-By Warner Todd Huston
In yet another example of how our governments, whether city, county, state or federal, have become tyrants instead of servants, residents in Pittsburgh have discovered that they are being fined–some up to thousands of dollars–for “illegally” parking their cars in their own driveways.
You read that correctly. The city passed an ordinance that essentially makes it illegal for homeowners to park their own cars in their own driveways on their own, privately held property. And now city officials are randomly cruising through the city and handing out fines to homeowners for violating that “law.”
The city ordinance, being enforced by the Bureau of Building Inspection, states that no one can park a car within 30 feet of a building. This, of course, would make nearly every driveway in the city an illegal parking space.
One family ended up paying a $2,400 fine to escape the harassment from the city. Another is now parking at the curb in the street taking up spaces customers of local businesses used to use–and, yes, that is now hurting businesses.
This is just one more example of the tyranny that our governments are bringing down upon us all. From nagging rules of where and when you are allowed to build a shed or put up a fence on the local level, to trick “traffic” cameras operated to levy illicit fines on people based on split second timing, to how you are allowed to run your business or sell a product because of the EPA or the IRS on the federal level our governments are now so constantly involved in our lives that we no longer have any freedom to move and act as we wish.
So many people, these days, claim that politics is so “partisan” and the political debate so mean. These sorts of rules are why. Government is so involved in our lives that the fight over who can control the government is a life or death proposition.
The solution to getting both money and public vitriol out of politics is to start taking away power from our governments.
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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
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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, MrConservative.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, Wizbang.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.
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