»In which high taxes fit in to the Algebra

I enjoyed reading this NYT article about declining use of plastic bags, and feel encouraged by the suggestion that a very high tax on the consumption of bags will

The Alegbra of Need, expressed by my friend William S. Burroughs, describes how this works: so long as demand exists for the item, suppliers will find a way to bring it to market. Eliminate the demand, in this case by jacking up the cost suitably high and by providing a reasonably-priced alternative, and hey presto! consumers switch to the alternative. Last year, San Francisco enacted a follow-up piece of legislation that requires large stores to cease using plastic bags; previously, the large stores (the definition is along the lines of how many outlets a particular store has, or how many square feet the store is) needed to provide a "recyling" facility for plastic bags. New York has now taken this same step, and hopefully will move quickly to the second, and discourage the use of plastic bags entirely.

2% of our landfill mass that will stay with us forever; hundreds of millions of carrier bags stuck in trees from Bryant Park to The Siq; a whirling mass of tangled plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean.