Law-abiding feel the heat

While warming my car up the other morning, my wife said, “Did you know it’s illegal to warm your car up in the street, but not your driveway?” A quick trip to The Spokesman-Review Web site confirmed, “In Washington, you can get a $124 ticket for leaving a running car unattended on the street.”

Our driveway is only long enough for one of our cars. So if I need to warm up the one that’s parked in the street, that’s somehow a civil “offense,” but not if I warm up the car in my driveway? How can this be when the supposed “threat” to the public order is arguably the same?

I’m fed up with Washington’s $124-a-pop victimless “crimes” like not wearing seat belts (though I always wear mine) or warming your car up on the street. Such laws don’t punish real criminals, they merely serve to fatten government coffers at the expense of law-abiding taxpayers who are only minding their own business.

Worst of all, such laws erode the public’s confidence in the general legitimacy of the law, for as someone once said, “For the law to be respected, it must be respectable.”

Frank Golubski

Spokane Valley