The people who have read my early draft of Tail of the Dragon, my new book due out in 2012 all have had a common reaction, “Great story, but wow, you really hate cops!”

No, it’s not that I hate cops. I hate politics, and police officers enforce the law of politicians. I see many of the laws that are currently on the books in any city, state, or federal ledger to be simple work creation measures designed to give law makers something to do, a way to justify the enormous amounts of money we pay them in public office. Sometimes, the police that are hired to enforce, “the law” have legitimate claims to danger such as bank robberies, drug busts, and armed confrontations. But most of the time and we all know this, police offers don’t have a whole lot to do, so they become the minions of the bloated politician and the rules they have created who have lost all common sense. Case in point, the video below is of a group of young girls who want to raise money to go to a water park by selling lemonade. The police shut down the stand because it is against “the law.”

The permit process is largely created under the guise of authenticating an endeavor. The original thinking is that if people will take the time to get a permit, then some measure of control can be enforced by whoever issues the permit, and that is for the public good. But like all things in politics, permits have become a cash cow and a form of abuse culminating into complete breakdowns of rationality, such as what happened to these poor little girls.

But it doesn’t end there. Police are law enforcement created to enforce the law. They are not law contemplators. They take orders like blind machines and do not question the authenticity of their superiors. If a law is bad, they have no opinion. If a prosecutor or some other law-maker wants to twist the wording of a city ordinance for their own ends, then the police can be called in like a private army to wreck the lives of whomever is at fault, whether those at fault are even aware of their illicit deeds. Because nobody can claim ignorance to the law, even if the wording is something you think you understand. If the prosecutor “interprets” the wording differently than you do, then you will be in court to battle out the definition and case-law will be created off your case. This is the situation with the woman in this next video; she is building an organic garden under what she believes to be the law. But a politician looking to make a name for himself doesn’t like it, so he is shutting it down, or trying to.

A common occurrence in dealing with any large organization private or public is that accountability is often less enforced because of the sheer number of people employed. This makes dealing with them a real problem especially when a mistake is made on their end. In the video below the homeowner went to jail and lost everything because of a bank error and it was the police who showed up and put him in jail. Because the interpretation of the law almost always favors lawmakers and those lawmakers are closely tied to those who give them campaign donations for their elected office, the police can be made to completely serve the needs of those with power.

Meanwhile it is all of us who pay taxes that fund the entire enterprise. We are funding our own demise.

Without some sort of check’s and balance system which is what court is supposed to be, the law will grow itself out of control. Small ordinances created with good intentions will shut down the lemonade stands of little girls trying to learn to become entrepreneurs, or people participating in self-reliance by growing their own food. Or homeowners who get stuck trusting the system and being caught in the middle of an error, spending the weekend in jail and having their assets seized while a bunch of public employee buffoons try to figure out what to do and how to cover up their mistake. It is the police that these public officials use to perpetuate their activity. We are headed toward this type of situation which can be seen in Greece, where secret police dressed in plain clothes are able to arrest people from the crowd, because “the law” states it’s for the public good.

So is my story, the Tail of the Dragon anti-cop. No. But it does question the validity of law enforcement and the entire process from which law is created and then used against the tax payers who paid for it. All too often what we discover in any reasonable investigation is that the law was used to make somebody wealthy, and law enforcement was there like a personal army to advance the strategic position of those in power to gain an advantage over those they seek to crush.

Police are needed to some extent to keep some order in the world. But how much is too much, and what power should they be given? For me, as a general rule, if a cop has time to sit on the side of the road and pull people over for speeding, or for not having on a seat belt, then that is one cop too many. If that is all that officer has to do but harass the public for more money, then we are wasting our money on that employee. Because it’s such people who will come to your house to arrest you for some run-in with the law, whether it’s your child setting up a lemonade stand, or you not growing in your front yard what the politicians think you should be, or worse and most likely, you’ll find yourself in the middle of a bank error. It will be the cop who’s doing nothing on the side of the road who will be on call to serve the needs of corrupt politics, and the scam is ultimately on you, the tax payer. Because it was you who put that cop on the street to begin with, with a great salary, and attractive pension under the watchful care of a public sector union, the FOP, which is so closely tied to politics they might as well be the same thing. No, I’m not too hard on the police in my book.

Just hard enough……………………

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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