Gas-powered leaf blowers are super annoying. I recently woke up 7:30 one beautiful Saturday morning to the NASCAR-like grinding of a leaf blower. My initial reaction was to confront my neighbor for working on his lawn during my prime snooze time, but it turned out is was my gardener cleaning up my lawn!
Gas blowers are a perfect example of economic externalities. An externality is consumption of a resource outside of market allocations. Look around you and you’ll see them everywhere. If you’re driving a traditional internal combustion engine, you’re not paying for the air you consume and later pollute. If you’re operating a gas blower, you are consuming air you’re not paying for, and your noise is impinging on a neighbor’s quality of life. Those resources need to be internalized into the cost of operating the blower. Doing so forces equipment owners to adjust their behavior so that the free market does what it does best: deliver goods and services to the largest number of people at the lowest cost.
One way to internalize the gas blowers’ external costs is to levy a fee for using them. Just as we pay annual registration fees for our vehicles, so we should pay “resource consumption” fees for the gas blowers. The amount of the fee is commensurate with the resources consumed. How much would you be willing to take from a neighbor so she can power on her gas blower during autumn cleanup? Fifty, one hundred dollars? Multiply that by the large number of neighbors affected by commercial gardeners, and the fee would be rather high, and no doubt would force the blower operators to look for other solutions that promote economic benefits for everyone.
Instead of internalizing costs, our county government—typical of most governments—prefers to use the mandate-and-punishment view of addressing a behavior it doesn’t particularly like. Starting around April 2024, gasoline-powered leaf blowers will be prohibited to sell in Montgomery County, and six months later prohibited to use. If you’re caught using one, you are slapped with a Class A violation. In the county government’s eyes, you’re a criminal.
If the county government and environmentalists were truly concerned about the physical and mental health effects of leaf blowers, they would also be concerned about physical and mental health effects caused by the forced exile they impose on us to find work. Below is a heartbreaking image taken on the Beltway shortly after the leaf-blower bill was enacted, highlighting only four of the Maryland license plates traveling northward from Tyson’s after a day’s work.
Commuting is as much a source of pollution as gas blowers, arguably more. Why isn’t this behavior criminalized? What is being done to reduce commute times and distances? Nothing.
The demoralized and depopulated police force, caused by a few grandstanding politicians and their supporters, is resulting in significant economic loss. We need to internalize the costs incurred by residents, insurance companies, and retailers for the increased crime. That will never happen.
My conclusion is that the gas blower ban is not about pollution, health, or the residents’ well being. It’s about selective control and punishment. The selective ban is proof that we don’t have a government serving the people, we have a government serving a few special interests pursuing a few special agendas. None of this is news to Clean Slate’s readers.
