Query: If all politics is local — as many say — have local Tea Partiers gone blind to over-reaching government in their own backyards?
Or are Tea Partiers effectively co-opted by local pols’ self-serving participation in the local Tea Party groups and thus prevented from seeing any evil in governments smaller than state level?
If so, smaller-government activists are missing prime targets for their blunt weapons.
Exhibit in point: Peachtree City’s government by survey.
The Peachtree City Council — they of the newly minted 1.25 mill* increase in local taxes and no layoffs for government workers — differs little in philosophical reach from Obama Democrats and the Dems’ interest group-driven politics.
Don’t like untethered dogs on cart paths? Hitch your little aggrieved group to an always-ready-to-regulate city bureaucrat, and — presto! — an instant new ban on a previous unfettered action that council members add to a growing list of new city regulations.
Crinkle your nose at gas golf carts? No problem, city regulators can crank out a ban on the nasty things by next council meeting date, and council can add yet another ban on things that free folks once took as givens.
Want to “keep Peachtree City special”? No problem, city employees can justify every one of PTC’s current well-paid and well-benefitted staff as indispensable to specialness and City Council swallows it whole. Tax increase ordered by staff? Tax increase will be compliantly voted by council.
Who owns Peachtree City? Not the residents; the owners are the ones who respond to city-staff-generated surveys.
Well, the surveys surely are scientific, you protest, like the random sample surveys taken by Gallup and Rasmussen.
In your dreams. No, the Peachtree City Council has resorted to governing by totally unscientific, non-random online and returned mail surveys. Just like those unchecked “Family Feud” gameshow surveys, the city population now is subject to council votes based on surveys that would be laughed out of any basic Statistics 101 class.
And the latest: PTC cops now will be handing out tickets to people fishing in Lake Peachtree without a state license. When will police Chief Skip Clark seek council approval to buy a department Jet-Ski to apprehend those dangerous villains dragging a troll line behind a canoe?
Do these council members have any discernible principles of governance underlying their approach to casting votes? To ask the question is to answer it: None that are on consistent public display.
You never know what these council members will do next. Are there any advocates for banning public use of salt? Get three or four of you anti-salt folks together and call City Hall in an angry lather. You’ll have your salt ban ordinance prepared for a vote by next month. God knows how the council would swing on that one.
Maybe what we should do is call for a tax on tea in Peachtree City. But I despair that even a tea tax would get the Tea Partiers focused on attacking expanding nanny government within the borders of Fayette County.
After all, they’ve got the big picture to worry about. Forget about loss of freedom in our own city.
*[Correction: Sentence originally and erroneously said “percent.” Sentence has been corrected to say “mill” instead.
