Let us be honest. I’m only a 93% Libertarian and roughly a 90% patriot. That’s why I curse our Alabama Legislature’s proposal to mount cameras at traffic intersections, but view with calm equanimity the wiretapping of suspects or even suspected suspects who’d like to blow up New York City; or poison Chicago’s water supply or otherwise harm me or my countrymen.
A democracy only works if you vote your self-interest and I have no murderous plans. So I’m not worried about a few flawed interrogations of terrorist candidates or kinsmen. It’s a great tradeoff: a small price for a humane society to pay for a major life-saving bonus.
Those darn cameras on the other hand are as intrusive as pollen in springtime and pay off in pennies. Some impatient citizen (like me) busts the red light and is hit with a hundred dollar fine. Many a late-nite, maybe midnite — I’ve sat at the lighted but empty intersection, expending energy, polluting our environment. Fuming, you might say. And once, maybe twice I gunned through the red. I’m not only confessing but writing my state representative to vent my outrage at his camera concept.
And since I am a 93% (maybe 98%) Libertarian, I’ll tell him if he replaced the state-decreed light with a traffic circle, we’d get the state out of our commuting life and traffic would flow like beer at my corner tavern.
