Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I am writing to the City Council where I live, and to the Mayor, whom I happen to know slightly, with a series of unique suggestions. The first is that the city’s police budget be increased by sixteen percent—the same percentage by which New York’s police budget is being irrationally slashed. I don’t know exactly how much that is, but I would be willing to endure a slight raise in sales taxes to make it happen. (I don’t know how to increase the budget of the Sheriff’s Department but I’d give them thirty-two percent.)

Moreover, I want to see my hometown declare itself a sanctuary city—for statues. It sickens and it angers me to see historic remembrances torn down, mutilated, and burned by hordes of moronic vandals and barbarians. Bad enough that they destroy statues of General Robert E. Lee, a man universally recognized as one of the great gentlemen and geniuses of his time, bad enough they tear down statues of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy. Both men were abolitionists who contributed to anti-slavery organizations. What they were fighting for was independence from a corrupt government that was draining them dry and then lying about it. We have inherited those lies today.

There is a great deal about Theodore Roosevelt that I don’t admire—he was a war-monger and tried to destroy the free market system in America—and a great deal more that I do. Teddy always led from the front, where the enemy fire was thickest and he was a great believer in the American West. He was a sickly boy who learned to break broncos. If anybody ever deserved to be memorialized with an heroic horse-statue, it was Teddy Roosevelt.

But as I often do, I have digressed. I want anybody in the Marxist-Leninist East or in Soviet California to be invited to ship the statues they don’t like anymore to my hometown. I would love to get up in the morning, look out my window, and behold the noble likeness of John Wayne, of Christopher Columbus, of George Washington, even of Abraham Lincoln, whom I have compared to V.I. Lenin. They can put a statue of Thomas Jefferson, the greatest American who ever lived, on my front lawn—or in my living room. These are men (there, I said it) for better or for worse, who made America the modern miracle it is today. They created American exceptionalism. They aren’t just a part of history, they are history.

Another way that we can become a sanctuary city is to welcome police officers from failed municipalities like Minneapolis, New York, or Los Angeles who have been laid off—or grossed out—by gutless, trendy liberals in their governments mindlessly doing the bidding of communist shock-troops like Black Lives Matter who desire to demolish the fundamental structure of American society and substitute the politico-economic system that murdered 200 million people in the 20th century and is aiming to beat their record in this one.

Over the years I have been more than a little critical of the police, but given a choice between them and the intellectual heirs of Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Frederick Engels, Josef Stalin, Fidel Castro, Nicolas Maduro, and Daniel Ortega, I will side with the cops every time. The refugees in blue could come here to retire or to practice their trade. Either way they would be great additions to our community. But they would have to get used to the very un-Minneapolis, un-New York, and un-Los Angeles fact that, out here in Flyover Country, everybody is well-equipped and ready to defend their lives, their property, and their rights. That’s precisely why it’s so peaceful here. As Robert Heinlein put it, “An armed society is a polite society.“

This is a small city, divided pretty evenly between townies of various stripes and one-stripe denizens of a state university. Most of the time, I am ashamed to say, it votes blue. At any given moment the City Council may be packed with collectivist poseurs and academic pseudo-intellectuals who will absolutely detest these ideas (I don’t know, I don’t follow local politics). But since they can’t seem to think their way out of a wet paper bag, to hell with them. If it took my advice, my modest little city would become famous the world over as a beacon of sanity and tolerance, a stalwart buttress of Western Civilization.

And that’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.