His Own Private Kingdom
Commentary: In which our self-sufficient hero says to heck with all those nitpicky, clock-punching bureaucrats.
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I am an independent guy. I take a lot of pride in doing for myself, like my dad and my granddad before me, and I don't need any bloated, out-of-control government holding my hand. When I found our local public schools to be less than satisfactory, I said the heck with them, and began schooling our kids at home. They've never been happier with the learning experience, and they score higher on standardized tests than 98 percent of the kids in the state. I don't waste my life waiting on bureaucracy and I never have. I own a quarter-ton pickup and a 10-foot plow blade, so I can plow our road and the right-hand lane of the freeway if necessary every winter, and with the Allis-Chalmers grader I bought at auction I keep all the local roads that I use smooth and well maintained year-round.
We grow a lot of our own fruits and vegetables out back, and any produce from the store I always inspect myself. As for the meats and poultry we buy, I carefully examine and certify every single piece using techniques I learned in a meat-inspecting class on the Internet. I do a more thorough job, too, than those spot-checking timeservers from the USDA. Hey -- it's my money, and it's my food, and I think I know better if it's going to give me botulism than some government scientist shuf-fling papers in a fully equipped laboratory somewhere.
I'm my own postal service, fire department, and sanitation. Don't need regular garbage pickup because I just dump our trash off the bluff. I told the EPA I'll handle all the groundwater monitoring and whatnot myself on a voluntary basis, and they signed off on that and thanked me -- more taxpayer dollars saved! And thanks to the recent tax cuts, I now have the personal resources to regulate interstate trade. I find I do this much more efficiently than a whole squad of ICC loafers ever could. When I see a truck I believe is running overweight in my area, I stop it by signaling with my new customized flashers. Then I check out the vehicle, write up the fine, submit the citation electronically to the driver's company, receive payment by wire transfer, and he's on his way.
If I want a bridge built, I build it. Forget about bond issues and the rest of that red tape -- I simply go out and get the job done. Just last week I finished spanning one of the largest rivers in this part of the country using pontoons and spare lumber. Now, maybe my bridge doesn't comply with every nitpicky specification of the DOT, but it's good enough for me. For matters of criminal justice, I run my own court of law in a spare bay of my equipment barn. Jail's down in the cellar. My wife handles the prisoners' meals and parole requests and so on before she starts teaching our kids in the morning and after she's done with chores at night. I get so mad when I think of all the money per prisoner the county is wasting. The only thing I ask of those padded-payroll government-employee types is that they get off my back and let me show what individual effort can do.
Same goes for air travel. Whenever I hear people whining about how some federal agency ought to make it safer to fly on com-mercial airlines, I want to take those folks aside and say, "Let's talk personal responsibility here. You're worried about safety -- you deal with it. If you think there should be an armed air marshal on your flight, hire one." That's what I do. And to be extra-secure, I have my oldest boy get on the computer and patch in to the air traffic control towers in the cities I'll be flying over. If there's a possible collision problem up ahead, he calls me on my cell phone, and I alert the captain. Listen, if you want something done right....
I've got my own little weather satellite, which I launched last year on a two-stage rocket I built from a kit. It was sending back data beautifully, so I didn't have to rely on politically skewed reports from the National Weather Service. But then the transponder broke, I think, and the signal quit. If our do-nothing Congress would repeal a few more of its confiscatory taxes, I would buy a bigger rocket and go up there and repair the glitch myself. Unfortunately, the big-government monopoly on space travel locks out ordinary entrepreneurs like me. I had a deal in the works with the Republic of Azerbaijan to sign a mutual-assistance treaty whereby I would trade some of the forest products my kids collect for surplus rocket technology left over from the Cold War. Then I got a letter from the feds politely reminding me that private citizens aren't allowed to enter into treaties with foreign governments. As if that's any of their concern!
I went ahead and did it anyway, and never looked back. I don't need obscure, long-forgotten phrases from the U.S. Constitution to tell me right from wrong. The toughest judge I face is the one in the mirror every morning. I am ruthlessly honest with myself, even about areas in which I could improve. I'm aware, for example, that I could do better at controlling public health. With a microscope I got at a yard sale, I've been trying to crack the genetic codes of drug-resistant tuberculosis, West Nile disease, and the avian flu, but with small progress so far. Similarly, my customs checks on traffic up at the Canadian border have until now been sporadic at best. I'm a firm believer in self-betterment, however, and I plan to make a little progress in these areas every day.
That's partly the reason I have been of two minds about the gay-marriage question. On the one hand, as a traditionalist, I want to affirm marriage between a man and a woman as the sacred building block of society. On the other hand, my own wife is kind of overextended, and I may have to marry a few more. Plus, the whole man-woman concept is an issue for me, because I think I might also have to marry a few guys. Not that I want to, you understand -- we just need more bodies around the place, at least until some of our kids get big enough to do the heavy lifting and drug interdiction and so on. And of course in the interest of fairness I would want all my spousal partners, male and female, to share in every government benefit coming to me.
Nobody ever said that the lifestyle I've chosen would be easy. Let others follow the less-demanding paths of conciliation, group-think, and compromise. I prefer to go my own way, taking comfort in the thought that our country has always owed its survival to people like me. Every night at two or three in the morning when I've finally finished all my jobs and paperwork, I step out on the porch and breathe deep of the cool air. Then I turn on a pair of speakers set up on the lawn and I sing a little karaoke to some of my favorite rock tunes, just to unwind. A sense of satisfaction, of justification, fills my soul. As the lights blink on in neighboring houses, I imagine the occupants unable to sleep from worry about creeping government intervention invading their lives. I can only pity them for the sheeplike communal mentality that keeps them down. In their pajamas, they pace the floor and fret over endless burdens of regulation and bureaucracy. They don't even see I've got the answer right here.
Illustration: Ross MacDonald
