Why People Hate Government
A meditation on parking tickets in Los Angeles
Sitting on my front porch in the middle of Los Angeles, California, I saw a drama unfold that encapsulates why many of us dislike the ways in which governments affect our everyday lives. In this holiday season, it serves as a parable of sorts of the relationship between an often beleaguered people and their often Leviathan-esque civil institutions.
Every Monday morning, from 8:00 a.m. until noon, cars cannot be parked on my side of the street, according to posted signs. If your car is parked in this zone, you will receive a $60 parking ticket from a parking enforcement officer. On Tuesday mornings, it’s the other side of the street you have to avoid during these early hours. People live their lives according to these rules, shuffling their cars around and driving through the neighborhood in search of safe spaces for their automobiles, in order to avoid the aforementioned fines.
Why do these signs exist? Why the rules, the fines, the enforcement officers? Why, to benefit everyone, to contribute to the common good, in the form of weekly street sweeping.
We all pay taxes and fees to the city of Los Angeles, and in turn, the city provides us with services such as trash pick up and street sweeping. This is not complicated. If someone leaves their car on the side of the street that is to be cleaned, the street cannot be properly cleaned. The parking fine is an incentive to ensure that everyone moves their car. The purpose of this exercise seems relatively clear: “We will fine you if you obstruct our service to the community, so be sure not to obstruct that service.”
Los Angeles uses this system to great effect. According to 2013 data, the City of Angels ranks second in the entire country in extracting revenue from parking violations. (It’s a California thing—three of the top 10 cities on the list are from the Golden State.)
Enter my friend Jesse, who was stopping by to help us with our small home business. Jesse arrived after this Monday morning’s round of tickets were doled out, and after the street sweeping had already taken place. It was between 11:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m., but closer to 11:30 a.m., if I’m not mistaken.
When Jesse got out of his car, I said something along the lines of
Hey man, you might not want to park there; they can give you a ticket until noon… Actually, they already gave out tickets earlier, and they swept the streets a few minutes ago, so you should be ok. I mean, they could technically still give you a ticket, but I don’t think they would.
You can guess what happened shortly thereafter, as I sat on my front porch, grading papers. I looked up to see a second parking enforcement official drive away in his ticketmobile, having given Jesse a fresh $60 ticket less than 30 minutes before the parking ban lifts on Mondays, long after the street sweeping had been concluded.
To quote Ben Affleck impersonating Keith Olbermann (complaining about the eviction of his cat, Mrs. Precious Perfect, from his apartment building):
And there it was. All perfectly legal. Like the 1942 internment of more than 100,000 Japanese American citizens. Or the forced relocation of the Cherokee on the Trail of Tears. Or the monstrous injustice of our nation’s Jim Crow laws. It was ALL perfectly legal!! AND!! EVERY BIT AS WRONG!!! IF NOT!! Indeed, MORE SO!!
This is how I felt in the moment of ticket-induced realization.
What I saw had nothing to do with street sweeping. That had already happened. It had nothing to do with the common good. It had nothing to do with incentives; those are established with the first ticket-doling sweep of each Monday and Tuesday morning.
It’s about the money. It’s taxation without rationale. It’s a hidden fee. Trick the people parking on the street into giving your government more money than it already takes.
There is a counterpoint here, though. As my wife argued, “They probably don’t know that the street is already swept; they probably don’t communicate with each other.” Even better. The disconnect between the officer providing incentive and the workers actually providing the service is indicative of the ways large institutions and organizations operate: It doesn’t matter what the actual point of the exercise is; the point as it plays out in real life is to do the thing the government says you should do, or pay the consequences.
This is all a bit dramatic, you might say. Get over it; the rule was posted on a sign. Don’t park there during that period of the week, period.
If the rules are all that matters, and not the reasoning behind the rules, this is absolutely right. Obey. But remember, these kinds of rules are often used by governments to quietly tax the poorest among us, something which should give us pause as to the justice of this kind of government function. This was covered by a number of outlets in 2015 in the aftermath of the tragedy and protests in Ferguson, Missouri.
The Justice Department’s report details how Ferguson operated a vertically integrated system — from street cop to court clerk to judge to city administration to city council — to raise revenue for the city budget through increased ticketing and fining.
In Ferguson, and in many other places across the United States, it could be argued, as the federal report does, that “city, police and court officials for years have worked in concert to maximize revenue at every stage of the enforcement process, beginning with how fines and fine enforcement processes are established.”
This is all anecdotal, in other words, until it is not. These kinds of instances of irrational or unjust taxation of (especially poor) citizens of a given city, neighborhood, or county only serve to exacerbate feelings of resentment and mistrust of the systems, institutions, and officers who are supposed to be serving their constituents.
And, if this kind of minor abuse of the rules and of power is so common, small-government advocates are, I think, reasonable to suspect that even more insidious and outrageous abuses of government power are happening at the highest levels of our local, state, and federal institutions.
