&gt;  Would you describe vandalism as a &quot;market failure&quot;? How about shoplifting? If not, why are they a different problem from littering?<p>In the great scheme of things, yes. Although the definition kinda gets silly and I see your point. At the end of the day, you cannot trust the &quot;free market&quot; to solve vandalism or shoplifting.<p>You need to create a justice system, hire cops, and then use these cops to persecute vandals or other criminals. Under a free market devoid of crimefighting units, vandals and shoplifters will cause prices to rise (as stores increase prices to offset losses). IE: market failure. Otherwise innocent people are forced to pay for the crimes of others.<p>The creation of a police force requires innocent citizens to pay taxes for the police force as well. And the state will require the use of force to extort the money from these innocent citizens. So in the great scheme of things, the whole setup is extremely anti-market and demonstrates how much of a market failure the whole crime system is.<p>So from the perspective of &quot;we can&#x27;t trust only the free market to solve this problem&quot;, yes, Vandalism and Shoplifting require more than just straight capitalism to solve.<p>Most problems can be solved with capitalism btw. Which is why I&#x27;m generally a conservative on issues. But I educate myself on the failures of the free market so that I understand when we need to look at other solutions.<p>I&#x27;m mostly happy with the police system we have by the way. It seems like the &quot;least bad&quot;. I see many issues, but I can&#x27;t figure out a way to make the system better. And when I travel the world and look at other country&#x27;s police systems, I&#x27;d much rather have the American system.<p>&gt; If there is a problem with plastic bag litter, it is the fault of the litterers, which is a subset of all users of plastic bags. Shifting what should be the liability of the polluters onto the entire population of plastic bag users doesn&#x27;t right any wrong--in my view the wrong is even greater.<p>Here&#x27;s the primary difference: plastic bag pollution occurs even if you are 100% compliant with the law.<p>Plastic bags get thrown away into a dump, or otherwise discarded by some means. Then they degrade into micro-particles (since there&#x27;s very few bacteria that can actually break down the bag), and then you start running into long-term pollution problems.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plastic_pollution#Microdebris" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Plastic_pollution#Microdebris</a><p>Someone needs to pay for this. And naturally, making the users of the bags pay for this seems like the most fair solution.