My Take: Think of how your choices affect others, future generations
Years ago, I worked for a major global office furniture company that happened to be based in Grand Rapids. This is how the company wishes to be known at this time — now that it has shipped a goodly amount of its manufacturing south of the Texas border to a series of maquiladoras — but I digress.
When I toiled in the offices of said company, smoking inside the building was still very legal. Yes, that would make me rather old, but it is true. When I told my son this, he couldn’t believe it. Restaurants also had smoking/non-smoking sections. Many of those non-smoking sections were on the opposite side of a low wall over which the smoke wafted. We were perhaps a little naïve?
So the point is, once again? This today is called an economic externality. When I took ECON 101 in West Lafayette some 45 years ago, we called it a diseconomy — someone benefits at the cost of someone else. Smokers “benefited” at the cost of non-smokers.
Someone I know has the responsibility of making sure the grounds of a south side business are clean and tidy. This business is right across the street from a gas station/convenience store. The store obviously sells lots of healthy things like cigarettes, lottery tickets, meat sticks and soft drinks that come in disposable containers. Unfortunately, this packaging ends up on the ground and makes its way, via the prevailing winds, to the other business.
The guy who is responsible for keeping the other property that doesn’t sell these one-time-use consumables ends up picking these things up as they waft over to his fiefdom. His boss ends up paying him to pick up this junk. The business owner also ends up paying for the garbage can that is usually 25% full of these consumables that the other fella sells. Diseconomy, externality. You say po-tay-to, I say po-tah-to.
Which brings us to oil. You pay for gasoline. You may drive a really big, honking SUV and you may drive it a lot and at very high speeds. You pay for the fuel, so you have that right, right? Well, how about the externality, diseconomy factor? Your gas hog emits a goodly amount of hydrocarbons that are awful for the air we all breathe. Not just the air you breathe, but the air others breathe as well.
The air doesn’t just do a Doug Henning and magically, mystically disappear. Those hydrocarbons have a Michael Jordanesque hang time. What we breathe today may be in Canada, India or Iceland in the not-so-distant future. So you get the enjoyment of dirtying said air, but someone else ends up paying the price. Doesn’t sound too equitable to me.
We can and have to do a whole lot better. We have to start thinking of others in other places and those who will follow once we are standing outside St. Peter’s gates. Don’t be selfish. Do we have the right to pursue our own personal, temporal pleasures at the expense of others? To those whom much is given, much is expected, no?
Get right with the creator. Do your grandchildren and their future kids right. Ditch the internal combustion engine and look into cleaner forms of transit. Crunch time is here. No more time to debate or dither!
— Jeff Raywood is a resident of Holland.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: My Take: Think of how your choices affect others, future generations
