Because They Can, Wingtip Edition
Posted by Thomas L. Knapp on Jun 5, 2009 in Commentary • 3 commentsLarry Moore’s story is not one of those “rags to riches” tales. It’s just the story of a homeless alcoholic, living under a bridge, who decided it was time for a change and made one. Moore cleaned himself up, went into the shoe shining business, and over a fairly short period of time saved up enough money to get off the street and rent an apartment. Things were looking good.
Until, that is, he found himself stepped on by a much bigger shoe than the 10Ws he was used to buffing and polishing. Three guesses what kind of organization wears that size shoe. You’ll probably only need one.
Someone from San Francisco’s “Department of Public Works” caught wind of Moore’s success. In short order, a bureaucrat tracked him down and shook him down: That rent money would instead have to be paid to the city government. He’d also have to jump through some hoops (produce government-approved identification papers, for example). In return for his cooperation, the bureaucrats just might allow themselves to be persuaded to issue him a “permit” to work for a living, “allow” him to save more money up to move into a place with a roof overhead, etc.
You can keep up with Moore’s story at the San Francisco Chronicle. By most people’s standards, he’s “taking it well,” and I wish him the best of luck.
What I find surprising about Moore’s story is that anyone’s surprised by Moore’s story. The reason Moore is unusual is not that his aspirations ran up against the demands of the protection racket we call “government.” The reason his story stands out that is he’s not used to that happening, having lived “off-grid” for several years. Most of us take this kind of thing for granted. If we hadn’t been conditioned over time to do so, chances are most of us wouldn’t put up with it at all.
From the time we’re born (birth certificate) to the time we die (death certificate), the interstices of our lives are filled with government paperwork, government permissions, government prohibitions — fill out the W-9, get in line to buy your license plates, walk through the metal detector. Taken as a whole, complying with all these mandates is sort of like walking around with 500-pound monkeys on our backs.
We take it for granted because most of us don’t see it as a whole or as a system. We perceive it “a la carte.” Any particular one of these impositions, taken as a single instance, just doesn’t seem like that big a deal unless we’re diving in all at once — like, say, a poor, unemployed, homeless person trying to earn money, work at a job and find a home.
We put up with it because it comes at us in small pieces. It’s easier to let the monkey grab part of our lunch than to fight the monkey. The monkey gets heavier, but we get used to it. He takes a little more of our lunch today than he did last Friday, but hey, we could all stand to lose a little weight, right?
Two hundred years ago, the notion that the legitimacy of government rests on “the consent of the governed” must have seemed like a novel idea. These days, it sounds more like the game plan for a creeping swindle in which “consent” equals “weary resignation” to each tiny additional increment of coercion. It’s a lot easier to see the shape of the thing, and a lot less tempting to consent to its ministrations, when it comes at you all at once. So … it doesn’t. “Consent” has, over time, ceased to be an active process of engagement and turned into ratification through apathy.
“Departments of Public Works” officials and other gangsters do what they do because they can — and they get away with it not because we say “yes,” but because we don’t say “no.”
What a story, and I was delighted to see the happy ending that resulted from the actions of a large number of private individuals the very next day:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/05/MNVJ1817N1.DTL
Keep shining a light on these power trips. All part of the legitimization process.
Perhaps surprisingly, there is a public interest in licensing bootblacks, the same one as in licensing taxis, which is why when it was introduced in 19th century London the same licensing authority handled both which otherwise don’t seem to belong together.
That interest is, keeping opportunistic muggers out of those trades. Quite often, since they couldn’t easily be identified, practitioners would mug customers if they were easy prey. A proper licensing system favoured “good bacteria” driving out “bad bacteria” with a self policing approach. Licensed practitioners were in the places where they could spot and turn in the others, which they did to protect their valuable privilege, and they themselves couldn’t get away with mugging because they could be tracked down by their highly visible licences. London taxi drivers have a flourishing trade association complete with trade paper and support facilities all around the town (repair yards and dumps, trade cafes, etc.), all working for the “good bacteria”.
This is the old mediaeval approach of having privileges in exchange for public functions, and the added cost to the public is actually buying something – a true fair market. The modern approach has taxes to fund distinct policing that looks fairer to the modern mind than privileges – but it’s inefficient in cases like this, where there is an added overhead from setting up a distinct policing presence that self policing doesn’t incur (that is, the self policers have the overhead of a presence anyway, to carry on their trade).
The problems today don’t stem from a lack of a sound reason for licensing but from the authorities losing the plot and not doing things properly but instead for revenue while trying – bureaucratically, wastefully and harmfully – to police those trades themselves. There is a sound kernel in there, heavily trampled down.
It makes a change for me to bring this out from the bootblacks’ point of view rather than the taxi drivers’.
The same approach PML identified could be, and I suspect is, used where prostitution is officially tolerated in Europe. The same approach would work here in a manner much more efficient than the current regulation of vice. Speaking of vice, such an approach would also work better in the regulation of cannabis sales.