Conservatives are sometimes accused of being anti-government per se. The Republican party is not full of anarchists, even of the Rothbardian variety.
But if you would like to know why some of us still recoil in horror at the words “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” consider this very interesting report from Winnie Hu of the New York Times. The short version: Residents of Harlem complained about overflowing trash cans, and the powers that be in New York City decided that the problem was the unauthorized dumping of commercial garbage into said public trash cans. So the city thought hard on that problem and took away the trash cans entirely. It took away hundreds in Harlem and more than 1,000 in the city at large.
Harlem residents are, as you might expect, not happy about that.
The city claims that the sidewalks are cleaner now than before the trash cans were removed. And here is a nice illustration of how government thinks: The evidence for that claim of cleaner sidewalks is the fact that fewer citations have been written to property owners for dirty sidewalks. It could be that the sidewalks are cleaner, or it could be that the city is just writing fewer citations, perhaps in an effort to juke some stats in order to claim that the sidewalks are cleaner. (For comparison, some cities have seen declines in the number of DUI citations they write after — no surprise — diverting resources away from DUI enforcement to other priorities. There were probably just as many drunks on the road, but fewer of them were caught.) Even if the city is being entirely honest there, it is not the case that fewer citations necessarily mean fewer violations.
I know that I repeat myself on this subject, but: Always keep in mind that law-enforcement personnel (broadly defined here to include the people who write citations for litter violations) will generally embrace the enforcement strategy that requires the least work. That’s why practically all of our gun-control efforts are focused on federally licensed firearms dealers and the people who do business with them. They have fixed addresses, regular business hours, and detailed records — and criminals don’t. It would have been a lot of work to figure out which commercial establishments were misusing those public trash cans. It’s far easier just to remove them and declare the problem solved.