November 25, 2025

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As insane and moronic as the behavior of elected officials on the national level seems to be, true insanity is usually most visible at the local level.

But it's hard to write about crazy local governments because there are thousands of local governments in America and they're all crazy in their own ways.

We get huge national coverage of New York and Seattle electing openly socialist mayors, who have campaigned like student body president candidates: Free ice cream at lunch, soda pop in the drinking fountains, all homework done by AI instead of your parents!

So in my effort to talk about local insanity, I'm not going to agitate about partisan implications ("Is this what the Democrat Party is coming to?"), and instead I'm just going to talk about not caring about the desires of the citizens.

I'm going to give you two examples of citizen-hatred by the local government in the place where I have lived since 1983: Greensboro, North Carolina. This has nothing to do with Greensboro being in the American South. The stupidity I'm going to talk about is not partisan, and it's not regional. It's just the nonsense that goes on in various meetings and offices in the government buildings.

1. Disposal of autumn leaves

When I lived in Mesa, Arizona, autumn leaves weren't a big problem. I'm not sure we even owned a rake. I never had to rake leaves when I lived in Santa Clara, California, and raking the leaves off our property in Orem, Utah took about twenty minutes.

But in Greensboro, North Carolina, you could lose crawling children in the leaves on the lawn before you rake them into piles. There's alotta leaves.

For years, the city maintained a fleet of leaf-sucking trucks. Citizens rake the leaves into piles at the curb and then make sure their pets and children aren't asleep in those piles when the leaf-suckers come by. Problem solved.

Instead of starting neighborhood-destroying fires by burning leaves in our yards, we could have our leaf litter disposed of by the city. Our tax dollars at work. That was a good system.

But now, some government morons (I apologize to actual morons, who were never consulted about this issue) decided that it was more "eco-friendly" to shift away from leaf-sucking to disposing of leaves in bags.

Other yard waste throughout the year used to have to be collected in clear plastic bags, so it could all be verified to be yard waste. (No banana peels or peach pits allowed, unless you had a banana bush or peach tree in your yard.)

Then they decided that this was wasteful. What do you do with all the plastic bags after you've emptied them into the communal compost heap?

So now we are required to use special yard-waste bins right alongside our recycling bins and household waste bins, and roll them out to the street for collection.

In order to maximize inconvenience, we are not allowed to roll these conveyances to the curb earlier than six p.m. on the night before collection, and we have to bring back our empties before some arbitrary time the next day. These times are carefully selected to make sure that the maximum number of citizens are unable to comply.

It is especially desirable to require citizens to do their can-to-curb-and-back-again bin-rolling in the cold and the dark, and, if possible, in their pajamas or bathrobes.

So now, instead of sending out the leaf-sucking trucks, somebody decided we should bag up our leaves and leave them at the curb for collection.

At first, we could use huge plastic bags. It's maddeningly, stupidly difficult to force leaves into these bags. There are no useful tools available for the task. Invariably, you ended up with a long, tedious two-person job: one person to hold the bag open while the other person picks up the leaves by hand and stuffs them into the bag, cramming them down so the bag holds as much as possible.

No explanation about why the leaf-sucking trucks were no longer a viable choice.

Now the plastic bags have also been banned. Your leaves will only be picked up now by the city if they are stuffed into paper bags with openings that are far smaller than the plastic bags were. So again, a job that has to be done by hand. Your leaf-blower is not going to blow the leaves into the paper bags.

This process steals hours and hours of citizen time. I'd like to offer you a mathematical-sounding number of citizen hours, but I know my calculations would be complete guesswork and/or fakery, and you would know it, too. But we also know that time spent stuffing our yard leaves into twenty or thirty tall paper bags per home is a colossal waste of our time.

And why? What happened to the trucks? If a child or a pet had ever been sucked up and mulched, I would have heard about it. So this change was not caused by a fatal accident, which is what it usually takes to get a traffic light at a dangerous intersection.

And it definitely wasn't caused by a desire to stop gas-guzzling leaf-sucker trucks off the city streets every autumn. We know this because the city's leaf-suckers were sold to a private company, which, for a fee, will come to your house and suck up the leaves from a pile at your curb -- just like the city used to do.

So the city no longer runs the leaf-sucking trucks, but a private company will still do it. However, the city is still sending around trucks with wage-earning human workers who pick up the leaf bags and carry them away.

Taxpayers are thus paying for a public leaf removal system, taxpayers are also paying for paper bags, and the ones who reject the paper-bag system can also pay a fee to have the same old leaf-sucking trucks show up and hose the leaves from piles at the curb.

I have no knowledge of the details of the city services and the private leaf-sucking operation. I don't know if anybody got a kickback for allocating the city's old trucks to the private company. I'd rather assume that everybody involved was scrupulously honest and nobody profited financially from any step in the process.

No, I ascribe every one of these decisions to a combination of stupidity, false beliefs about what is harmful to the environment, and a deep hatred of taxpaying citizens, along with a belief that requiring hours of meaningless backbreaking labor to do a job that leaf-sucking trucks did far more easily "costs the city nothing."

When you require citizens to do needless, meaningless labor to comply with government mandates, it does not "cost the city nothing." Those taxpaying citizens are the city, along with the non-tax-paying citizens.

And guess what? Requiring citizens to perform pointless labor and make pointless purchases according to a government-determined schedule is not "free."

Forced labor is not free: The cost is paid by the laborer and it's paid in labor.

Every bag of leaves at the curb is the result of stupid decisions by government employees, elected or un-, who have no respect for the time and physical condition of the citizenry.

It is quite likely that some ecologically minded government wight declared that this or that decision was "eco-friendly," but in fact they had no reliable information to prove those assertions. All we actually know about rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is that they improve the fertility of plant life all over the planet.

So far, industrial human civilization has only begun to restore the levels of carbon dioxide that once upon a time made this planet verdant and productive of far more biomass than the planet now sustains.

Therefore, taking the leaf-sucking trucks out of city service removes the benefit of restoring atmospheric carbon to its natural levels. Except that the trucks are still running. Plus the trucks that pick up the paper bags.

2. No recycling of glass

Greensboro maintains a triple system of waste removal. Household waste is taken to landfills. Recyclable waste is taken to recycling centers to be, you guessed it, recycled. And yard waste is, I imagine, taken to a vast compost heap where the heat of decomposition is probably going to start a huge fire someday, returning all the carbon back to the atmosphere whence it came in the first place.

Not everything can be recycled. I think of four categories of recyclables:

. Glass. Nothing is more recyclable than glass. Nothing lasts longer in landfills than glass. It isn't biodegradable. But it can be melted down and remade into -- wait for it -- new glass.

. Aluminum. It is almost as recyclable as glass. Like glass, when it is melted down and reused, it is indistinguishable from the original.

. Paper. We are told that "corrugated recycles." When you break down your Amazon boxes and flatten them, they can be taken back and repulped into usable corrugated cardboard. Newspapers and other pulp papers can also be repulped and made into newspapers and pulp page. And all other papers can be burnt and returned into atmospheric carbon, where they nurture the copious growth of fast-growing trees which can be turned into new paper.

. Plastic. Almost every bit of plastic that we buy in the form of packaging for food, toys, and electronics has a recycling number on it somewhere. The number reflects the type of plastic, which tells recyclers how to treat it to put it back into use. Because, unlike glass and aluminum, plastics are very different from each other and have to be treated differently. (Or they can all be burnt and returned to atmospheric carbon, see Paper, above.)

Since we are good citizens in favor of avoiding waste, we have always complied scrupulously with recycling requirements. If the bin says "paper," we only put paper in it. If it says "glass," then that is where we put our empty bottles.

And we appreciate the fact that Greensboro's waste management policies allow for recycling, so that valuable resources are put back into use.

In our family, we grew up with the old slogans from the Depression -- and from our Mormon pioneer heritage, back when our ancestors lived in the Utah desert, far from industrial centers back east. Here's the main one:

Use it up,
Wear it out,
Make it do, or
Do without.

That's why as a kid I only rarely got new bluejeans. Instead, I got jeans with iron-on patches, jeans which were rolled up at the cuff until I was tall enough to unroll them, and then jeans that were too short to come anywhere near the tops of my shoes. Because, you know, "wear it out, make it do."

By not having to buy new bluejeans every year for every one of the six children in my family, my parents could spend their money on luxuries like food and gas and mortgage payments. Oh, and taxes.

So the spirit of recycling was instilled in me from earliest childhood. Back in the 1950s, when diapers were made of cloth, and parents knelt at the toilet to rinse those diapers before putting them in the washing machine. And those diapers were hung out on a line to dry, because we didn't waste money on foolishness like clothes-driers.

Until we could finally afford clothes driers.

And then, by the time my wife and I started having kids, we found that using disposable paper diapers was far, far better and cleaner than the cloth diapers, and didn't require us to get our hands into poopy toilet water, and never never caused our babies to cry because of getting stuck with a diaper pin.

Still, we hung onto the ethos of "use it up, wear it out." I practically have to beg my wife to buy new clothing for herself. In fact, before we married, she made most of her clothing. That's right, that beautiful young woman used to walk all over our college campus wearing clothing that she sewed herself.

And she still makes and repairs Halloween costumes for our grandchildren, which are often recycled costumes that she made for our children. And those costumes are passed down from one child to the next, as they move into the right size range.

I mean, we are serious about recycling and wasting nothing, if we can help it.

And we thought the city government of Greensboro had the same attitude toward recycling.

But no. Somewhere along the way, the official morons of city government decision-making got really confused. Because they sold our city's recyclables to recycling companies, they got the idea that the main purpose of recycling was to make money.

Now, the recycling companies have to make money to stay in business. So they can't pay more for their raw materials (i.e., our household recyclables) than they can make by reselling the recycled materials.

So in the past few years, they have revised the rules for recycling several times. First, they stopped paying attention to those recycling numbers on our plastic waste. The new rule was: If the plastic was a bottle, which was narrower at the neck than at the base, it could be put in our recycling bin. But any other kind of plastic should go into our landfill-bound trash.

That's a lot of plastic packaging that now goes into our landfills. Yet almost all of it can be recycled. It just costs more to collect and sort it than it brings back in revenue. So we stopped recycling most of our plastic because we lost money on it.

Wait a minute. Have we been doing all this recycling to make money?

I wouldn't have wasted two seconds a month on recycling if the only purpose was to make money for city government. My purpose was to avoid wasting resources that could be reused.

Otherwise, garbage is garbage, and the city's primary job is to carry that garbage away from my house and neighborhood so we don't become archaeological treasure troves, like so many ancient and medieval cities, with huge areas of household waste for future graduate students to sift through.

What will happen when some slackbrained city employee decides that it will only accept household sewage if it is profitable to sell it to make fertilizer? The moment its resale value falls below the cost of collecting it, our sewers will all be allowed to back up into our bathtubs, unless we hire sewage collectors to carry away our toilet deposits.

No. We pay taxes (or fees) to maintain city sewage services in order to carry the stuff away from our houses into a safe place where it will not contaminate anybody's water supply, thus preventing cholera and relocating disgusting stenches.

Not only do our recycling regulations now forbid putting most plastic types into the recycling bins, but also we have been informed that our recycling system will no longer accept glass of any kind.

"What!" I screamed upon learning of this regulation. The longest-enduring manmade substance, which never corrodes or gets absorbed into the environment, and which can be melted down and reused infinitely -- that is not to be recycled? Why?

Because it is no longer profitable to recycle glass in Greensboro.

But profit was never the public purpose of recycling. When we want to profit from items we don't wish to own anymore, we hold yard sales. On which we do not charge sales tax and do not report our income on our taxes. That's how we recycle for profit, and it's not the government's business at any point.

But tossing our empty bottles into a bin, we did that so that our landfills would not be replete with everlasting bottles or broken bottle-sherds, like that ancient potsherds that bedevil the lives of archaeological interns working in the hot sun at ancient village and city sites.

If our city waste removal system is only going to recycle items that are profitable, I say, scwew 'em. Either recycle everything that can be recycled, even items that cost more to collect than we get back from selling them, or stop pretending that we have a genuine recycling program at all.

Look, I know that these stupidities of our local government aren't crimes, when weighed on a global scale. But even when stupidity is minor, it's still stupid. And when we have to wait till six p.m. to drag our garbage bins to the street even though it will be cold and dark by then, and when we have to spend hours bagging our leaves by hand in order for or tax-paid city services to carry them away, then I, for one, want to fire every one of the city employees involved in making those decisions.

I know those idiotic decisions always have reasons. I've never met a stupid person whose stupid actions didn't have a reason.

I just wish that city governments would stop to think: How much does the inconvenience this will cause our citizens weigh on the scale compared with the cost of leaving them the freedom to decide when to take their garbage bins to the street.

After all, if somebody is leaving their bins at the curb all week, instead of the night before collection days, the neighborhood will punish them by dropping all the poop their dogs produce on their daily walks into those bins.

And those who think that running leaf-sucking trucks is causing too much "pollution" in the form of life-giving carbon dioxide, please remember that you're picking up the bags of leaves in trucks, too. And the bags are made from cut-down trees, not recycled leaves.

Plus, our time is as valuable as yours. (And maybe you could realize that you don't have either the right or a reason to require us to perform needless manual labor at your command.)

The city might as well pass ordinances forbidding the trees to let their leaves die back and fall to the ground just before winter. Think how much money and repetitive labor that would save.

Oh, wait. No! The city just announced they're going to save the expense of leaf removal by cutting down all the trees within the city limits.

I know an even more drastic yet effective environmental action. Let the city forbid anybody to sleep overnight in any building inside the city limits. With zero citizens in the city, water, sewage, and waste removal costs will drop to zero.

But so will revenue to pay the salaries and wages of city employees.

Never mind.