Fight the Power.

CASTLE ROCK—Sedalia knife shop owner Hal Van Herke on Tuesday posted a Declaration of Business Independence on Facebook saying he would reopen CastleGate Knife and Tool Tuesday in defiance of Governor Polis’ stay-at-home order.

Van Herke’s declaration says in part:

“WHEREAS: Small businesses have carried the burden of this effort more heavily than special interests, large corporations and major banks who once again received preferential treatment and largess from the Federal Government at the further cost of small business tax payers, and

WHEREAS: Non-essential Government, Academic, and Corporate staff continue to remain unconscionably fully paid at the same time that Small Business, the Self Employed and the Unemployed suffer, and

WHEREAS: Our attempts at petition and righteous redress, to Our Government has fallen on uncaring ears, and in some cases has been actively suppressed, and

WHEREAS: We refuse to become second-class citizens, beholden to the entitled class for our safety, freedom, and wellbeing, and

WHEREAS: We have the ability to operate our business in such a manner as to reduce and mitigate the risk to our Community, Customers, and Staff, and to adjust operations in a responsible and balanced manner commensurate with local conditions.”

“I felt like it was important to for somebody to stand up along with other businesses and say we’re not going to be discounted in this and we’re not going to sit back and watch our life’s work destroyed while many of the people making decisions are still being paid their full time salary while they’re sitting at home,” said Van Herke.

Amen to that, brother.

In his declaration, Van Herke quotes President Ronald Reagan’s farewell address of January 11, 1989 in which Reagan says, “I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”

Amen to that, too. Ain’t it sad how quickly, and how thoroughly, Americans seem to have forgotten that home truth.

(Via Stephen Green)

Update! Defiance: the American spirit.

Shelly Luther, a salon owner in Dallas, is drawing a line in the sand. Behind on her mortgage and no Small Business Association funding in sight,  Luther has decided to re-open her business Friday, April 24, in violation of the stay-at-home order in Texas that has closed all non-essential businesses, Inside Edition reported.

“I’m behind on my mortgage,” Luther said. “I know a lot of my stylists haven’t paid their mortgage. It’s either come in and make money to be able to feed your family or stay home and freak out.”

A mother of three, Luther has 19 stylists who make their living at her salon.

“Obviously I don’t want anyone to get sick and I don’t want the virus to spread,” the business owner told Inside Edition. “It will be one of the safer places for people to go rather than going to Walmart or Home Depot.”

And Luther is willing to risk her freedom as an American.

“No one wants to go to jail, but if push comes to shove I’m willing to take that risk,” she said.

Which is the question podcast host Cari Kelemen asked in a tweet.

Noting that Luther’s schedule was “PACKED,” Kelemen asked how local authorities would respond to this carefully calculated violation.

“This morning, a single mom Salon Owner in Dallas, who cannot afford to stay closed another day, is opening her salon ‘ahead of schedule.’ Her schedule today is PACKED with happy women. Will sheriffs be there to arrest her? How will the women with appointments respond if they do?”

That really is the crucial question here, isn’t it? For their own part, the cops ought to know that enforcing illegal edicts carries a price tag of its own.

In my previous column, posted on April 6, I lamented that the actions of some police officers, ordered to carry out some of the sillier or more onerous restrictions attendant to the pandemic, will further erode the already strained relationships their departments have within their communities. As one might have predicted, things have only gotten worse. Since that column was posted, we have seen police officers issuing $500 citations for the crime of attending a drive-in church service, and others arresting an Idaho woman who dared take her kids to a closed playground. Indeed, social media is awash with similar tales, which are all the more insulting to the average citizen when accompanied by stories of criminals released from jail only to re-offend within hours.

With the accumulation of these stories, the populace grows ever more restive at the restraints placed upon them. If the law and civil authority are to be respected, the laws must be respectable, at least to a majority of those on whom they are imposed.

Which brings us back to the police officers in the field and caught between their feckless superiors and a fractious public. There comes a time in every cop’s career when he receives instructions he knows will waste his time and may even be antithetical to his mission to reduce the fear of crime in his community. Often these instructions are relayed by a sergeant who himself is equally dubious about them, but who is obeying orders to disseminate them. When this happens, it is the wise officer who can say, “Yes, sir,” and then go out and do the right thing, modifying the instructions or ignoring them altogether with the sergeant’s tacit blessing. Every good cop, and every good sergeant, is familiar and comfortable with this arrangement.

Chasing people away from churches, beaches, hiking trails, and parks, and arresting those who do not meekly comply, is not enforcing the “law,” it is enforcing the whimsical edicts of people unqualified to craft and issue them. When all of this is over, can the damage be undone?

Doubtful at best, and certainly not easily. Look at it this way: when a trust is betrayed, how willing should the betrayed be to grant it again, at least without a great deal of hesitance and skepticism? Does that sound like a smart move, or a sucker’s bet?

Non-essential update! I didn’t think of this angle before, and I really should have.

Whenever the threat of a government shutdown looms, Democrats and their media allies give us daily doses of how devastating such a thing will be on “non-essential” government workers.

Then they go into overdrive when a shutdown actually occurs: wall-to-wall sob stories giving examples of government workers supposedly harmed even though, everyone knows, those employees will soon be paid. They essentially have a paid vacation.

Now, after weeks of the intentional destruction of the private sector with tens of millions of jobs lost, with businesses and families being devastated and having no idea how they will feed their families and themselves, there are few of those same sob stories, despite real hardship, and here is what we get instead:

If a Republican governor wants to open a state’s businesses, we get attack pieces saying he wants people to die. It’s as if the media were acting as a major participant in encouraging the U.S. to commit economic suicide. For decades, they have sought to weaken the U.S. and remake America.

If most of the media had an honest bone in their bodies, instead of an agenda, they would report that states that did not have a complete shutdown, or stay-at-home orders, had as good results or better results than states that put in the tyrannical, dictatorial orders. They would say there is no proof that the stay-at-home orders and harsh measures caused the flattening of the COVID-19 curve. It appears that most of the flattening has occurred naturally, same as with the normal flu.

That’s a pretty big “if” there, fella. Probably the biggest, most glaring one ever attempted indoors.