Government Steals Little Girl’s $2,000 of Lost-And-Found Money

-By Warner Todd Huston

There is an ages old American tradition where it concerns found money. We are all familiar with the concept that if one finds a pile of money lying on the ground and it is taken it to the authorities, if the actual owners cannot be found, then that money becomes the property of the person that found the money and dutifully turned it it. If the owner does turn up, of course, a reward is usually the result. This practice is meant to encourage honesty among the populace. But the city of Dallas, Texas is destroying that honesty-is-the-best-policy ideal with its greed.

As the story goes, in February teenager Ashley Donaldson found an envelope stuffed with $2,000 in the parking lot of shopping center in North Dallas. Like a good citizen she took the envelope to the local police and they began the process of trying to find the owner. Now, in May, the police have given up the search and have decided that the owner of the money cannot be found.

At this point, the American tradition holds that good citizen Ashley Donaldson would be awarded the found money as a reward for her honesty. But the city of Dallas is turning this American tradition on its head and has decided that the government will keep the cash leaving Ashley out in the cold.

Not only is this an abrogation of American tradition, but it will add one more stroke to coarsen, and impersonalize our society and make it more selfish.

You see, one of the things that will happen if this sort of un-American practice becomes more wide spread is that people will no longer turn in found money. This means that people who lost a substantial amount of money will be assured they’ll never find it because the finders will reason that they may as well keep it since government will just steal it anyway.

Rapacious government stealing everything that isn’t nailed down. Government, police, politicians, they are long past the time when they were on our side. Government is now in it for itself. Not we the people.

After a day of being berated, the city police announced that maybe they would give the cash to miss Ashley after all.

This is all well and good and a good decision of face saving. But that they had to make this about face at all is still a major problem.

Our police, our governments, they are fast becoming an intractable problem. This is just one more, small example of that.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson

Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.

For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.


2 thoughts on “
Government Steals Little Girl’s $2,000 of Lost-And-Found Money”

  1. How many cities/town in this country have been taken over by money grubbing, self serving, greedy people such as Dallas evidently has. Time to clean house all across this land!

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