Screeds
Thursday, September 02, 2004
Chiseling
March 31, 2004
On his daily commute to work for the past two months, your Curmudgeon has noted a curious thing. It's an electrically lighted road-hazard sign, the sort routinely used to alert motorists to an approaching condition of which they must beware. Its generator is powered by a small gasoline engine, which is fed from an attached five-gallon tank.
This particular road-hazard sign, however, does not warn of a road hazard. It says:
YYY Road
That's what it's said for the past two months. Each day, a Department of Highways worker stops by that sign at least once. He tops off its fuel, checks that it's still working properly, and makes sure it still says what it's supposed to say rather than some obscenity from the mind of a hypothetical hacker.
Why does the sign stand where it stands and say what it says? Obviously, because until recently there was a permanent sign there: a steel placard, mounted on steel struts sunk into the road shoulder, that said the same thing. One of the past winter's windstorms proved that sign to be somewhat less than truly permanent.
The Department of Highways might reasonably have been expected to replace the old sign a bit faster than this. The road-hazard sign that stands in its place costs a lot more for the service it delivers. Worse, because it requires fuel and is programmable, it occupies the attention of a county road worker at least once a day.
But the road-hazard sign persists in that spot. The reason isn't far to seek: the money that would be spent to replace the permanent sign must come from a budget that's already been depleted for this fiscal year, whereas the money that pays for the road-hazard sign comes from a "general exigencies" budget that still has some funds. To pay for the emplacement of a new permanent sign from the exigencies funds is forbidden by law.
Hard and fast rules often give rise to results such as these. C. Northcote Parkinson commented on it as regards Britain's parliamentary procedure for voting the funding for England's military:
As for the regulations imposed on the official, all they do is add rigidity to waste. The whole system of appropriations is convenient only for cash accounting and useless for purposes of control. The departmental appropriation does not represent, to begin with, the cost of the department to which it relates. The Army vote excludes stationery, for that is supplied by the H. M. Stationery Office....Nor does the appropriation correspond to what is being done. Thus, the Navy's votes are serialised from 1 (for pay) to 15 (for Additional Married Quarters), with separate Votes for such things as shipbuilding, armaments, and the Admiralty Office. Similarly, the Army Account is serialised into Votes, No. 1 for Pay, 7 for Supplies, 9 for Warlike Stores, and so forth. But neither the Navy nor the Army is organised like that. The Navy is organised into units afloat and units ashore. The Army is organised into battalions, batteries, depots, and schools, for which individually no cost is shown. All that the system ensures is that money voted for vehicles should not be spent on weapons. But what if it were? And what is the point of the distinction? Parliament should not concern itself with that....Which are we more likely to need in an emergency -- minute sheets or bayonets, ledgers or guns?
Both the rules, which were putatively set down to prevent misuse of the allocated funds, and the irrationalities described above, which arise directly from the rules, are entirely understandable. It's exceedingly difficult to set rigid rules in place without creating the occasion for irrationalities.
On reading yesterday's Curmudgeonly tirade, reader Wince (yes, he of the distressingly static Wince And Nod weblog) commented thus:
Although I am pro-life, I believe a Federal Law against Partial-Birth Abortion is unconstitutional because Congress does not have the authority to pass it. They are attempting to usurp that authority by claiming abortion fits under the inter-state commerce clause, which is pure horse hockey.
Your Curmudgeon couldn't quite believe his eyes. Did Congress really do that? It seems incredible, when the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments cover the necessary legal ground quite well.
But they did:
Section 1531. Partial-birth abortions prohibited(a) Any physician who, in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce, knowingly performs a partial-birth abortion and thereby kills a human fetus shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.
It would appear that Congress has not learned from its recent reversals on this score. (It would also appear that whoever advises Congress on matters of Constitutional law badly needs a refresher course.) Partial-birth abortions do not affect interstate commerce, unless unborn children have an ability to order goods telepathically, a service Amazon has not yet announced.
Back when money was gold or silver coins rather than paper proxies of some sort, one of the nastiest things one could call another man was "chiseler." A chiseler was one who clipped precious metal off the rims of coins, reducing their weight and therefore their real value, and kept the clippings to sell as bullion. As a countermeasure to chiseling, many a merchant kept a set of truing dies, usually cut right into the wood of his countertop. A coin had to fit the appropriate die snugly for the merchant to accept it at face value. Later on, when technology made it possible, higher-value coins were produced with milled rims, to make chiseling instantly detectable.
Today, a chiseler is one who tries to work the edges of a rule to his own advantage, at others' expense.
A great deal of government naughtiness is plainly chiseling. The road-hazard sign mentioned at the top of this screed is a minor example. The use of the Constitution's Interstate Commerce Clause to empower federal lawmaking about so much that is plainly not interstate commerce is a major one.
Even though rigid rules such as our federal Constitution can create a lot of frustrated irritation among us when we'd like Congress to act in some way, they're fundamentally necessary. They protect us from the immeasurable harms a government can inflict on us under the fiction of serving our "needs." When we allow their edges to be chiseled to create entryways for things we deem necessary, but which the Framers did not foresee, we weaken that protection and create the preconditions for an explosion of tyranny.
Anything that's really necessary, but that requires an expansion of Constitutional grants of power, or a weakening of the protections of individual rights, can be addressed with a Constitutional amendment, as Prohibition was in the last century. If its backers can't get it approved by three-fourths of the state legislatures, it's odds-on that we don't really need it.
Besides, your Curmudgeon, who's driven the same route to work every morning for the last seventeen years, knows quite well that Exit XX is to YYY Road. And he never takes that exit anyway. But that's neither here nor there.
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