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You’ve identified the real problem. This person’s preferences (and yours and mine) are guided by externalities being priced poorly.

If the consumer was responsible for the real cost of disposal and someone said “I don’t care about repairing it” then it wouldn’t be selfish at all.

But it’s extremely hard to do that. Because if you price proper disposal higher you’ll just get improperly disposed stuff.

A tax on the products to account for this is highly regressive. It’s a complicated muddle.





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