All Hail the Police State, part 5

There is a lot of real crime in world, but we see bureaucracies in this country increasingly cracking down on code violations.  We have forfeiture laws that allow police agencies to take your property if there is reasonable suspicion if you're using it to sell drugs.  Untold amounts of cash, cars and even homes have been taken in this manner.

But this case seems a bit overboard, even for the current state of the US.  It seems somebody at the Department of Transportation has decided to crack down on illegally imported cars.  These cars aren't illegal because they are stolen, they are illegal because they didn't make the list of cars that were tested for sale in the US in a given year.

There are lots of cars sold in other countries that aren't sold in the US.  One of the reasons is it costs about a million dollars to get an engine tested by the DOT and the EPA.  So we have cars sold in Europe and Asia and even Canada and Mexico that we can't buy in the US.

Of course, this makes people want them more.  I'd love to be able to buy a a Land Rover Defender, but they stopped selling them in the US in the 90's.  Because of that the ones in the country have continued to go up in value.  Land Rover still sold them in Canada and Mexico for a time, but if I bought one in one of those countries and tried to license it in the US I wouldn't be able to.  Even though it's identical mechanically to another year that is legal to license.

This car is now a bunch of Coke cans or something.

But lately the evil car has been the Nissan Skyline.  One of them was featured in the movie The Fast and The Furious which made people want them.  Maybe a dozen made it into the country.  Since they can't be licensed they can't be operated on the street, so they end up as show cars and racing cars.  It's technical illegal.  The bad, bad men that brought them into the country should face a fine or something.

Instead, they've taken to confiscating them and crushing them.  The DOT is basically showing everyone they have a bigger cock than everyone else.  By the way, one of the cars crushed was the one used in the movie.

Oh, and this isn't the first time somebody decided they needed to confiscate Skylines.  

But this is how a police state works.  It starts enforcing minor laws with draconian responses.  Soon people are afraid to not fall in line for increasingly overbearing laws.  Oh, and of course there's nary a week that goes by that cops don't harass or shoot innocent people in this country as well.