All anarchy should be local

In a post about “middle class anarchy” the other day, Glenn Reynolds made the following observation:

…if the middle class asserts itself it can change things for the better instead. That’s why so many fear the Tea Party movement.

Over the weekend I spoke with a Tea Party activist from a Michigan town who told me about a discussion he had with the mayor over budget constraints. One of the reasons there won’t be money for things the town needs like basic road repair is that the federal government is requiring the town to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on something that no one in the town either wants or needs. New street signs that are in Mixed Case instead of ALL CAPITAL LETTERS!

The federal government says street signs in mixed case are easier for drivers to read than those in all capital letters.

“Easier to read? I can read that just fine,” Driver Bill Sutherland said of the COCHRAN road sign in Charlotte.

For safety’s sake, the Federal Highway Administration is mandating that all signs in all caps be changed by 2018. The only problem, they didn’t doll out any extra money to do it.

“The problem is there’s an awful amount of them out there and it costs a lot to replace them,” Blair Ballou of the Eaton County Road Commission said.

Ballou said each named sign costs about $100 to replace, and there are 2,500 signs like it in the county.

“We’re worried about salt and snow removal and we don’t have an extra quarter of a million dollars to replace named signs,” he said.

The thing is, the county has already spent two years a lot of money replacing signs with one that are more reflective. They won’t stop doing that, Ballou said, but they may hold off on changing the named signs for awhile.

“We’re hoping they review it at the federal level and perhaps change it,” Ballou said.

They just may, but as of now, several sign changes like font, and letter size are on the books that will cost cities and towns upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“I think it’s a waste of money,” Driver Katherine Johnson said.

Government officials News Ten talked to Wednesday said they’d much rather fix the roads, than replace the signs above them.

It is not only a complete waste of money, it’s the craziest thing I’ve seen in a long time. A lesson in the arbitrary nature of government power. Back in October, Nick Gillespie wrote a piece about this (“ALL-CAP Street Signs MUST DIE!“) and he linked a USA Today piece that said the new sign mandate was a nod to the fading eyesight of aging Baby Boomers:

In a nod to the fading eyesight of the nation’s growing number of aging Baby Boomers, the federal government is requiring communities around the USA to change street name signs from all capital letters to a combination of capital and lowercase letters. The government says that makes them easier to read.

And maybe after that they can have another session of group hugs and issue a new rule that the signs have to be pastel green.

Anyway, these cash-strapped towns have until 2015 to do it.

Or else what? The Tea Party guy I talked suggested that the mayor simply tell the feds to blow it out their ass.

This is tyranny, plain and simple. I’ll skip the rhetorical questions about where in the Constitution does the federal government have the right to tell a town what kind of signs it has to have. I just want to know what would happen if the angry municipalities just started refusing to obey.

Let’s hear it for middle class anarchy!

Bankrupt big cities like Detroit don’t have to comply with no steenking rules, so why should small towns? Fair is fair. 

And if you think redoing all the signs is bad, another expensive issue facing virtually every cash-strapped municipality in this country involves new federal stormwater rules:

POTTSTOWN — Changes to rules governing stormwater are quietly under way which could add thousands to even the most basic home improvement. And a group of Montgomery County townships and boroughs are out to make some noise about it.

The changes are an outgrowth of the federal Clean Water Act and are part of a package of rules known as MS4, which stands for “municipal separate storm sewer systems.” The first phase of these rules, enacted several years ago, had to do with things like education and getting permits for large stormwater discharges.

Read it all. It’s a nightmare.

The Tea Party activist told me that the new stormwater rules means that ordinary road repair is a thing of the past. It is no longer a simple matter of repaving the roads. Instead, they have to tear off the road and excavate the whole bed, all to install expensive and unnecessary new stormwater systems. Inconvenience everyone with road closures, bankrupt local businesses and force cities to spend money they don’t have.

After all, we can’t have the water that falls from the sky going where the EPA doesn’t want it to go, can we?

And if this helps bankrupt cities, perhaps that’s the plan.

Screw the feds.

I’m for middle class “anarchy” at the local level.

If all politics is local, then shouldn’t anarchy be local too?

AFTERTHOUGHT: I should probably add that the federal government has become so malignantly totalitarian that even Alexander Hamilton would be an “anarchist” by today’s standards.

(If people knew American history, that would be considered ironic.)