&gt;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>See my above response. Markets do deal with vandalism and shoplifting, probably better than the police.<p>&gt;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>&gt;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>Private police forces do exist. There are currently examples of this in Detroit where the public police is defunct. As for the court system, the closest thing I can think of in the private sector would be arbitration. There are theories out there of how the market might operate an entire court system. Just because these private systems are not more prevalent due to government monopolies does not denote a market failure.<p>&gt;Here&#x27;s the primary difference: plastic bag pollution occurs even if you are 100% compliant with the law.<p>&gt;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>If the dump is incurring a cost by putting plastic bags into its landfill, than it behooves the dump to recuperate those costs from those consuming and throwing away those bags. If the dump&#x27;s consumption of plastic bags is causing pollution to neighboring properties than the dump is liable.<p>This can all be handled with the market. No bans, and no taxes necessary.