Video: Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs (of Unconstitutional Government and Government-Mandated Monopolies)

The Federal Highway Administration is ordering, with the coercive arm of the federal government, all local governments to buy new street signs.   What's so important that the federal government had to force itself into local affairs?  Street signs should have mixed lettering, not just all CAPS.

Whew!  At least we can rest assured this coercive, unconstitutional, bureaucratic fiat is for high and good purposes.  (What's that old authoritarian maxim about the means and ends...)

Let's repeat this situation in different terms:  Local governments, funded by local taxpayers, have been ordered by an unelected bureaucratic wing of the central government to use local tax dollars to remove all existing street signs and replace said signs with new street signs.  (The term "federal government" will hereby be changed, by fiat of the author, to "central government" for the remainder of this post, for reasons that will be easily inferred by the reader.)   

Are local and city governments incapable of deciding for themselves which signs best suit their traffic conditions?  Put another way, is a categorical, one-size-fits-all federal government central government  edict going to work out best for every single local municipality across the country?

And what about that whole federalism thingy set up in the Constitution?  The federal government central government is allotted specific tasks it is constitutionally empowered to pursue.  Everything else, by default, falls to the state and local governments.  Skipping right over the state government and ordering local municipalities what to do and how to do it is an even broader, bolder slap to federalism than, say, arm-twisting state governments with federal highway funding. 

But wait!  It gets even worse.  Pick up at the 0:55 mark of the Fox News video below to hear about the private company that helped to fund the so-called research that went into this very important task of the central government that had to take place during a recession:


The 3M company that just happens to make the new-and-improved reflective material now mandated by the central government contributed to the research that revealed that every local government in the country just had to purchase and install new signs.  3M could deserve the good citizen award, one could suppose, for being so concerned about traffic safety they cut into their profit margin to help fund such research.  One big problem: 3M happens to make the reflective material that will be used in the manufacturing of all those signs that local governments are required by law to purchase.

As Dana Carvey's beloved Church Lady used to say, "Well isn't that conveeeeeenient?"

Side-stepping honest competition in an openly competitive market and using the force of government to corner the market and regulate out of business pesky little competitors is nothing new.  Ever since the federal government central government began interfering in the otherwise free and cooperative interactions of free individuals--the market--corporations have parlayed the regulative apparatus of the federal government central government to legally leverage for profits.  In other words, some corporations find it more convenient to use the coercive power of the federal government central government to make competition illegal and/or force the purchase of their products than compete openly by persuading consumers to freely purchase their goods.

As Tim Carney makes abundantly clear in his invaluable book, The Big Ripoff, the history of big government is the history of big business, and consumers and taxpayers have been paying a higher and higher price for the unholy alliance.

Who suffers in this anti-free market game?  We the People suffer, once as consumers paying artificially high prices for goods and a second time as taxpayers burdened with funding the bureaucracies and regulations that is at the heart of this mess.  And the bigger the federal government central government gets, the worse that problem.

If you have not read Carney's book, please buy a copy and do so.  There will soon be bright new street signs that show you the way to your local bookstore!