groups in pursuing their self-interest — say, a government subsidy, tax preference or a protective tariff. Bigness conveyed power.

Just the opposite, Olson said in his 1965 book “The Logic of Collective Action.” With so many people in the large group, the benefits of collective action were often spread so thinly that no individual had much of an incentive to become politically active. The tendency was to “let George do it,” but George had no incentive either. By contrast, the members of smaller groups often could see the benefits of their collective action directly. They were motivated to organize and to pursue their self-interest aggressively.

Here’s an example: A company and its workers lobby for import protection, which saves jobs and raises prices and profits. But consumers — who pay the higher prices — don’t create a counter-lobby, because it’s too much trouble and the higher prices are diluted among many individual consumers. Gains are concentrated, losses dispersed.

Around here, one can see this dynamic at both the state and local levels.  The special interests have much more incentive to become active.  So conspicuous is this, at the local level, that those who benefit disproportionately from the higher taxes find it selfish when those who do not push back on excesses.  The doubling of a town’s tax levy over a decade is just a few thousand dollars per year to the average taxpayer, but it’s $30 million in brand new elementary schools to teachers, administrators, and parents, as happened not long ago in Tiverton.

Of course, if the effort required of the large group (Samuelson’s term) is relatively minor, and if a small, motivated team can offer the people an option, the large group can still win.  However, the special interests will do their best to utterly destroy that team, working especially hard to make sure that few see them as motivated out of a sense of fairness and justice.  Rather, there must be some explanation of greed or personal corruption.  They must be bad, evil people.

It’s quite an education to be on the receiving end of that dynamic.  In some local circles, for example, I’m the symbol of all politically empowered greed in the world because I work to give people a substantive option when it comes to their tax bills, which causes problems for those who want to take money away from their neighbors by force and spend it on things that benefit themselves.

We’ve reached the point, in other words, that the special interest advantage has become a sense of entitlement.  That attitude, if not stopped, will lead inexorably to tyranny as entitlement transitions into a sense of a right of ownership.