"Code" and Bureaucracy

Grand Prairie, TX — A hard-working Texas man was thrown in jail after a warrant was issued for his arrest for an overgrown lawn.

Rick Yoes is the campus electrician for Tarrant County College and usually works from before sun-up to after sun-down.

In September of last year, he and his daughter had been hard at work and were unable to cut the lawn on their Grand Prairie home. The local government then claimed that because Yoes could not mow his lawn, he now owed them $1,700 for his grass that achieved a height of over six inches.

A warrant was subsequently issued for his arrest and police were dispatched to keep us safe from the dangers of this man’s lawn. Yoes turned himself in on Saturday.

Unable to pay the fine, Yoes was forced to use up all of his vacation days and find a replacement for his position as he serves out his 17 day sentence in the county jail—to pay his debt to society . . . .

http://www.alternet.org/texas-man-thrown-jail-weeks-because-his-lawn-was-overgrown

The American people constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day.

H. L. Mencken

When "code enforcement" pushes past regulation of the commercial and the publicly-accessible to arrogate power over private citizens on private property, it exceeds its Constitutional boundaries:

Congress by the Ninth Amendment has not the slightest power to tell us how high to grow our grass, and what Congress cannot Constitutionally legislate the Executive cannot Constitutionally enforce, decree or order, and the courts cannot Constitutionally interpret, find or order, and our freedom from any such all-encompassing and niggling bureaucratic totalitarianism on the Federal level as Federal citizens is extended to us on the State level as State Citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment—and States cannot delegate to lesser jurisdictions, such as cities and counties, powers they do not have.

But a nation of sheep will be shorn.

And ruled by foxes and wolves.

Keywords: bureaucracy, code enforcement, Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment, liberty, Ninth Amendment, Tenth Amendment, totalitarianism