LIFE IN THE ASYLUM

WHY DO WE TOLERATE THIS?

Today’s article was originally meant to expose overstaffed state agencies that certainly do their share of overreach, complementing last week’s exposé of overstaffed and overreaching federal agencies. But it seems the Feds will not let a day go by without additional outrage against the American people, so first:

In rural Idaho, a father was confronted, on his own 20-acre spread, with a grizzly bear menacing his young children. Rashly deciding that his children’s lives were important to him, and not having handy his copy of the Federal Register to review the thousands of pages of absolutely essential regulations that might be implicated, he shot the bear. He then made a major mistake: he called “the authorities”. Naturally, the father was arrested and charged with a federal crime.

The good news is that if he is entitled to a jury trial, and if he does not bankrupt himself by demanding a trial, a typical Idaho jury should acquit him in record time. The not-so-good news is that as he spends his own money defending himself, our wonderful Justice Department will be spending his, and our, taxpayer money trying to convict him.

If you want some really good news, we can all sleep well tonight knowing that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (yes, that Fish and Wildlife Service) is still on the job. On August 24, 2011, they, along with U.S. Customs and Border Protection [now having completely secured our borders], raided and shut down the venerable Gibson Guitar Corporation’s corporate headquarters and manufacturing plants in both Memphis and Nashville. The evildoing allegedly involves the very well known Lacey Act. [Your writer, being an attorney, humbly confesses that he has never heard of the Lacey Act, but it must ban some truly horrendous activity.]

Now, back to the originally planned program: it seems at times that state and local agencies are engaged in a heated competition with their federal counterparts in overstaffing too-numerous agencies, for seemingly little purpose other than the harassment of local taxpaying citizens. But things are not always what they seem. Note the following:

The absolutely essential task of shutting down little kids’ lemonade stands usually falls to local government. Not just here and there, but on a regular basis throughout the country. Selling Girl Scout cookies from one’s own property has also been exposed as the menace it truly is. And lest your children, after too many cookies, want to get some exercise, don’t let them try to do it on your own basketball hoop. You may discover that, for such matters as basketball hoops on private residential property, the local authorities must call in muscle from state agencies. Please take a minute, click on the basketball link, and watch the video. The young woman authority figure haranguing the taxpaying property owner is not only incredibly obnoxious, but she is wearing a sweatshirt that says “FBI” on it.

Since all of the above necessary law enforcement takes up so much local police time, how are we going to give out enough traffic tickets? Easy: red light cameras. Modern technology can now free up our first responders for more essential tasks. Many states are now doing the same thing on highways with speed cameras. And the citizenry can be browbeaten into sending in another check, all for our own good, of course.

Why is this happening? Kevin Williamson at NRO has summed it up as well as it can be stated:

Our worst problem is that democratic governments lack the kind of robust fiscal controls that prevent the political class from pillaging the productive economy to feather the nests of its own members and their clients. . . At every level - federal, state, local, county, school district, sewage-treatment authority - we have disfigured our institutions such that they function principally as wealth-transfer mechanisms for the benefit of the political class. The word for this is ‘corruption,’ and it is at least as much a moral problem as an economic one. We are our own disease.

While we as a people should never have allowed our current President to be elected dogcatcher, the problem as described by Williamson has been developing since well before we ever heard of our current President. Reread the above quote, and think about it. If we manage to reorient our country back to federalism, only then to discover that our state and local governments [think California] have become as bad or worse, we may have accomplished very little. It is long past time that all Americans must wake up and start paying attention to what our devoted “public servants” at all levels of government have been doing to us.

MO Atty