[dc]T[/dc]his is tyranny, folks.
Federal agents swooped in on Gibson Guitar Wednesday, raiding factories and offices in Memphis and Nashville, seizing several pallets of wood, electronic files and guitars. The Feds are keeping mum, but in a statement yesterday Gibson’s chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, defended his company’s manufacturing policies, accusing the Justice Department of bullying the company. “The wood the government seized Wednesday is from a Forest Stewardship Council certified supplier,” he said, suggesting the Feds are using the aggressive enforcement of overly broad laws to make the company cry uncle.
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It’s not enough to know that the body of your old guitar is made of spruce and maple: What’s the bridge made of? If it’s ebony, do you have the paperwork to show when and where that wood was harvested and when and where it was made into a bridge? Is the nut holding the strings at the guitar’s headstock bone, or could it be ivory? “Even if you have no knowledge—despite Herculean efforts to obtain it—that some piece of your guitar, no matter how small, was obtained illegally, you lose your guitar forever,” Prof. Thomas has written. “Oh, and you’ll be fined $250 for that false (or missing) information in your Lacey Act Import Declaration.”
This does not differ much from things like the Stamp Acts, which might have been tolerable in isolation, but in context were just the last straw. Soon, we may come upon a last straw, and we won’t know what it is. Contrary to the kooky conspiracy sites’ lurid claims, these things are not planned, and do not require coordination. It’s hardly controversial to point out that we are edging closer to a point where people’s reserve capacity for abuse is exceeded.
Those with an interest in avoiding a distinctly un-American display of foolishness and violence have a duty to resist the oppressive and unreasonable strictures placed upon a nominally free citizenry by a government which is proving resistant to input from those governed. After all, the identification of the government and the governed as the very same body is the defining characteristic of this country.
We relax this requirement at our peril.
