Freedom — and common sense — are under attack in this country

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Freedom — and common sense — are under attack in this country

By John Stossel, Creators Syndicate

Friday, July 16, 2010

Something’s happened to America, and it isn’t good. It’s become easier to get into trouble.

We’ve become a nation of a million rules.

Not the kind of bottom-up rules that people generate through voluntary associations. Those are fine. I mean imposed, top-down rules formed in the brains of meddling bureaucrats who think they know better than we how to manage our lives.

Cross them, and we are in trouble.

The National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) received an anonymous fax that a seafood shipment to Alabama from David McNab contained “undersized lobster tails” and was improperly packed in clear plastic bags, rather than the cardboard boxes allegedly required under Honduran law. When the $4 million shipment arrived, NMFS agents seized it. McNab served eight years in prison, even though the Honduran government informed the court that the regulation requiring cardboard boxes had been repealed.

How about this one? Four kindergartners — yes, 5-year-old boys — played cops and robbers at Wilson Elementary in New Jersey. One yelled: “Boom! I have a bazooka, and I want to shoot you.” He did not, of course, have a bazooka. Nevertheless, all four boys were suspended from school for three days for “making threats,” a violation of their school district’s zero-tolerance policy. School Principal Georgia Baumann said, “We cannot take any of these statements in a light manner.” District Superintendent William Bauer said: “This is a no-tolerance policy. We’re very firm on weapons and threats.”

Give me a break.

Here’s another: Ansche Hedgepeth, 12, committed this heinous crime: She left school in Washington, D.C., entered a Metrorail station to head home and ate a french fry. An undercover officer arrested her, confiscating her jacket, backpack and shoelaces. She was handcuffed and taken to the Juvenile Processing Center. Only after three hours in custody was the 12-year-old released into her mother’s custody. The chief of Metro Transit Police said: “We really do believe in zero-tolerance. Anyone taken into custody has to be handcuffed for officer safety.” She was sentenced to community service and now carries an arrest record. Washington’s Metro has since rescinded its zero-tolerance policy.

Keith John Sampson, a student-employee at Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis, had the temerity to read “Notre Dame Versus the Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan” during breaks on the job. One student complained because the book’s cover depicted the Klan. The university then found Sampson guilty of racial harassment! Thankfully, a great organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), came to his defense and got his school record cleared.

Palo Alto, Calif., ordered Kay Leibrand, a grandmother, to lower her carefully trimmed hedges. Leibrand argued that no one’s vision was obstructed and asked the code officer to take a look. He refused. Then the city dispatched two police officers. They arrested her, loaded her into a patrol car in front of her neighbors and hauled her down to the station.

In 2001, honor student Lindsay Brown parked her car in the wrong spot at her high school. A county police officer looked inside and saw a kitchen knife — a butter knife with a rounded tip. Because Lindsay was on school property, she had violated the zero-tolerance policy for knives. She was arrested, handcuffed and hauled off to county jail where she spent nine hours on a felony weapons possession charge. School Principal Fred Bode told a local paper, “A weapon is a weapon.”

Congress creates, on average, one new crime every week. Federal agencies create thousands more — so many, in fact that the Congressional Research Service itself said that merely counting them would be impossible.

This is a bad trend. As Lao Tsu said, “The more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.”

John Stossel is host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “Give Me a Break” and of “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.” Visit his website at www.john stossel.com.

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driz 2 years, 10 months ago

Stossel knows better than to try and make a larger point based completely on anecdotal evidence. I thought he was an investigative journalist?
Besides the fact that all these situations happened about a decade ago, the reference to the crime David McNab committed is woefully lacking in real facts. It was about much more than packing rules. It was actually much more about smuggling. The defendants in that case were found to have intentionally falsified import documents by utilizing a secret code to disguise the true size of the lobster tails. After federal special agents with NOAA Fisheries discovered and stopped their attempts to smuggle through waterborne shipping routes, the defendants imported large quantities of undersized lobster by commercial airlines. These air shipments contained virtually all undersized and illegally coded lobster. One particular air shipment contained over 26,000 undersized Honduran lobster tails. This investigation also involved the seizure of over 5,000 pounds of female egg-bearing lobster. In many instances, the eggs had been illegally clipped or removed to avoid detection.

I guess I'm not surprised though. Stossel has a long history as an investigative reporter of conjuring stories out of thin air. There is no doubt that schools, and city codes, and some others have silly rules from time to time. That's what happens after Columbine incidents, which still occur today. What Stossel fails to mention though is our societal correction of that problem. Palo Alto apoligized and corrected that action against Ms. Leibrand. Indiana Purdue university did the same with Mr. Sampson. For Ms. Brown and the knife charge?- the case was dismissed. So before we accept that freedom and common sense are "under attack" in this country, lets take those commonsense results into account.

batgirl 2 years, 10 months ago

Ah, the Fox "News" reporters, bless their little hearts - they've got nothing so they create, and their bleating followers swallow it. I remember the lobster crime - it was quite heinous.

Annsboy 2 years, 10 months ago

The zero tolerance policies are simply there to cover administrators tails, nothing more. Does anyone really think a person who intends to kill as many people as possible really thinks, "wait, they have a no tolerabce policy, darn...I was going to kill a bunch of people, now...what to do...guess i'll write a letter to the editor" give me a break. When I was a kid we played "war" every recess and we took a pocket knife to school as often as we wanted to carve our initials in a tree, if we got out of line we got spanked and there were half the discipline issues we have today, case closed, IMO

driz 2 years, 10 months ago

Ferdberfel: The point Stossel is making needs to be put in context. That was my only real point. Keep in mind also, that it is Stossel who is trying to add relevance to these things that happened about 10 years ago. I simply pointed out how long ago they all occurred.
The point I feel Stossel misses completely is societal reaction to these stories. You and I seem to agree (along with Stossel) that this type of ticky-tack enforcement of people is laughable. I simply note that almost everyone agrees with that. That's why all those stories were media darlings (again, 10 years ago) and why, people largely were outraged by them. And that's why Stossel misses the point completely. We all agreed they were outrageous and the efffected parties were vindicated. This shows a society with tons of common sense, not a society bereft of it. I fail to understand Stossel's point, other than, like a said, to conjure a story out of old facts.