Lindsay Perigo
The Politically Incorrect Show - 20/01/2000
[Music - Die Fledermaus]
Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show for Thursday January 20 on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that breaks the mould & applauds tall poppies, celebrates achievement & excellence, minds its own business & tells busybody do-gooders to do the same, resists the ever-advancing tentacles of Nanny State & glorifies above all the most sacred thing in the universe - the liberty of the human individual.
[Music up, music down!]
Goddam drivers' licences. I'm sick to death of hearing about them. No doubt many of you are too. Now the time has come when I personally must decide whether to acquire a new one under Maurice Wimpiamson's infamous new regime. Though there are a number of objectionable features of this regime, I'm tempted, as I've said many times this week, to join the hundreds of thousands of sheeple who've already docilely complied & say, this is not an issue I choose to take a stand on. As a citizen of a substantially unfree society I do many things I don't approve of in principle. I pay tax, for instance.
I chose to make a stand on the NaZis On Air tax because I thought it provided a readily graspable instance of the broader injustice of taxation itself - the forced extraction of your money for services you don't use, want or ask for. I got sick of hearing about the NaZis On Air tax, too, I can assure you. At the end of it all, was it worth it? Sure, we got the thing abolished, but how many sheeple are awake to the fact that the injustice will continue? National Socialist Radio will still be supported at gunpoint by people who don't listen to it.
Similarly with the resistance, such as it is, to the drivers' licence regime. It was spearheaded until recently by someone who believed in conspiracies that even Ian Wishart hadn't heard of. It consists significantly of statists who believe that governments should own roads just as they should own television stations & order them to broadcast rugby & cricket matches. They see the new regime as part of an agenda to privatise the roads. I wish there were such an agenda.
I am worried, in other words, about the company I'll be keeping if I do take a stand on this issue.
Nonetheless, I have concluded that I cannot NOT take a stand. There is too much about this new regime that stinks. It is not a private company with no power to use force against me to whom I will be surrendering a digitised photograph of myself; it is Nanny State herself, who has a legal monopoly on the use of force. It was Nanny's firm intention to use the new licence as a National ID card when the scheme was conceived & there's little doubt that that objective will resurface soon enough under some pretext or another. The Privacy Commissioner, no raging libertarian, has said, "There is a deliberate desire to create the conditions for a state-backed identity card without calling it this in so many words."
It is not acceptable that Nanny can unilaterally detain me to establish that I'm carrying the document, & fine me or confiscate my vehicle if I'm not. It is not acceptable that I'm already the holder of a licence from Nanny which doesn't expire for another 26 years. Now Nanny wants me to haul myself off to an office of the traitorous Automobile Association to join a queue, fill out her forms, get my photograph taken & of course, hand over some cash for the privilege of it all. Well, Nanny can go & get rooted.
But as I implied at the outset, the whole thing is a damned nuisance. Sometimes I yearn to be one of the sheeple again, quietly going along with every fresh atrocity against my self-ownership that Nanny State commits. As the conformity-touting Common Man says at the end of A Man For All Seasons, "It isn't difficult to keep alive, friends - just don't make trouble - or if you must make trouble, make the sort of trouble that's expected." Sometimes I think that. Then I say, "The hell with such cowardly impulses."
I shall not be getting a new licence.
Politically Incorrect Show, beating the bastards back - 309 3099.
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