Tucker Talks Trash

This pre-school boy would stand at the curb on the Base and watch the men and their vehicles gathering the garbage every family created. They would lift and carry a metal can full of trash, tump it into the truck, return the empty can to it's home and keep doing this all day as the truck moved forward on it's route. Every so often the driver would stop and wait while the men on the ground pushed a lever so that a hydraulically powered ram would almost gently squeeze the trash backwards into the bowels of the truck or sweep it forward from the hopper on the rear of the truck.


These "garbage men" would open ours and the neighbor's side gates and walk into  back yards to fetch the full cans.  Some neighbors would take the cans to the edge of their front lawns.  Eventually a coating of filth and the smell would summon the Master Sergeant who would order my older brothers to scrub - one of the "Spend an hour scrubbing garbage can" details.

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....living in sanitary conditions and staying alive turns out to be something of a priority for people. This is why the largest advances in garbage collection came about during the Industrial Revolution.

Municipalized Trash: It's Uncivilized

Mises Daily by Jeffrey A. Tucker | Posted on 9/14/2009 12:00:00 AM

http://mises.org/story/3698