Posted on Mon, Feb. 20, 2006

There are a million stories in the big city ...

By GARRY REED

Special to the Star-Telegram

The state egg inspector confronts the supermarket produce manager.

"I've just tested your refrigerated egg display. The temperature is 44.5 degrees Fahrenheit. You are in violation of Article 7-11-01-03 of the North Dakota Egg Code, which requires a chill temperature of 45 degrees Fahrenheit. That means your egg display is a crime scene. I'll have to cordon off your cold case. Then I'm calling in the feds."

"What?" the grocer whimpers. "You're making a federal case out of my cold case?"

"I have no choice. You buy eggs from a tri-state area. That's interstate commerce. This cold case is a case for ... [dramatic music crescendo] ... Inspectorcrat Eggbert Eggleheart!"

"Oh, no!"

"Oh, yes. He's a hard-boiled federal egg inspector. He carries an egg inspector, candler and grader license. It is illegal to forcibly interfere with a federal egg inspector. Killing a federal egg inspector will get you the death penalty. He's also exempt from federal gun laws, which means he's entitled to carry."

"You mean he's ... he's ..."

"Yes. Agent Double Grade A -- License to Chill."

Unfortunately, this is not entirely an exercise in satire.

This is the real drill: Alan Korwin, author of Gun Laws of America, noted on his Web site last June that "22% of federal gun laws now authorize arming staff." Scroll down the screen a bit and he further observes: "Some of the more unusual federal 'police' forces are the egg inspector police, the print shop police, the EPA police, and one of the newest, the Federal Reserve Board police."

All of these absolutely beneficent bureaucracies have been endowed with "broad powers to keep and bear arms in cases where the public is banned from keeping arms."

(Incidentally, it's US Code Title 21 Section 1041 that makes it illegal to forcibly interfere with a federal egg inspector, and extending the death penalty to anyone murdering such a valuable government asset apparently became law way back in 1991.)

"Wormly, you see that truckload of paper? That's the new budget we just printed here at the Congressional Print Shop. You need to ride shotgun when they take it over to the Bureau of Budget Control."

"Ride shotgun? Why?"

"To protect it from a terrorist attack, of course."

"But why would terrorists want to destroy the budget?"

"Who cares why? Homeland Security awarded us 2.1 million tax bucks for anti-terrorism operations. We bought a .38 police special and a bullet for you, and we spent the rest redecorating the directorcrat's office."

"I'll do my duty, sir. Congress won't be able to act without a budget."

"Are you kidding? Nobody knows where all the money goes anyway. If they don't have a budget, those congresscrats will just borrow deeper into the future and spend deeper into the night, that's all."

Across town, Grimley Styffnek stares intently at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.

"I will dedicate myself to my calling," he murmurs quietly. "I will exercise my obligations as a mindless bureaucratic tin soldier of the establishment civil service. I will set the standard for all Federal Reserve Board police officers to come.

"I don't know exactly what the Federal Reserve Board is except that Wikipedia says it has something to do with our fiat money. I must protect our fiat money at all costs. I must protect the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at all costs. I must protect him from Marxists and Maoists and socialists and Third Worlders and especially those wild-eyed anarcho-Austrian free-market libertarian gold-bug economists. If someone picks up a gold standard and tries to strike the chairman with it, I will throw my body in front of him.

"As a dedicated and highly trained mindless bureaucratic tin soldier, I must protect the Status Quo at all costs -- whoever this Greek-sounding Status Quo guy is."

In a distant corner of Drydirt County, Okla., a woman dressed in khaki steps from behind a tree and points her service revolver at a figure standing in his campsite. "Hold it right there," she snarls. "I saw you scrape those scrambled eggs onto the ground. That's an ecological crime."

"Hey," the man snaps, "I'm a federal drylands inspector, and I was just --"

"Oh, a fellow envirocrat," the deputy murmurs as she holsters her piece.

"Had me worried there. For a second, I thought you were one of those snooty, protected federal egg inspectors."

Garry Reed is a longtime Fort Worth libertarian and freelance writer. http://www.freecannon.com/

A lightly edited version of my article, Cartoon Libertarians, appeared in the June 2005 print edition of the Libertarian Party News as follows:

Many libertarian bloggers and bulletin board sloggers reacted with rancor to the March 15 Wall Street Journal article by Julia Gorin, "Party On," which colorized libertarians as comic strip characters.

"Libertarians generally bill themselves as fiscally conservative but socially liberal," observed Gorin, a position statement I've deplored ever since "Libertarianism for Dummies," my very first online article: "Calling libertarianism an amalgam of certain left handed and right handed principles just perpetuates the myth that all political philosophies exist on a one dimensional scale, like a DOA's flat line."

In case you don't want to read her editorial, Gorin first answers her own question, "So what's a Libertarian, anyway?" and then quotes knee-slapping definitions from other named sources, thusly:

Notice one theme that runs through almost all of these definitions. People are thought-bots who can't divest their cranial cavities of the Red-Blue political concept they've become accustomed to. All American politics, they're convinced, must fit somewhere on the Left-Right, Liberal-Conservative, Democrat-Republican horizontal thermometer. They can't comprehend "libertarian" without a reference to that stale two-dimensional standard.

They're descendents of people who saw their first Technicolor movie and wondered where it fit on the black-and-white grayscale. ("Hmmm, it's sort of like those reds are fiscally black and those blues are socially white.") Or people who thought TV was just radio with pictures.

They don't get it that libertarianism is not just another note on their harpsichord; it's a whole different instrument entirely.

But don't worry about articles in the Wall Street Journals of the world that color-code all of us as toon buffoons. They're actually doing us a favor. The more of these articles that appear in big-time newsprint, the better. Why? If Gandhi was right, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

We've already been through the ignore stage. As anecdotal evidence: In 1993 I bought my powerful 486 Zeos computer with Windows for Workgroups 3.11, replacing my 8086 Hyundai with its potent 80 meg (that's meg, not gig) internal hard drive, and signed up with Prodigy Internet access service. I was hard pressed to find more than a handful of Web sites that responded to the HotBot search term "libertarian."

Now consider this: On May 12, 2005, I finger-tapped "libertarian" into Google on my Dell. The result was "about 4,330,000" hits.

So bring on the ridiculing! And don't worry about the people who believe the cartoon libertarian definitions. They'll typically believe anything. Tell them that government welfare programs are charity and they'll nod, agree, and go on with their lives. Tell them it's smart to surrender freedom for security and they'll nod, agree, and go on with their lives. Tell them there's a really big difference between Republicans and Democrats and they'll nod, agree, and go on with their lives.

Those people have never and will never give us anything or take anything away from us. But show a hundred Gorin-style caricature commentaries to a thinking person and he or she will wonder, and ruminate, and eventually discover the reality behind the straw libertarians invented for yucks and chuckles.

"Another ludicrous libertarian lampoon, eh?" they'll say, putting aside their Post or Times or Journal. "But I've read something else about these Librarians or Liberians or Libertarians before. A friend mentioned them a couple of times. And that local third-party political chick had some interesting ideas. Maybe I'll need to check these folks out."

Those are the people we want. And someday, when all those unthinking people with their flat-lined brain valves repeatedly hear from opinion-makers all around them that only libertarianism safeguards their rights and their property, they'll nod, agree, and go on with their lives.

The statist authoritarians will be fighting us soon enough, when they sense their power is threatened. The storm is coming. So for now, enjoy Gandhi's "laugh at you" phase while it lasts.

Some day the WSJ will know, "so what's a Libertarian, anyway?" And the last laugh will be on them.

About the author: Garry Reed is a freelance writer living in Ft. Worth, Texas. His articles have appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Jefferson Review. See more of his work at www.FreeCannon.com, or contact him at reedcannon@aol.com.

This is a bowdlerized version of my article, Freedom Riders, sanitized and edited for mass consumption before appearing in the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram.

Got an idea on transit? Let it ride

Arlington should take the debate out of the hands of government and let the people come up with out-of-the-box concepts.

Arlington noticed a few years ago that it is the largest city in the country without a public transportation system. It decided that this was a problem. Then it remembered its gleaming major-league ballpark and decided that there's only one way to solve such a problem.

If the city's taxpayers were so magnanimous that they were willing to finance a baseball palace for the millionaire owners and the millionaire players of the Texas Rangers, why couldn't they be convinced to foot the bill for public transportation?

(1) Should Arlington taxpayers get mugged to extend either the Fort Worth or Dallas public monopoly bus line into Arlington?

(2) Should Arlington taxpayers be stadiumized into starting their own public monopoly bus line?

I have an alternative suggestion that, while obvious to libertarians, may not have occurred to the magnanimous taxpayers of Arlington: How about a free market in public transportation?

That's right - banish the monopoly charters and the taxi medallions. Throw the streets open to entrepreneurs large and small. Anyone with a valid driver's license and a street-legal vehicle gets to play. Buses, shuttles, taxis, limos, jitneys, vans, wheeled trolleys. Even light rail if some enterprising gambler wants to build it with private - repeat, private - funding.

Nobody's entitled to city-guaranteed success. If a taxicab operator can't hack it (yes, that's a pun), he should park it.

When free-thinking eggheads compete, innovative ideas get hatched. Like some of these possibilities:

· A savvy bus operator notices that fast-food eateries dominate major streets and intersections, so he contracts with them. In the morning, a small bus (big ones seldom run full and are therefore inefficient) pulls into the parking lot of the fast-food establishment, thereby not blocking traffic flow in the street. His riders are waiting inside, hence no need to build covered bus stops. Those riders are also fast-food customers, chomping Breakfast-on-a-Stick with Secret Sauce. Everyone benefits, including the taxpayers.

· A jitney jockey has developed a file of elderly widows and shut-ins. Mrs. McNoodle wants a ride to the beauty parlor, so he starts dialing his list. "Hey, Guido, I'm taking Hilda to Happy Hair Heaven. You wanna make that run to Handy Hunk Hardware today? If I get six people, I'll discount everyone's fares."

· Wheelchair-equipped vans? A church gets together with service groups like the Elks, Lions, Moose and Squirrels. Or maybe they solicit corporate sponsors by plastering their logos all over their vehicle's sheet metal like a NASCAR pole-sitter. Repeat recipe as required. Who needs taxpayer's money?

· Park-and-ride lots? No need for the city to build any. They're already there. Ever see a church parking lot packed full of cars during the workweek? Churches should welcome the income from a park-and-ride lease. How about nightclub parking lots? Empty during the day. Maybe offered gratis in the hopes of converting some homeward-bound bus trippers into happy-hour sippers?

Eons ago when I lived in Minneapolis-St. Paul, an exclusive gated community formed an association, bought a bus and hired a driver. Residents were delivered to work in the morning and home in the evening. Twice-a-day runs were also made to shopping malls for housewives and househusbands. But residents had to wrangle with city hall for months just to get the permits.

These types of services should be encouraged, not scourged. Why can't any of us non-millionaires use whatever transportation we want?

I'd love to ride a door-to-door shuttle to work and back. Even if it costs more than driving, it'll save wear and tear on my car and on me. I can use the extra time to snooze, read the paper, eat a Breakfast-on-a-Stick with Secret Sauce or bang out yet another brilliant libertarian Op-Ed on my laptop. And yet another already congested street is spared yet another vehicle.

Insert your own ideas here. Yes, you, innovative competitor. No, not you, command-and-control politician. You don't have any new ideas. But your citizens do - by the thousands.

In the libertarian vision of free-market transportation, the ideas that people haven't even thought of yet will outshine the ones that people already have. All those tax-power-regulate planning boards will never solve our transportation problems. But the free minds of our own free citizens just might.

So how about it, Arlington? Want to out-California California as a trend-setter? Want to be the public transportation envy of the nation? Lock up your bureaucrats and let the free-wheeling begin!

Footnote: Arlington voters rejected all forms of taxpayer-funded public transportation.