President Obama thinks he can prevail in the government shutdown fight by deliberately making life as difficult as possible for the maximum number of ordinary Americans.
We’ve seen this before. After suffering a defeat on the sequester, he made himself a laughingstock (as illustrated by these cartoons) with his Chicken-Little warnings that a tiny bit of fiscal restraint would grind government to a halt.
But his sequester hysterics are trivial compared to what the Obama Administration is doing today with the National Park Service.
Here are some unbelievable excerpts from Mark Steyn’s funny yet horrifying National Review column.
…the one place where a full-scale shutdown is being enforced is in America’s alleged “National Park Service,” a term of art that covers everything from canyons and glaciers to war memorials and historic taverns. The NPS has spent the last two weeks behaving as the paramilitary wing of the DNC, expending more resources in trying to close down open-air, unfenced areas than it would normally do in keeping them open. It began with the war memorials on the National Mall — that’s to say, stone monuments on pieces of grass under blue sky.
But it gets worse.
Not content with that, the NPS shock troops then moved on to insisting that privately run sites such as the Claude Moore Colonial Farm and privately owned sites such as Mount Vernon were also required to shut. When the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway declined to comply with the government’s order to close (an entirely illegal order, by the way), the “shut down” Park Service sent armed agents and vehicles to blockade the hotel’s driveway.
Think that’s bad? Read on.
..in South Dakota, having closed Mount Rushmore the NPS storm troopers additionally attempted to close the view of Mount Rushmore — that’s to say a stretch of the highway, where the shoulder widens and you can pull over and admire the stony visages of America’s presidents.
What happened in Yellowstone, though, is surreal. Like something from Cambodia during the Pol Pot years.
But perhaps the most extraordinary story to emerge from the NPS is that of the tour group of foreign seniors whose bus was trapped in Yellowstone Park on the day the shutdown began. They were pulled over photographing a herd of bison when an armed ranger informed them, with the insouciant ad-hoc unilateral lawmaking to which the armed bureaucrat is distressingly prone, that taking photographs counts as illegal “recreation.” “Sir, you are recreating,” the ranger informed the tour guide. And we can’t have that, can we? They were ordered back to the Old Faithful Inn, next to the geyser of the same name, but forbidden to leave said inn to look at said geyser. Armed rangers were posted at the doors, and, just in case one of the wily Japanese or Aussies managed to outwit his captors by escaping through one of the inn’s air ducts and down to the geyser, a fleet of NPS SUVs showed up every hour and a half throughout the day, ten minutes before Old Faithful was due to blow, to surround the geyser and additionally ensure that any of America’s foreign visitors trying to photograph the impressive natural phenomenon from a second-floor hotel window would still wind up with a picture full of government officials. The following morning the bus made the two-and-a-half-hour journey to the park boundary but was prevented from using any of the bathrooms en route, including at a private dude ranch whose owner was threatened with the loss of his license if he allowed any tourist to use the facilities.
No bathroom stops?!? Has the bureaucracy really become this punitive and vindictive? Sounds like the Park Service has the same training program as the IRS.
I wonder if the “you-are-recreating” ranger is related to Mr. Norlander?
Ironically, American citizens now have less rights to “public land” than English peasants in 1217.
…in actual monarchies the king takes a more generous view of “public lands.” Two years after Magna Carta, in 1217, King Henry III signed the Charter of the Forest, which despite various amendments and replacement statutes remained in force in Britain for some three-quarters of a millennium, until the early Seventies. If Magna Carta is a landmark in its concept of individual rights, the Forest Charter played an equivalent role in advancing the concept of the commons, the public space. Repealing various restrictions by his predecessors, Henry III opened the royal forests to the freemen of England, granted extensive grazing and hunting rights, and eliminated the somewhat severe penalty of death for taking the king’s venison. The NPS have not yet fried anyone for taking King Barack’s deer, but it is somewhat sobering to reflect that an English peasant enjoyed more freedom on the sovereign’s land in the 13th century than a freeborn American does on “the people’s land” in the 21st century.
Yet all this abuse serves no purpose for open-air parks and monuments.
The geyser stasi of the National Park Service have in effect repealed the Charter of the Forest. President Obama and his enforcers have the same concept of the royal forest that King John did. The government does not own this land; the Park Service are merely the janitorial staff of “we the people” (to revive an obsolescent concept). No harm will befall the rocks and rivers by posting a sign at the entrance saying “No park ranger on duty during government shutdown. Proceed beyond this point at your own risk.” And, at the urban monuments, you don’t even need that: It is disturbing that minor state officials even presume to have the right to prevent the citizenry walking past the Vietnam Wall.
So what’s the bottom line?
The National Park Service should be out of the business of urban landmarks, and the vast majority of our “national” parks should be returned to the states.
Amen.
In my libertarian fantasy world, I have a list of priorities. I start with big things like entitlement reform and flat tax.
Then I move to medium goals like shutting down the department of agriculture and getting out of NATO.
At the bottom of my list are things like ending the drug war. It used to be that getting rid of national parks was in this category.
But the bureaucrats at the NPS have behaved so despicably that this is now much higher on my list of priorities. Simply stated, they’ve earned our disdain.
Let’s close with some amusing cartoons on this topic.
This Nate Beeler gem may be my favorite from today’s collection.
Michael Ramirez unveils a monument to arrogance.
Chip Bok shows who’s the real ideologue.
Last but not least, Glenn McCoy captures the President’s petulance.
P.S. Other examples of government shutdown humor can be enjoyed by clicking here, here, here, here, and here.
P.P.S. Excerpts from some of my other favorite Mark Steyn columns can be read here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
[…] bottom line is that nothing really bad happens when there’s a shutdown (notwithstanding petty efforts by bureaucrats) for the simple reasons that only “non-essential” parts of the […]
[…] travelers during the 2013 sequester. Sort of like the jerks at the National Park Service, who did something similar that year during the partial government shutdown (though at least we got some good humor out of […]
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[…] a humorous fringe benefit to government shutdowns, as you can see by clicking here, here, here, here, and […]
[…] Though not as outrageous as the crass behavior of the politicized National Park Service. […]
I scoff at the destruction of national parks where are the wolves going to go or the bison? Are we going to kill them off to! Our military spending is higher than like than the next couple militaries combined. And im sure that 30+ million going to drug warfare is doing just great when theres a crystal whatever is blossoming all over hmpf some use of money as the most powerful military. why are so many illegal drugs getting across the borders. The idea of destroying the national parks and services only will lead to the nation wide dust bowl. If theres anything that we humans are the primairy reason why so much of the earth is baren earth or sand. We are earths greatest species as well the most destructive
[…] Service bureaucrats threatening a business if it allowed tourists to use bathroom […]
One has to wonder what would have happened if the visitors to these sites would have stormed those who were guarding them- having the benefits of higher numbers. Would those armed officers have shot somebody? If so, this would have made the perfect “Kent State moment” for libertarian causes. Of course, libertarians seem less willing to give their lives for a cause. that’s why they never win these battles.
[…] Last but not least, here are WWII vets who failed to obey the statist clowns at the National Park Service. […]
it’s very surreal…. an American president using his authority to impose unnecessary sanctions on the American people… designed to inconvenience and annoy the population… in hopes of gaining a political advantage…
it’s just another indication that the government is no longer on our side……………..
Are u not saving public money from closing the NPS sites?
No eyes will be opened. With every passing day my European experiences confirm that the degree of vigilance needed to avoid Europeanization is beyond what the average American voter-lemming imagines. The road to serfdom is much more ingenious than most Americans imagine, naturally self-leveling and naturally finding the path of least resistance to expand. It is not any one person’s evil plan. It is the inherent natural order of human societal dynamics.
Cuddly, lovable and benevolent institutions, with huge followings, like WWF, Greenpeace, EDF etc. are looking forward to the fences becoming permanent even after the inevitable reactivation of the NPS.
While shutdown gimmicks bring the deviant tactics of government expansion to the forefront, the thuggish, ubiquitous and increasingly intimidating behavior that authorities project at US national parks is not a new phenomenon. There is a pervasive authoritarian tension when one visits those parks, and it can be primarily attributed to laws now been instigated by a majority who are increasingly becoming urban dwellers (and soon increasingly Euro-style apartment dwellers) who have little interest in nature other than the occasional urbanite walk or “been there done that ‘wild’ (yeah dude really wild you had to go without Starbucks for a whole day!) adventure”. The focus of these urban dwellers is now increasingly concentrating on raising obstacles for distant others who want to enjoy distant parks. Parks that the apartment dwellers themselves are unlikely to frequent. So when it comes to obstacles against Arizonans enjoying their local parks? The New Yorker says yes! And so do a majority of dwellers in other distant states, especially those confined to city apartment living.
So, Wyomingites want to snowmobile in Yellostone? Now what is the chance that I’ll ever get to do that more than a couple of times in my life? So why should he? He may after all damage some twigs (a tiny minute remote externality for me) so let me put some restrictions on his fun! I get my pitchfork, head to our federal representative with my other grumpy oppressed apartment dwelling buddies and we demand: “No more Yellowstone snowmobiles” …
So as pitchfork democracy gains ground, the ecosystem turns more and more towards tyranny — democratically imposed, but still tyranny. So now that you outlawed my snowmobiling, “I know who you are, those city liberals you must be, I’ll try to get together with my own revengeful pitchforks and we’ll try to outlaw your marriage in retaliation,…” … until we all get screwed in a round robin of ever shifting majorities imposing laws to control ever more things. Then we will hand over the laws to politicians to occasionally abolish (ha, ha) some laws. So the politicians will say “hey, these laws make little sense, and do more harm than good. You don’t need me anymore to be the monopoly gatekeeper of these particular activities. You may actually need less politician services and less politicians, I’m telling you” …. Sure, open your ears and you will hear it…
So this too will pass. Look for ever more collective control over national parks in the future. And as a swelling majority of ever crankier apartment dwellers gets drafted into the collective task of liberating mother earth from the compounding high growth rates of capitalism, expect ever more restrictions.
Marginal variances will compound to huge differences down the line. Which road will Americans take? It’s starting to become more and more evident….
America’s decline appears slow on a daily basis. But on a historical time scale, it is precipitous. Keep Hoping that Change to Euro-style coercive collectivism will restore prosperity. Keep hoping…
Understand what is happening around you and you’ll have the best chance of faring ok in a declining situation. Or hope that things won’t get too bad too soon… hope…
Outrageous, brutish behavior. Unfortunately it’s becoming par for the course.
The only good thing that may come of this is to open the eyes of the people to the fact that govt is inherently evil.
How can ending the drug war be at the bottom of your list?! If we ended the drug war, we’d probably reduce violent crime in this country by half…
Obama is silly sometimes!!!
[…] Time to Get Rid of the National Park Service […]