A Perfect Example

A Perfect Example

In the post below I wrote:

We read here on the internet, on an almost daily basis, of events where government actors abuse their powers in egregious ways against individuals - and no one's "threshold of outrage" is exceeded. In fact, when someones threshold is exceeded, it's a rare, newsworthy event! Man bites dog!

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Our job, then, is not to "Frighten the White People," it's to make them MAD. It's to make them "pro-freedom, pro-individual, pro-principles." It's to educate them.

It's to MAKE THEM THINK.

And hope we haven't waited too long.

How many of you have heard of this:

Fischer: Outrage in Idaho: Feds send man to prison for protecting town from flooding

Lynn Moses will be locked up in federal prison next Wednesday. His crime? Protecting the city of Driggs, Idaho from flooding.

When Mr. Moses began to develop a subdivision along Teton Creek in 1980, Teton County required him to implement an engineer’s plan to modify the Teton Creek stream bed to prevent the flooding of subdivision property, caused by the buildup of gravel bars and downed trees, during high water flows in the spring.

In fact, the county would not allow him even to record the plat for the subdivision until the modification work had been done, and only allowed the development after requiring the homeowner’s association to maintain the flood control channel year after year.

Teton Creek used to be a flowing stream, but irrigation diversion over 100 years ago dewatered the Creek and left the stream bed dry for all but two months a year at the most. Water only fills the stream bed when irrigators have more water than they can use. (Note: this means there is no “aquatic environment” here, nor any “wetland.”)

Officials from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were invited to a planning meeting with the county and Mr. Moses in 1980, but they soon left the meeting after informing county officials that they had “classified the stream as intermittent and therefore outside their jurisdiction.”

So working on plans developed by an engineer and approved – in fact, required – by the county, Mr. Moses got to work and cleared the channel of gravel bars and downed cottonwood trees to ensure that the channel would serve as a flood control structure.

Read. The. Whole. Thing.

And ask yourself: If you were Lynn Moses, what would keep YOU from going Carl Drega on any member of the government you could get your sights on?

Found originally at Random Nuclear Strikes, pointed to in a comment at Tam's.

Spread it around.

Liberally.

UPDATE: And another.