Live Free and Face the Wrath of the Historic Commission

Ha! I suspected as much! One of my old New Hampshire friends, commenting on cellar holes, reports:

God forbid that anyone here in [this lovely, high-income New Hampshire town] remove a stone from one of the many stone walls. One fellow put up a multi million dollar home, and he got so much grief because he opened up a slot in the stone wall for his driveway. WOW, the Historic Commission made an exception., after a long battle. We also have a big thing here about cutting down trees along some of the very narrow dirt roads, that are a hazard, and especially this past winter when he had an ice storm and the trees were hanging down over the roadway.

To repeat, ha! This is New Hampshire we are talking about, home of Live Free or Die, the state where no one over the age of consent has to wear a seatbelt, and every motorcyclist has a constitutional right to splay his brains (if he can find them) on a public highway. But apparently if you try to get the icicles out of driving range, it's all "touch not a single bough."

It's a hobbyhorse of mine: there really aren't any libertarians. Some may come closer than others, but for every one, we can find one or a hundred issues on which they are perfectly willing to slam their tastes down someone else's throat.

I can hear the protests now. But the stone wall is different, they will say, because this is one place where your tastes affect me. Well, of course they affect me. There wasn't a Mrs. Grundy born who couldn't make that argument, and with a perfectly straight face, about anything that got her blood up. Or they'll say: but this time it is money, you are damaging my property values. Well, since when did vulgar, venal property values trump something so sacred as our God-given right to cut a gap for a driveway?

There is a deep-seated paradox here, built into the fabric of our perception of anarchism. Nobody wants Hobbes' anarchism, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." What we want is a chance to impose values so self-evidently (to us) right that we don't even know they are being imposed.

So, enjoy your stone walls, New Hampshirites: best way I can tell, it was my ancestors who by great sweat and effort rolled them into place, and is nice to know that somebody wants to preserve them. But don't give me that dog twaddle about "liberty." You're as tightly wound a society as any I know.