Anyone who spends time with me knows me knows how much I despise litter. For as long as I can remember, I have fumed at the sight of trash on sidewalks, beer cans in the gutter, or garbage flung from passing cars. I often pick up litter when I’m walking, and when my kids were young I made them pick it up, too.

My visceral loathing for litterbugs may have something to do with the worst summer job I ever had. For three months, I went out every day with a cleaning crew hired by the Ohio Transportation Department, picking up rubbish and sweeping trash from highway on- and off- ramps. The work was grimy, the trash was gross, and by the end of each day my head ached from breathing smog and exhaust fumes. But what I hated most of all was the selfishness of the people who treated public spaces as their personal dump.

Which is why I’ve been arguing with myself about the Massachusetts bottle bill.

CommonWealth Beacon reported last week on a campaign to expand the state’s bottle-deposit law, which for more than three decades has required consumers to pay a refundable 5-cent deposit on every bottle and can of beer or carbonated soft drink. The assumption was that if customers had an incentive to return empty containers to the store, they would be less likely to toss them in the trash — or on the side of the road. And since no receipt was required to redeem the nickel deposits, anyone willing to collect discarded bottles or cans could earn a reward.

When the law first took effect in 1983, the article notes, it was “hailed as a game-changer.” For a decade or so, the overwhelming majority of bottle deposits were redeemed. But after peaking in 1995, when nearly 90 percent of eligible containers were returned, redemption rates began steadily losing ground. Last year, the bottle return rate hit an all-time low of 33 percent. Of the 10 states that have a bottle bill, Massachusetts has by far the lowest redemption rate.

The explanation seems straightforward: A nickel no longer moves behavior the way it once did, especially in a state like Massachusetts, where the cost of living is unusually high and purchasing power low. So advocates propose to revitalize the bottle bill by doubling the deposit to a dime, and expanding the program to cover other kinds of beverage containers — not just beer and soda, but water bottles, juice, iced tea, sports drinks, and the like. The assumption is that a bigger incentive will mean more returns, and more returns means less litter. When Connecticut tried something similar in 2021, raising its bottle deposit to a dime, the redemption rate jumped more than 20 percentage points.

But would it work?

My instinctive skepticism of government solutions is at least as old as my animus against litter. Again and again I have written to criticize the expansion of government power in American life. I share the libertarian conviction that — as a rule — voluntary private action is better than mandatory state control, that politicians and regulators are no wiser than the rest of us, and that it is dangerous to presume that if something is wrong, there ought to be a law to deal with it.

A frequent theme in my columns is that when government steps in to fix a problem, it often makes the problem worse. Rent control destroys housing. Minimum wage laws price workers out of jobs. Prohibition caused alcohol-related death to spike.

And it isn’t only the danger of unintended consequences that I worry about. It is also the tendency of modest state interventions to grow. “The natural progress of things,” Thomas Jefferson warned, “is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” That warning never gets old.

So whenever a new government “solution” is proposed, my first instinct is misgiving. What will it cost? Whom will it hurt? What unintended consequences lurk around the corner? And there is always the deeper worry: that a reasonable-sounding nudge today becomes a mandate tomorrow. The slippery slope is not a fallacy; it is a recurring feature of political life.

For all those reasons, opposing an expanded bottle bill should be an easy call for me.

Or maybe not.

Litter isn’t just an eyesore. When someone tosses a can from a car window, he isn’t simply being a slob — he is vandalizing a public space that belongs to all of us. The street, the sidewalk, the roadside: These are common property, and the litterer is trashing them for his own convenience, leaving the rest of us to live with the consequences.

That is exactly the kind of social cost that even free-market economists recognize as legitimate grounds for government action — not to punish or prohibit, but to realign incentives. The deposit doesn’t fine anyone for littering. What it does is give everyone a reason to think twice before tossing an empty — and give anyone who spots a discarded can on the sidewalk a reason to pick it up. It turns an act of civic decency into an act that also pays. That’s not the heavy hand of government. That’s closer to the way markets are supposed to work.

I admit that my personal antipathy for litter may have something to do with my benign attitude here. But even libertarians don’t claim that every government intervention is a step toward serfdom. Not every nudge leads to a slippery slope. This one puts a dime’s worth of incentive between a clean street and a littered one. And if a dime is enough to make us treat our shared spaces with a little more respect, then maybe this is one government intervention even a skeptic like me can support.