Liberal blogs and, of course, public radio are up in arms over this story about an Oregon woman who was raped because, due to massive budget cuts, there were no cops available to take her panicked phone call to the police. The rape occurred last August in Josephine County, a rural district that responded to the loss of millions of dollars in federal subsidies by firing 23 of its 29 police deputies and restricting the remnant’s availability to Mondays through Fridays. (The woman placed her call on a Saturday.) It’s a very sad tale—and one wrapped up in the waning of the logging industry, which the original subsidy was designed to support—but I advise readers to be careful and hold on to their wallets, because the people peddling it have an agenda. This is what those big government types do, you see: Tug at your heartstrings and get you into an emotional place so that they can lure you into voting to raise taxes for more government spending. Well, I for one am not fooled.
Look, no one is for rape. But that doesn’t mean the nanny state tax-and-spend solution is the answer. A government handout—for law enforcement or otherwise—just, to quote Rep. Paul Ryan, “lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency.” All this feminist hand-waving about rape is really just about turning women into victims hooked on federal aid. Real feminists want women to be strong and pick themselves up by their bootstraps, instead of living their lives depending on things like police showing up to your house when you call 911.
I have three words for you women who don’t want rapists breaking into your house: Get. A. Job. That way, you can earn money and pay for a private security firm to guard your house while you sleep. That’s the sort of private enterprise and self-reliance that this country was built on. Government is absolutely terrible at job creation, after all. If they restored those federal funds to Josephine County, where the rape took place, or passed the public safety levy that the patriotic conservative voters rejected, how many cops would they have hired? Ten? Twenty? Even if they hired 100 police officers, that’s fewer jobs created than if every household in the county hired a private security officer to prevent rapists from getting into their houses.
For those who scoff at the old-fashioned American free market approach to personal security, I recommend the wise words from the Josephine County sheriff’s office: “Consider relocating to an area with adequate law enforcement services.” Exactly. I recommend France, where they love this wooly-headed socialist nonsense.
