Everything-Questioning by Kyle A. Lohmeier
Anyone who’s operated a motor vehicle knows the feeling: a glance up in the rearview mirror reveals a patrol car is following, a glance down at the speedometer shows you’re over the posted limit by six miles per hour. Now comes the cold sweat as you look back up in the rearview and wait for the light show to begin.
Growing up in the United States and attending government school as most of us have, the average American has long since grown comfortable with the assumption that we need police officers, including traffic cops; otherwise, there would be chaos. Like most of the assumptions we were taught to believe when it comes to the utility and necessity of the state, this one is wrong as well. The primary function of the traffic cop is that of revenue generation, first and foremost.
Let’s look at some hypotheticals that are likely happening somewhere in the USA even as I type this.
Steve is a kind of a crummy driver. One day, Steve’s barely paying attention to the road and ends up rolling up over a curb, bending his rim and flattening his tire. The curb, being reinforced concrete, is undamaged. As he sets about changing his tire, a patrol car comes up and the officer asks what happened. Steve tells him and receives a careless driving ticket for his honesty. Now, Steve is already out the cost of a new or repaired rim and is already late to wherever it was he was going. Given that the only property damaged by Steve’s action was his own, why does the state need to collect an additional fine from him? To what end? Revenue generation, plain and simple.
Let’s take the same example and add a wrinkle to it now. All other things being the same, let’s say Steve had drank a few beers before his little mishap with the curb. Now the officer has Steve blow in a tube and a machine of dubious accuracy indicates Steve is “legally” drunk. Again, Steve has only damaged his own property, but now Steve gets to go to jail and have his car impounded. Now, Steve is on the hook for thousands of dollars in legal fees, fines and impound costs. Worse yet, because a bunch of social workers bent the state’s ear a decade ago, Steve will be forced to pay to attend a class he’d have never paid to attend of his own volition – thus keeping the state’s crony social workers employed in jobs for which there is no market demand, thereby strangling the economy further and harming innocent people via extortion.
So, for actions that resulted in harm to no one but himself, in both cases, Steve would somehow be liable for criminal fines and fees paid to the almighty state.
Let’s say Steve rear-ends another car, there are no injuries, just property damage; then, along comes a cop to ticket Steve. Steve is already civilly liable for the damages he caused to the other person’s car, now he’s also forced to pay the state fines and fees even though Steve didn’t rear end a state-owned vehicle. He’s essentially being assessed a misery tax.
And that misery tax would skyrocket should the cop smell alcohol on Steve’s breath and arrest him for driving under the influence. Of course, we’ve all been taught that drunk driving is bad, and it obviously is a terribly selfish and irresponsible thing to do; but this simple truth gets scrambled up when mixed in with the state’s indoctrination. Yes, drunk driving is bad, even worse, by far, is drunk driving enforcement – a simple fact of reality the state will never admit to because drunk driving enforcement is big, big business.
How big? Well, really recent numbers can be hard to come by when it comes to total arrests made statewide in a given year by all police departments in Ohio. The author of a 2012 article in the Toledo Blade compiled “recent” stats for a story on drunk driving enforcement, using 2006 numbers. Despite being a decade old now, the numbers are telling.
In 2006, 461 Ohioans lost their lives in crashes where at least one driver had a blood alcohol content of at least .01 percent – half a dose of NyQuil will put most people over that limit. That same year, cops throughout Ohio arrested 72,475 people for drunk driving. In other words, in 2006, cops ruined some 70,000 more lives than the people they arrested did.
Yes, ruined; because ruination is what the state visits upon those convicted of drunk driving. Mandatory license suspensions make it hard for people to get to work to afford the massive fines and fees they’ll be paying for a year or more while they’re on probation and paying for the pleasure of being so. A criminal record makes it hard to find work, particularly if said work involves driving a vehicle professionally. Then, there are the mandatory classes – again, so pointless social workers can have a coerced career at all of our expense – jail time, and other assorted extortion.
Furthermore, it’s idiotic to assume that all 72,475 victims of state predation would have actually gone on to cause an accident or kill someone had it not been for the timely interdiction of the brave police officer. Or, even most. Or, many for that matter.
And, what happens when you have a predatory police force that arrests 72,475 people a year for not hurting anyone? You end up with a state full of “criminals.” As of 2012, there were 1.1 million convicted drunk drivers in the state of Ohio, out of a total population of 11.59 million, nearly ten percent of the state’s population.
“But, if it weren’t for drunk driving laws, people would just get hammered and drive,” victims of Stockholm syndrome exclaim at the notion of being free.
Of course, 72,475 arrests statewide in a single year says the laws aren’t any sort of deterrent, which suits the state just fine. If the laws were a deterrent, then there’d be a massive budget hole to fill, plus, all the social workers who teach the alcohol diversion “classes” would have to go find a real job, the demand for which isn’t supplied at gunpoint. Indeed, any sizeable downturn in drunken driving behavior would be a nightmare for police department and other state budgets.
If someone is behind the wheel of a car and causes the harm to person via negligence; what other material facts matter? None. Adding an additional layer of state-induced pain to what should be a civil matter serves no other purpose than to generate revenue for the state. Adding additional penalties because someone was intoxicated while negligently causing an injury is akin to adding additional penalties because someone was racist while intentionally causing injury to another person. Sure, “hate crime” laws make sense to our predatory government, even if everyone from civil libertarians to the creators of South Park realize they’re idiotic. Drunk driving laws are equally idiotic, and for the exact same reason.
Want to deter drunk driving? Make it understood that full and even punitive restitution will be paid to the victim by anyone who causes a car crash that results in property damage, injury or death – up to and including a period of indentured servitude to the victim’s family in the event of a fatality. Of course, this leaves the state almost no role to play (other than civil courts, which in a perfect world would be replaced with private arbitration firms), and therefore no way to extort money from the parties involved, so, expect the percentage of Ohioans with “criminal” records to continue to climb until every last one of us is in the penal system at some level.
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