Take your plates and stick em.....
Sometimes I get confused on the difference between a strawman and a red herring. I’m not sure what the latest ICLU suit over the “In God We Trust” license plates would qualify as. Maybe neither. I do remember hearing Michael Cloud make the statement once that “if you can get people asking the wrong questions, it doesn’t really matter what the answers are.”
Apparently Mark Studler and the ACLU are asking why he has to pay a $15.00 administrative fee for his environmental license plate while people who choose the IGWT plates are exempt from such a fee. There are other questions we should be asking. The first would be, why would someone that wanted to donate $40.00 to an environmental cause use the BMV to make that donation, knowing that the state was going to keep nearly 40% of your donation? Wouldn’t a more prudent solution be to send the $40.00 directly to the organization of your choice, put an environmentally friendly bumper sticker on your SUV, and cut out the middle-man altogether? You won’t find much that the government does efficiently, and redistributing our money is no exception.
Secondly, we need to ask why we are buying license plates to put on cars that we bought to drive on roads that we paid for. And why does it cost more to get permission to drive a new Cadillac on our roads than an old Volvo? All of the necessary funding for our roads should come from gas and wheel taxes, and that would work out a lot better if they would use the money raised from those taxes on the roads, instead of spending billions on unrelated pork projects. And vehicle ID numbers are already in place if we need to determine origins and ownership.
Instead of the ICLU asking the State of Indiana to charge more people more money for more types of plates, they should be asking why the state is issuing license plates at all.
And in the interest of efficiency, we should send our donations directly to the organization, university or cause of our choice, slap a bumper sticker in our back window as a show of support, and give the BMV and ICLU a break.
Lord knows they need it.
Apparently Mark Studler and the ACLU are asking why he has to pay a $15.00 administrative fee for his environmental license plate while people who choose the IGWT plates are exempt from such a fee. There are other questions we should be asking. The first would be, why would someone that wanted to donate $40.00 to an environmental cause use the BMV to make that donation, knowing that the state was going to keep nearly 40% of your donation? Wouldn’t a more prudent solution be to send the $40.00 directly to the organization of your choice, put an environmentally friendly bumper sticker on your SUV, and cut out the middle-man altogether? You won’t find much that the government does efficiently, and redistributing our money is no exception.
Secondly, we need to ask why we are buying license plates to put on cars that we bought to drive on roads that we paid for. And why does it cost more to get permission to drive a new Cadillac on our roads than an old Volvo? All of the necessary funding for our roads should come from gas and wheel taxes, and that would work out a lot better if they would use the money raised from those taxes on the roads, instead of spending billions on unrelated pork projects. And vehicle ID numbers are already in place if we need to determine origins and ownership.
Instead of the ICLU asking the State of Indiana to charge more people more money for more types of plates, they should be asking why the state is issuing license plates at all.
And in the interest of efficiency, we should send our donations directly to the organization, university or cause of our choice, slap a bumper sticker in our back window as a show of support, and give the BMV and ICLU a break.
Lord knows they need it.
posted by Rex Bell at 2:13 PM
3 Comments:
Excellent editorial, Mr. Bell. All drivers already have licenses, and that has a significant public safety benefit.
But the question you raise is very good: do we need secondary permission for specific vehicles? I've never really thought about it before.
And in the interest of efficiency, we should send our donations directly to the organization, university or cause of our choice,
Another excellent point, Mr. Bell. With government money comes government strings and entanglements between private charities and is detrimental to liberty.
If it's an inalienable right...
Why would we need a license?
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