According to the Washington Post, it’s not a “death tax,” it’s a “posthumous federal levy on accumulated wealth.” So there.

Libertarian arguments about the importance of economic liberty so often fall on deaf ears, but then you come across government abuses in this area that are so ridiculous that maybe even progressives can see the folly. Here’s an excerpt from an email I just got from the Institute for Justice:

For those of you who follow IJ’s National Street Vending Initiative, you most likely know that cities across the country pass arbitrary and anti-competitive laws that make it practically impossible for food trucks and other vendors to succeed. An opportunity to fight against one such law has presented itself in Arlington, Virginia.

Arlington County has a law in place that prevents food trucks from operating in one place for more than 60 minutes. A local food truck named Seoul Food received a notice for violating this rule. According to the owner of the truck, he informed the police officer that he did move from one parking spot to another within the allotted time. The police officer still cited Seoul Food, however, because in the officer’s view the truck had not moved “far enough.” It is important to note that the County Code does not specify any minimum distance a truck must move; it states only that “the vehicle must remain stopped for … no longer than sixty (60) minutes.” Arlington Code Section 30–9(B).

The penalty for violating Section 30–9 is severe. The Arlington County Code classifies a violation of the sixty-minute rule as a Class 1 misdemeanor, which is punishable by “confinement in jail for not more than twelve months and a fine of not more than $2,500.” Thus, Arlington considers selling food to willing customers from a legal parking space to be as serious as Reckless Driving, DUI, and Assault & Battery.

You can’t make this stuff up!

I followed up with one of IJ’s lawyers, who also noted that every police officer who Seoul Food’s owners interacted with has given them a different distance that the food truck purportedly has to move. One said they just needed to move to an adjacent spot, while another said they had to go around the block. 

Alas, because the case is in criminal proceedings (!), IJ can’t represent Seoul Food. Any Virginia-licensed lawyers with experience in criminal defense work who might want to help out pro bono — or media/​others seeking more information on the case — please contact Krissy Keys, kkeys ‑at- ij​.org.

Over the years, I’ve shared some outrageous examples of overpaid bureaucrats.

• The chief bureaucrat of a low-income California city getting almost $800,000 per year.
• Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000.
• A school superintendent in New York raking in more than $500,000 of annual compensation.
• A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only two and a half years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year.
• A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension.
• California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time.
• An employee of the New Jersey Turnpike system raking in annual compensation of $320,000.

Hopefully we’re all disgusted when insiders rig the system to rip off taxpayers. And I suspect you’re not surprised to see that the worst example on that list comes from California, which is in a race with Illinois to see which state can become the Greece of America.

Well, the Golden State has a new über-bureaucrat. Here are some of the jaw-dropping details from a Bloomberg report.

The numbers are even larger in California, where a state psychiatrist was paid $822,000, a highway patrol officer collected $484,000 in pay and pension benefits and 17 employees got checks of more than $200,000 for unused vacation and leave. The best-paid staff in other states earned far less for the same work, according to the data.

Wow, $822,000 for a state psychiatrist. Not bad for government work. So what is Governor Jerry Brown doing to fix the mess? As you might expect, he’s part of the problem.

…the state’s highest-paid employees make far more than comparable workers elsewhere in almost all job and wage categories, from public safety to health care, base pay to overtime. …California has set a pattern of lax management, inefficient operations and out-of-control costs. …In California, Governor Jerry Brown hasn’t curbed overtime expenses that lead the 12 largest states or limited payments for accumulated vacation time that allowed one employee to collect $609,000 at retirement in 2011. …Last year, Brown waived a cap on accrued leave for prison guards while granting them additional paid days off. California’s liability for the unused leave of its state workers has more than doubled in eight years, to $3.9 billion in 2011, from $1.4 billion in 2003, according to the state’s annual financial reports. …The per-worker costs of delivering services in California vastly exceed those even in New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Ohio.

Actually, it’s not just that he’s part of the problem. He’s making things worse, having seduced voters into approving a ballot measure to dramatically increase the tax burden on the upper-income taxpayers.

I suppose the silver lining to that dark cloud is that many bureaucrats now rank as part of the top 1 percent, so they’ll have to recycle some of their loot back to the political vultures in Sacramento.

But the biggest impact of the tax hike—as shown in the Ramirez cartoon—will be to accelerate the shift of entrepreneurs, investors, and small business owners to states that don’t steal as much. Indeed, a study from the Manhattan Institute looks at the exodus to lower-tax states.

The data also reveal the motives that drive individuals and businesses to leave California. One of these, of course, is work. …Taxation also appears to be a factor, especially as it contributes to the business climate and, in turn, jobs. Most of the destination states favored by Californians have lower taxes. States that have gained the most at California’s expense are rated as having better business climates. The data suggest that many cost drivers—taxes, regulations, the high price of housing and commercial real estate, costly electricity, union power, and high labor costs—are prompting businesses to locate outside California, thus helping to drive the exodus.

Yet another example of why tax competition is such an important force for economic liberalization. It punishes governments that are too greedy and gives taxpayers a chance to protect their property from the looter class.

On Thursday’s episode of The Daily Show, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) gave one of the better explanations of why states should say no to an ObamaCare Exchange. (Goes from about 1:10 — 2:50.)

Yet another state seems poised to lure employers away from Mississippi. Excerpts from Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam’s press release:

Tennessee faces a decision this week about health insurance exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.

I’m not a fan of the law. The more I know, the more harmful I think it will be for small businesses and costly for state governments and the federal government. It does nothing to address the cost of health care in our country. It only expands a broken system…

Since the presidential election, we’ve received 800-plus pages of draft rules from the federal government, some of which actually limit state decisions about running an exchange more than we expected.

The Obama administration has set an aggressive timeline to implement exchanges, while there is still a lot of uncertainty about how the process will actually work. What has concerned me more and more is that they seem to be making this up as they go.

In weighing all of the information we currently have, I informed the federal government today that Tennessee will not run a state-based exchange. If conditions warrant in the future and it makes sense at a later date for Tennessee to run the exchange, we would consider that as an option at the appropriate time.

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s first minister, writes in the Washington Post that his country “once was independent and aspires to that status again.” I regret that a major part of his argument with the Post’s editorial board is whether Scotland would remain involved in global military intervention. You’d think the opportunity to extricate your country from quagmires like Iraq would be a great benefit to the Scots. But Salmond denies that an independent Scotland would mind its own business and live in peace.

Still, independence for any country ought to appeal to Americans, especially to those of us with Scottish roots. Some scholars argue that the Act of Union in 1707 made the Scots part of a larger and more advanced nation and opened the way to the Scottish Enlightenment of David Hume, Adam Smith, and other scholars. And perhaps those modern ideas and the connection with England made possible the achievements of the inventor James Watt, the architect Robert Adam, the road builder John MacAdam, the bridge builder Thomas Telford and later Scots such as Alexander Graham Bell and Andrew Carnegie.

But whatever the benefits of union might have been in 1707, surely they have been realized by now. And alas, the land of Adam Smith has become one of the poorest and most socialist parts of Great Britain. So maybe a libertarian shouldn’t look forward to Scottish independence. On the contrary, I think it’s easy for Scotland to whine and demand more money from the British central government. An independent Scotland would have to create its own prosperity, and surely the people who produced the Enlightenment are smart enough to discover the failures of socialism pretty quickly if they become free, independent, and responsible for their own future.

The Cato Institute’s late, lamented magazine Inquiry got to the topic of Scottish independence long before the voters did, in 1978. Its article was written by Alexander McCall Smith, a distinguished professor of law at the University of Edinburgh but now much better known as the author of the The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency Series, and independence activist Peter Chiene. They haven’t achieved their goal yet, but the landslide victory in 2011 for the Scottish National Party has made national independence a real possibility.

In my book Libertarianism: A Primer, I have a chapter of pop public choice called “What Big Government Is All About.” The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority isn’t really big government, just a local D.C.-Virginia-Maryland authority to run a couple of airports. But it demonstrates some of the problems you can expect from economic entities that don’t face a market test. Here’s how the Washington Post story today begins:

Meet the Kulle family: mom Helen, daughter Ann Kulle-Helms, son-in-law Douglas Helms, son Albert, daughter-in-law Michele Kulle and Michele’s brother, Jeffrey Thacker.

They all worked for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. All at the same time.

And what about Dad, I wonder. No job for Dad?

Anyway, officers of the agency don’t seem perturbed by the story.

“There were no clear-cut guidelines,” said MWAA board member H.R. Crawford, who will leave the board next month when his term expires.

Crawford, who has had at least three relatives, including a daughter-in-law, work at the agency, said family members are employed frequently, particularly among board members.

“If you ask a third of those folks, their relatives work there,” he said. “I never thought that we were doing anything wrong.”…

“This is a government town and an agency town,” Crawford said. “If there’s a possibility that you can hire a relative . . . it was the norm.”…

“This is not a patronage mill,” said Davis, whose daughter worked in the fire department for two months in 2011. “Dozens of employees’ kids worked there.”

At this point the response of good-government liberals is always: Pass an ethics law. Yeah, that ought to work.

MWAA’s ethics code prohibits employees from hiring, supervising or working with relatives. They also cannot supervise family members — directly or indirectly — or “have influence over their work.”