Monopolistic law-enforcement systems are a racket
December 16, 2009 – 2:55 am by JohnMy friend got a new car, a white Subaru Legacy, to replace his old white Subaru Legacy. Apparently, Michigan law lets you transfer your old license plates to your new car in some (all?) situations, so he just took his license plate off of his old Legacy and put it on his new one. Maybe this is allowed in many sates, but it surprised me.
A few days later, he was driving along doing nothing wrong, when a cop pulled him over and asked him where he got that license plate. He said, “The Secretary of State’s office.” (That’s Michigan’s stupid term for the DMV.) The cop asked him if he was trying to be a smart-ass or if he was being serious. Of course he was being serious. The reason the cop was asking, you see, is that this plate was registered to a much older car, and his was obviously very new. He asked him how this came to be. My friend told him the truth, that he simply had it transferred to his new car, and some paper or computer records must not have gotten changed yet.
So, naturally, the cop did what any officer of the law and protector of the people would do: He wrote him a ticket for running a red light, which my friend most definitely hadn’t done. He even had a friend in the passenger seat who could vouch for that with 100% certainty. As my friend pointed out to me while telling this story, the cop didn’t pull over the car that was behind my friend in the other lane and also drove right through the (green) light.
The reason, I suspect, that this clown-suited thug invented a bogus charge on the spot was because he was desperate for ticket revenue, since their tax revenue probably doesn’t cover all their expenses, and, possibly, he might have figured he got caught running my friend’s license plate through their police database, which shouldn’t be done unless there is a prior reason for doing so, meaning he needed a legitimate pretense for pulling my friend over, which function was filled by the red-light violation.
The ticket was for well over $100. I don’t remember the amount, but it is obviously completely irrelevant, and I’ll keep it in the mid-$100s to avoid unnecessarily trumping up the story. Naturally, my friend wanted to contest this ticket and explain to the judge that the officer had obviously made an “honest mistake” so that the ticket would just be thrown out and my friend could lose a morning of his life and go through a lot of hassle in exchange for keeping a small sum of his own money.
However, the judge told him that for some reason or another, possibly due to the nature of the violation or possibly because it was just his word versus that of the barbaric, primitive, parasitic waste of carbon and oxygen who issued the ticket, he couldn’t simply throw the ticket out or do anything else that would result in him not owing the money to the city, save filing an official appeal with the local DA’s office (or whomever). During the hearing, the clown-suited gangster submitted the bald-faced lie that he clearly remembered my friend running the red light and that that was the one and only reason he pulled him over.
My friend met with some attorney or attorney’s assistant and found out that to file an appeal itself would cost more than the ticket was for. This fee was non-refundable, win or lose.
So there you have it, folks. The government of the City of Ann Arbor is officially, proudly, patently, shamelessly a racket, and very little more. All the evidence I’ve ever encountered points to the “transfer theory of government” explaining, at least in large part, the foundation and continuation of every government in the history of mankind. The transfer theory of government, as, for example, Bruce Benson writes in The Enterprise of Law, posits that governments are formed primarily to take money, property, and other forms of wealth from one class of people (the citizens) to give it to another (the people who run the government).
In the future, just so you know: clown-suited thugs are apt to run your license plate in their database if they ever get a free second or two, in order to see if there’s any “crime” they can possibly pull you over for.