It is lastly spring.
Higher mow your garden.
In case you do not, your city authorities could effective you 1000’s of {dollars} a day.
Worse, if you cannot pay the effective, they could confiscate your home.
Six years in the past, in Dunedin, Florida, Jim Ficken let his grass develop.
His mother had died, and he’d left city to care for her property. He requested a pal to chop his grass, however that pal died, too!
Within the two months Ficken was away, his grass grew taller than 10 inches.
Metropolis bureaucrats began fining him.
However they did not inform Ficken that. When he lastly acquired again, there was no discover of the $500-a-day effective. Solely when he ran right into a “code enforcement officer” did he study he’d be getting “an enormous invoice.”
When the invoice got here, it was for $24,454.
Ficken rapidly mowed his garden. Then town tacked on one other $5,000 for “non-compliance.”
Ficken did not have that a lot cash, so metropolis officers instructed him they’d take his dwelling.
Luckily, Ficken found the libertarian legislation agency, the Institute for Justice (I.J.), which fights authorities abuse.
I.J. lawyer Ari Bargil took on Ficken’s case, arguing that the $30,000 effective violates the Structure’s limits on “extreme bail, fines, and merciless punishments.”
However a decide ruled that the effective was “not extreme.”
After all, judges are simply attorneys with robes. Usually they’re attorneys/bureaucrats who’ve develop into very snug with large authorities.
I name a $30,000 penalty for not reducing your garden absurdly extreme.
IJ lawyer Bargil told native information stations, “If $30,000 for tall grass in Florida is just not extreme, it’s laborious to think about what’s.”
Dunedin’s politicians usually impose heavy fines for minor transgressions.
One resident instructed us, “They [fined] me $32,000 for a gap the dimensions of 1 / 4 in my stucco” and likewise “for a garden mower in my yard….They effective those that they will choose on after which they hold selecting on them.”
It occurs elsewhere, too.
Charlotte, North Carolina, fined a church for “extreme pruning.”
Danbury, Connecticut, charged a resident $200,000 for leaving his yard messy.
Bargil notes, “It is fairly obvious that code enforcement is a serious money cow.”
In simply 5 and a half years, Dunedin collected $3.6 million in fines.
However by then, I and others had seen. We had been reporting on Dunedin’s heavy fines.
So did the politicians sheepishly acknowledge that that they had milked residents with extreme fines and provides the cash again?
After all not. They employed a PR agency. That value taxpayers one other $25,000 a month.
Politicians care largely about themselves.
After the Institute for Justice filed a second lawsuit, Dunedin agreed that Ficken might pay much less: $10,000.
Nonetheless an excessive amount of, however Ficken agreed.
“Our Founders,” says Bargil, “acknowledged that the power to effective is the power to cripple. It is one of many methods, aside from incarceration, that authorities can actually oppress.”
Authorities routinely oppresses. For six lengthy years, Dunedin’s politicians oppressed Jim Ficken.
COPYRIGHT 2025 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
