Robert Heinlein said that the smaller any unit of government happens to be, the harder it is to move. It’s relatively easy to make enough fuss to alter the course of a federal government, for example, but everybody “knows” you can’t fight City Hall and that the most viciously dictatorial level of government is the school board.
My daughter’s home schooled. And generally, I ignore my city government because I have far bigger fish to fry (or I’m taking the coward’s way out, you may decide for yourself which). But because I’m willing to bet that one city government across this country is pretty much like another (they should all be given 24 hours to get out of town) and the trends they set have a regrettable tendency to spread upward and outward, I think it’s appropriate to discuss them from time to time, so that we’ll all have an idea of what we’re up against.
If it were only a matter of good old-fashioned Chicago-style graft, we could probably accept it philosophically. For example, say some city council somewhere passed a law that lawn sprinkling systems (which our hypothetical city government urged us to install because they save water) must now be inspected and a whopping fee collected for this “service”. Never mind that the Earth got along perfectly well for the last four and a half billion years without the fee-collecting lawn sprinkling system inspectors who lobbied for this law. What we have here (and as usual, employing government as a truncheon) is sheer, primitive, plug-ugly greed, which I happen to define as an inordinate and potentially violent desire for the unearned.
L. Neil Smith, “Feeding the Ducks”, Libertarian Enterprise, 1995-10-01.
January 8, 2022
QotD: You can’t fight City Hall
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