David McElroy

You might remember the story from last week about the woman in suburban Detroit who was facing jail time because her suburb didn’t like her growing veggies in her yard. The good news is that public pressure has forced the city to drop the charges. The bad news is that she’s still facing possible jail time for another offense. The bureaucrats are determined to make an example of her, it seems.

Although the city has dropped the charges about her vegetable garden, she was also charged with failure to have a license for her dogs. After she was charged in June, she immediately bought the license and showed the paperwork to officials. The woman’s lawyer said that charges are normally dropped in such a case after a person buys the license, but the city is pursuing this charge.

The lesson: Don’t make bureaucrats angry. If they want to punish you, they’ll find a way to do it.

Note: Hat tip to the Agitator for alerting me to this update on the story.

Update: At her blog Friday afternoon, Julie Bass clarifies and corrects some things which the newspaper story apparently got wrong. She says the city still might reinstate the charge related to the garden, because it was dismissed by a judge without prejudice.

Classic comedian Henny Youngman frequently used a joke in which someone would ask him, “How’s your wife?” His reply: “Compared to what?” When people are asked how they like the modern nation/state, you can’t evaluate their answers without knowing “compared to what?”

If you allow someone else to frame a debate, he can control what your answer is going to be. If you allow the state and its supporters to frame the debate as being between the coercive state on the one hand and the lawlessness and casual violence you see depicted anywhere without the state on the other, most rational people are going to opt for the state as the lesser of the two evils. But it’s a false dichotomy.

Some libertarians or anarchists (of various stripes) want to live in a world with no rules and no order. I want them to be able to live that way, but I don’t want my part of the world to look like that. I want voluntary order, but I want it organized by somebody other than the coercive state — and I want a choice of whose system to live under. What’s more, I want the choice to establish my own system to compete with the others if I want to.

A friend of mine sent me a link to a story that NPR’s Planet Money team did a couple of weeks ago about PorcFest, which is a popular annual “freedom festival” in New Hampshire sponsored by the Free State Project. The headline on the NPR story calls it “libertarian summer camp.” Among other things, the reporter talked about how the bacon he bought for breakfast hadn’t been inspected for safety and how financial transactions were difficult using differing systems of gold and silver. The implied criticism is that this is the way things have to be without the coercive state. Is that true?

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Minnesota’s feuding Democrats and Republicans announced Thursday that they’ve agreed to a deal that will end the shutdown of state government. I guess some people think it’s a big deal, but I find myself thinking, “So what?”

People have become conditioned to think that it’s a big deal to have state offices close. It’s certainly true that it creates some inconveniences for some folks, mostly related to business that the state is going to force you to conduct another time. Other people have made themselves dependent on checks that various state departments issue with tax money. For the rest of us, though, why would we possibly care?

There are some things that the state currently has a monopoly on, but those things could be dealt with in other ways over time. We could see the rise of new entities that own and operate various areas — competing for customers in the same way that companies compete today. Some people would choose to live outside of those “civilized” places. It’s not a life I’d choose, but some people would. I want an orderly place where services are provided, but I want to know that if I’m not happy with the service or rules I get from one place, there’s another place I can choose — and the rules can’t be changed on me in midstream just because my neighbors decide they want to take my money or tell me what to do in some way.

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