Resist the Road Tax

Like most people of middle-class origins, we were raised to respect the police.   We do, when they act to thwart real crime and apprehend criminals.

But not when they shake-down citizens for money, like third-world police-thugs.

Lately the police, especially the State Police, have been doing a lot of it.

Since the beginning of the year, it's been impossible to miss the sudden, quantum increase in police hiding in speed traps everywhere you go in western New York.   Whether you drive around town, on the interstates or on the Thruway, it's been painfully conspicuous.

One very recently retired State Trooper tells us that in response to its "revenue shortfall"   (translation:  its refusal to control spending)  Albany recently ordered that monthly speeding ticket quotas for the Troopers be hiked significantly.   Remember that when the ticket is for speeding, it's the State that gets the fine.   And then gets to impose a "surcharge" on the fine (of course -- this is New York!)

We've commented before that New York's unrealistically low speed limits have little to do with public safety and everything to do with the State extracting yet more money from its residents.   When government sets speed limits too low, then everyone is "speeding" -- and the State has what's really a randomly-imposable Road Tax.

If you doubt this analysis, consider the evidence of your own eyes, as cops hiding in speed traps increase proportionately with Albany's desperation for more cash.

The State's degradation of its police in this way should be offensive to any of us. Troopers join the force to protect and to help the public.   Albany has made them into tax-collectors with guns.

As such, police have become nothing more than instrumentalities of a predatory and malignant State.   Enemies of the People, in the moral cellar with wife-beaters, public employee unions and members of the state legislature.

It's against the police, as tax-collectors, that ordinary citizens need to push back.  And New York's arbitrary Road Tax is one tax where the individual citizen can push back.

Coming Next: How to Fight Back