Permit Required for Beach Bonfire; Rebellion Ensues in Predictable Fashion

County issues bonfire permit requirement; beachgoers note fire predates permit concept by 200,000 years

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA COAST — The county government of a Southern California coastal jurisdiction issued new regulations requiring permits for beach bonfires above a certain size, citing air quality concerns, fire safety, and the need to manage increasing pressure on beach resources. The regulations were immediately the subject of robust criticism from beachgoers, surfers, and the general community of people who have been building fires on this beach without permits since before the permit requirement was conceived, which is to say since before the county was a county.

The air quality concern is real. Southern California’s coastal air quality is managed under strict EPA standards, and beach fire smoke contributes to particulate matter levels that affect respiratory health. The fire safety concern is real. The permit requirement is a response to documented problems, which is the standard justification for regulations that the regulated community resists on principle regardless of their specific justification.

The Rebellion and Its Logic

The rebellion against the permit requirement is also real in its logic: the bonfire on the beach is among the oldest and most fundamental human activities, predating the concept of permits by approximately 200,000 years, and its regulation by a county government is precisely the kind of administrative expansion that the libertarian tradition identifies as the gradual domestication of human freedom through bureaucratic accumulation. Each individual permit requirement has a justification. The accumulation of individual permit requirements produces a life in which spontaneous human activity requires filling out a form and paying a fee. Reason has covered the proliferation of permit requirements. Mises Institute provides the philosophical framework. The surfers will build fires when the permit office is closed. The county will issue fines when it notices. The fires will continue. The forms will multiply. This is the current equilibrium of the regulatory state and its subjects, who are mostly compliant and occasionally not, which is itself the equilibrium that permit systems are designed to manage.

The story continues past any single article or news cycle. The details accumulate into patterns, the patterns into systems, and the systems are what determine whether institutions built to serve people actually do so. Paying attention is the most democratic act available. Satire is the second. Both require looking at what is actually happening and refusing to pretend it is something else, especially when what is actually happening is considerably funnier than the official account suggests. The record continues. The analysis continues. The accountability continues, imperfectly and necessarily, because the alternative is worse.

The Libertarian Surfer’s Creed

The ocean does not ask for your papers. The wave does not check your permits. The dawn patrol requires no government approval, and the hour before sunrise on an uncrowded point break is governed by nothing except the swell period, the wind direction, and the willingness of the surfer to be in the water when conditions align. This is the freedom that the libertarian tradition values most concretely: not the theoretical freedom of political philosophy but the lived freedom of the person who has made choices the government did not sanction and has found the outcomes to be their own. California surrounds this freedom with regulations, taxes, permits, and the administrative infrastructure of the world’s most comprehensive state government. None of it reaches into the water. None of it governs what happens between the surfer and the ocean in the moment that everything else disappears.

The libertarian case is not against clean water. It is for the freedom that clean water makes possible. It is not against the coastal access laws that keep the beach public. It is for the public ownership of the beach that those laws protect. The surfing community’s political philosophy is more complex than its antiauthoritarian reputation suggests, because it has always understood that some of what makes the ocean accessible and worthwhile requires collective action and legal protection. What the community resists is the extension of that logic beyond its useful domain into the regulation of adult choices that harm no one, the permit requirements for activities that predate the concept of permits, and the fiscal policies that extract more from working people than the services provided justify. Reason covers this. Cato analyzes it. The surfers experience it, and then go surfing, which is the most direct political act available to someone whose preferred freedom is governed by physics rather than legislation.

The analysis, the accountability, the satire, and the serious journalism all serve the same function: keeping track of what is happening and insisting that it matters, which is the work that good journalism has always done and that the current moment requires with particular urgency given the complexity of the information environment and the scale of the decisions being made in it.

The record of events accumulates daily. The analysis of their causes and connections is the work that distinguishes journalism from mere reportage. The satire that finds the absurdity within the serious and the seriousness within the absurd is the work that makes the analysis bearable over the long run. All three are necessary. All three continue. The stories do not resolve on a weekly deadline. They continue past publication, past the news cycle, past the season, into the larger history that all current events eventually become. The journalism that covers them is, at its best, a first draft of that history — written under deadline, corrected in subsequent editions, and ultimately judged by whether it was accurate about what mattered and honest about what it did not know, which are the two criteria that good journalism has always been judged by and that the current moment requires with the same urgency as every previous moment that believed its circumstances were unprecedented, as they always were, and as they always will be.

Freedom dispatches: NewsThump | The Babylon Bee

SOURCE: https://bohiney.com