Towing the line on democracy

By Jason Lewis

Some time a while back, people stopped making up words. Maybe it is because words, like oil, are made from prehistoric things that inexplicably came into being only to rot themselves into something useful. Nonetheless, the problem that comes with a deficiency in nominogenesis is that we, in an attempt to conserve what precious few words we have, have taken to ascribing multiple meanings to the same string of letters.

Take for example the word “steal.” The five constituent letters synergize to form a word that has a legal meaning, a sportive meaning, a moral meaning and an idiomatic meaning (e.g. That deal was a steal). While there are so many meanings for the word “steal,” I am only referring to the moral meaning when I refer to what the towing companies do.

There is no dispute to be had that, legally, car relocation services do not steal cars. But just because it is protected by the majority consensus of what universally is regarded as a group of corrupt people (I’m referring to politicians) does not change the applicability of the moral, colloquial definition of the word “steal.”

With the most inflammatory example I can muster, I would like to point out that the Holocaust was legal.

Towing is a service that can only be offered by entities licensed to do so. Licensing, by definition, allows an entity to legally perform an action that is otherwise illegal. By doing this, lawmakers create an inhomogeneity in the rights of we, the people. Doing so leads to inherent differences in people aside from their natural endowments.

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Now, instead of people being limited only by their own intellect, their own creativity, or their own tenacity, they are limited by pieces of paper. While perhaps some limits need to be imposed and others would be nice to impose, a true democracy relies on these limits being applied to everyone or no one.

The purpose of the democracy is to create a government where all of the citizens are equal. The government’s purpose is to perform the functions that need to be done, but are otherwise denied to whole of citizenry. These things can include killing, forcible detainment and taxation. For this reason, functions like towing should be a function of the government.

There is the law, and there is the degeneration, or corruption, of the law. The truth is that there are times when laws need to be ignored for the sake of the good of the people. What that “good” may be is disputable and immaterial to this argument.

The important thing to get out of this is that corruption, while sometimes necessary, historically tends to beget corruption.

It is in the spirit of limiting corruption that I state that private towing should be outlawed. If there is a need to perform an act of corruption that corruption needs to be contained as much as possible. This is effected in a democracy by limiting law-breaking practices to the same entity that made the laws to begin with; the government.

Private towing companies violate no laws in the performance of their job, but they do violate the basic concept of democracy by existing. By legally skirting the laws that apply to the majority of citizens, they are a well-established tribute to the corruption that has leaked forth from the government and into the rest of the nation. Personal grudges with towing aside, everyone should see that to allow people to act in one manner, while imprisoning others for acting the exact same way (think grand theft auto) is fundamentally wrong.

Many people may not see any alternative to what is going on now but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one. More importantly, just because you cannot see a better solution at the moment, that doesn’t mean that one doesn’t exist. There are better alternatives, but that is another issue and another column.

For now, my concern is the inherently un-democratic nature of allowing licensed thieves. And I can only hope, for the sake of democracy, it is your concern, too.