Sunday, October 13, 2013

Steyn: Park Service Paramilitaries

I kind of like the term I came up with-the Parkstapo.

Mark Steyn analyses the extraordinary effort that the administration is making to make tourists, kids with cancer, veterans and regular Americans suffer. 

It is a real pity that all these Parkstapo troops are just following orders. Having a cushy government job has made them completely blind to the utter disgrace of their behaviour toward their fellow citizens-the ones they are supposed to serve and the ones from which their very paycheque is drawn.

"It’s not King Barack’s land; it’s supposed to be the people’s land, and his most groveling and unworthy subjects shouldn’t require a dispensation by His Benign Majesty to set foot on it. It is disturbing how easily large numbers of Americans lapse into a neo-monarchical prostration that few subjects of actual monarchies would be comfortable with these days. But then 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."