Monaco on the Potomac.(taxation in District of Columbia)

Living in Washington, D.C., requires some annoying compromises. The non-specialty supermarkets are abysmal. There's a Giant Food near my house that looks like live chickens and Polish peasants should be wandering around inside. Of course, the public schools compare favorably with schools in other national capitals--Baghdad comes to mind--but are dreadful compared with other schools in America. A friend of mine once ran a painting company in San Francisco when he was younger. Its motto: "We may be slow, but we're expensive." D.C. schools should translate that into Latin and inscribe it over every door.

But, as petty as it may seem, what bothers me the most are the license plates. I have to drive around with "Taxation Without Representation" on my license plate whether I like it or not. New Hampshire has "Live Free or Die!" and I get the rallying cry of the D.C. Green party.

There's so much I can't stand about the slogan. For starters, most of the folks who think "Taxation Without Representation" is the distillation of everything unjust about D.C.'s non-state status are also the sorts of folks who think the American Revolution was a riot of hypocrisy by rich white men. They look down their noses at anybody who sees the American Revolution or the Founding as a source of moral and constitutional guidance in any other sphere of life. Their arguments for D.C. congressional voting rights and statehood (not to mention gun control) do horrible violence to the Constitution. But they just don't care. They wear T-shirts with the phrase and even sport bumper stickers repeating what's already on their license plate. They think it's clever to bebop and scat off of the perceived inconsistency between the American Founding ...