Abuse of power begins at home

September 14, 5:18 PMDallas Libertarian ExaminerGarry Reed

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Give a little power to a little person with a little mind and watch the abuse begin.

This was amply illustrated by a recent article in the Wall Street Journal when it turned its gaze from a street named Wall long enough to watch the Crime Watch warriors working the mean streets of Wareham, Massachusetts.

Columbus, Ohio: doing what responsible Citizens On Patrol and Neighborhood Watch
volunteers ought to be doing – helping to fight actual crime, not hassling rules-breakers,
by distributing fliers of a burglary suspect. (AP Photo/Paul Vernon)

It seems that all over the country more and more volunteer Citizens On Patrol and neighborhood watch groups are working with their local law enforcers. 

In the beachfront town of Wareham, Mass, retired Crime Watch citizens are writing parking tickets, a task they took over from "an overstretched police force that had let enforcement lapse." 

The article doesn't tell us exactly why police forces nationwide are "overstretched." The economy is blamed ("This is a sign of the economy," says the president of the

National Association of Citizens on Patrol") implying but not quite saying that lost jobs and home foreclosures lead to increased crime. 

But we're also told, without further explanation, that the ranks of citizen patrol groups have swelled "after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." 

Which means what? That America's blue uniformed set is so busy searching for terrorists under every rock and behind every shrub in every neighborhood and hamlet from sea to shining sea that they don't have the time to do the most important thing that cops do – collect money for their township's treasury? 

And make no mistake. Traffic tickets are a tax. They're not called a tax, any more than a fee or a fine or an assessment or a levy or a toll or a tariff or a monetary penalty are called a tax, but any time any political entity demands money under threat of punishment it's a tax. 

So when the civic-minded volunteer Crime Watch citizens took over the job of writing parking tickets for the city of Wareham, Mass, they became, likely unknowingly, tax collectors. 

And they're pugnaciously proud of it. They "wrote 600 $30 tickets, a huge jump from years past," and the group is "simply too good at doing its job." 

Doing their job means harassing their fellow citizens for every little nit and pick of daily life that doesn't harm anyone. A ticket for not parking close enough to a curb, for parking too long in one spot, for not signaling a lane change, for not making a full and complete stop at a stop sign and counting "one Mississippi" before proceeding are not crimes, they are trifling little rules that have little or nothing to do with safety or preserving a sense of order in society. 

It's just another example of how the overzealous enforcement of freedom-stifling statutes by the proprietors of power actually creates rather than inhibits chaos. 

A crime, libertarians will happily inform you, occurs when one individual or group initiates force or the threat of force or fraud against another individual or group. A crime doesn't occur if one person doesn't harm another in some way. 

Parking a foot rather than six inches from a curb doesn't harm the curb or threaten the safety of drivers. Failure to signal a turn when there's nobody there to see the signal except the citizen snitch behind the signboard doesn't endanger anyone. Not moving your car from one parking spot to another harms absolutely nobody. 

But when little people with little minds are handed a little power they become, as described by their victims, "little Napoleons" and "screwball" and "gung-ho" and "go overboard" and are "rude to people who question their authority." 

Sound familiar? These petite megalomaniacal tax collectors represent our nation's politicians in microcosm. Give one citizen the opportunity to write a ticket against another for even the most trivial rule infringement, put "official" enforcement behind it, and that person is likely to become just as power-addicted as the local and state and national professional politicians who hold elective office. 

It's almost like a monkey-see monkey-do scenario. Little children, or child-like self-described "sticker for the rules" septuagenarians with a ticket pad and too much time on their hands watch how their elected "leaders" conduct themselves and then ape their idols. 

But as long as they're delivering the dollars to the municipal moneybox who will tell them to stop? 

If you really want to know how the politicians who run a whole state or a whole nation can become so corrupted by power and money and ego you might want to start by studying the people who live up the street from you. 

It just may be that parking tickets are a gateway drug.