Michael Arrington is a prominent tech blogger, who sold his site Tech Crunch to AOL in 2010. As such, this particular story of government overreach, starring a gleeful bureaucrat taking the property of a citizen operating in good faith, may get a wider audience than the usual conservatives and libertarians who catch wind of such things. Good. For every story that gets attention, there are countless abuses that don’t.

The story starts with Arrington buying himself a boat. He lives in Seattle, where there’s much boating to be done. Having paid for the boat, named her, and had her imported from Canada, she was to arrive Thursday. After signing a few customs papers, Arrington was to be standing astride the deck of his vessel. No such luck.

I named her Buddy. It has state of the art electronics and a fairly new highly efficient propulsion system that the TechCrunch audience would be interested in.

Today was the day that Buddy was going to be delivered. That didn’t happen, because the Department of Homeland Security seized the boat.

Buddy has to clear customs, part of the DHS, since she was built in Canada.

My job was to show up and sign forms and then leave with Buddy (WA sales tax and registration fees come a week later).

DHS takes documents supplied by the builder and creates a government form that includes basic information about the boat, including the price.

The primary form, prepared by the government, had an error. The price was copied from the invoice, but DHS changed the currency from Canadian to U.S. dollars.

It has language at the bottom with serious sounding statements that the information is true and correct, and a signature block.

I pointed out the error and suggested that we simply change the currency from US $ to CAD $ so that is was correct. Or instead, amend the amount so that it was correct in U.S. dollars.

I thought this was important because I was signing it and swearing that the information, and specifically the price, was correct.

The DHS agent didn’t care about the error and told me to sign the form anyway. “It’s just paperwork, it doesn’t matter,” she said. I declined.

I, too, would refuse to sign a form for the government containing obvious errors when said form has threats from the government for knowingly signing something incorrect. Had Arrington acquiesced in the form-signing, he would surely have been liable for the mistake in later tax forms or accounting documents. One would think the form could be quickly corrected, especially since the mistake was the government’s not Arrington’s. But this is the United States government we’re talking about:

She called another agent and said simply “He won’t sign the form.” I asked to speak to that agent to give them a more complete picture of the situation. She wouldn’t allow that.

Then she seized the boat. As in, demanded that we get off the boat, demanded the keys and took physical control of it.

What struck me the most about the situation is how excited she got about seizing the boat. Like she was just itching for something like this to happen. This was a very happy day for her.

So now I have to hire a lawyer to try to figure all this out. And I will figure it out, eventually.

My point in writing this isn’t to whine. Like I said, this will get worked out one way or another.

No, it’s to highlight how screwed up our government bureaucracy has become.

A person with a gun and a government badge asked me to swear in writing that a lie was true today. And when I didn’t do what she wanted she simply took my boat and asked me to leave.

-snip-

Read more:http://hotair.com/archives/2013/02/25/dh...aperwork-error/

INCREDIBLE.

Sadly, it feels like legions of bureauBats are itching to pull worse such idiocies.

Michael Arrington is a Libertarian, which means he is only concerned about legalizing pot and hates the party of smaller govt' because they concern themselves with messy issues like abortion and prayer in school. He deserves the rape the govt' he supports, by default, gives him.