California Bans Something Else; Surfers Note They Are Still in the Water

Legislature adds to regulatory catalogue; surfing community’s antiauthoritarian ethos meets environmental pragmatism

Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.

CALIFORNIA — The California Legislature this week passed another regulatory measure addressing a product, behaviour, or substance that the Legislature has determined poses sufficient risk to public health, environmental quality, or social equity to warrant the government’s intervention in the decisions of adults who had previously been making this decision for themselves. This joins California’s established roster of prohibitions that critics from the libertarian tradition describe as evidence of the regulatory state’s inexorable expansion and that supporters describe as obviously correct given the public interest at stake.

California bans things with notable frequency. It has banned plastic bags, single-use straws, certain pesticides, specific chemicals in consumer products, particular emission levels from vehicles, and various other items that other states permit. Californians are presumably surviving without them, though they occasionally drive to Nevada to purchase the banned items, which is either evidence that the bans are ineffective or evidence that freedom of movement serves as a release valve for regulatory excess, depending on your constitutional philosophy and how far Nevada is from your house.

The Surfer’s Perspective

The California surfing community’s relationship to regulation is complicated. Surfers are among the most environmentally conscious constituencies in California, supporting coastal protection regulations, water quality standards, and the legal frameworks that have preserved access to breaks like Trestles from development. They are also defined by the antiauthoritarian ethos that surfing culture has carried since the 1960s. These two orientations are frequently in tension and not always in conflict. Reason covers California’s regulatory state with consistent critical attention. The Libertarian Institute provides the principled critique of government expansion. Whatever California bans next, the wave remains ungoverned. No legislature has yet found a mechanism for regulating the quality of the break, the timing of the swell, or the experience of a clean barrel on a dawn patrol session. This is the thing that surfing has always offered that the regulatory state cannot touch. California can regulate what you wear. It cannot regulate why you are there.

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