Fake License Plates! (missing some of the point)

Fake License Plates (from Slate)

Another classic middle-brow Slate article. It even manages to get some cheap digs in on Matthew Yglesias who used to write (badly) for Slate when it was really starting to lean hard into the online advice/meta-trash site that it has become. This one caught my eye though because the plague of expired tags, no plates, clearly non-updated out-of-state plates and so on is plainly visible here in my little corner in the US. I had long just chalked it up to people skirting the borderline astronomical registration fees the citizens of my particular burg are forced to cough up for the privilege of owning a 10 year old Hyundai but it turns out it's a national problem and not just a provincial one.

The author here touches on all the topics du jour including police doing a silent strike, actual policies limiting traffic enforcement, and a couple other pointless digressions. But he misses the point - which he almost addresses in one of his earlier rhetorical questions regarding license plates' purpose:

"Are they a mark of a functioning society?"

My answer? Maybe! This gets back to a belief that I have in the three tier justice system which I think I've touched on before but essentially boils down to 1) the very rich can comfortably pay lawyers to violate the law (think of as the cost of business); 2) vagrants and the very poor can basically violate the law because the State has little to gain financially from enforcement and 3) the rest of us that have very real consequences to our livelihoods *and* have resources for the State to collect or place a lien against.

HOWEVER... the progressive left has decided that: people that are essentially vagrants shouldn't be prosecuted for a wide variety of property crimes, enforcing traffic laws is racist, etc. So guess what? The middle group - the *rest of us* - have taken notice. For a long time, the elite rich more or less had their crimes accepted. But when all the property crime is so in-your-face and so blatantly unpunished, it has a corrosive effect on the body politic. So normally law-abiding people ask themselves questions. If the criminal fleeing the scene of his latest catalytic converter theft isn't getting pulled over, then why in the hell should I bother to keep my registration updated? The answer is there is no good goddamn reason to unless you're a fucking sucker. And Americans generally do NOT like to think they are suckers. Until we as a society start electing people to (gasp) enforce the laws, we have no incentive to follow them. And letting your car's registration lapse is about as victimless a crime as they come. Certainly more victimless than the blatant drug dealing I can watch in front of Target, breaking car windows to steal 48 cents and a charging cable, etc, etc.

Fake plates, expired tabs... these are all just early signs of rot.

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is lost

The best lack all conviction, while the worst are filled with passionate intensity.”

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