Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

April 30, 2012

If a customer neglects to pay his internet service provider, the company discontinues the service. The service ends when the payments stop.

Someone who stops paying the government, by way of contrast, can expect personalized service from the government, which produces nothing useful and is devoted entirely to the practice of coercion. Government is the only enterprise whose so-called customers -- that is, victims ? make payments in order to prevent the delivery of the services provided.

Displaying a perverse creativity typical of its criminal caste, the government afflicting the city of Las Cruces, New Mexico has devised a new form of extortion: It will cut off water and related utility services to residents who don?t pay traffic tickets. Many of those citations were issued through red light cameras installed by the corrupt Australian corporation Redflex, which has built a huge industry out of such arrangements.  Shortly after announcing its ?Pay Up or Dry Up? extortion scheme, the Las Cruces City Government deployed police on a ticket-writing binge.

Last year, the same city government unveiled a program to seize the cars of people with unpaid tickets.  Las Cruces memorably vindicates St. Augustine?s description of government as a criminal gang that has granted itself impunity.

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.