Bolivar Ferry In The Houston Ship Channel—How About A Tea Party Citizen-Navy?
When the boats that are part of the Bolivar Ferry service need some repairs or a tune-up, it seems that they are taken to the spot you see above in the Houston Ship Channel.
The red boat and the yellow boat in the picture are each part of the Bolivar Ferry.
The Bolivar Ferry is a free government service offered by the State of Texas that takes folks between Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula.
The Bolivar Chamber of Commerce has no objections at all to this subsidy.
The Houston Ship Channel receives all sorts of government funds to stay up and running.
I’m not aware of any large industrial concerns complaining about socialism at the Houston Ship Channel.
Maybe Tea Party cells and small government advocates could muster up volunteer crews to run the ferry and to operate the Houston Ship Channel.
Surely the Tea Party has considered raising a citizen-volunteer navy to go along with all the talk of citizen militias and defending freedom.
(Photo copyright 2011 by Neil Aquino.)
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Welcome To Texas Liberal
Texas Liberal is a blog of politics and political history.
My name is Neil Aquino. Here is my profile.
I can be reached at naa618@att.net.
Additional focuses of the blog are books, art, poetry, personal relationships and, also, sea life and marine mammals.
( The picture above is of the Houston Ship Channel. A narrow channel can lead to a wide sea.)
The signature post of this blog is the Martin Luther King Reading & Reference List. This list is the best of it’s kind on the web.
Another good post is my reciting the words to the Shaker hymn Simple Gifts on Galveston Island, Texas as a ship passes behind.
I live in Houston, Texas and I do sometimes write about political issues in Houston and in Texas.
I also often write about my former hometown of Cincinnati, and about the great beach city of Galveston, Texas.
I define liberalism as a role for government in the economy to help make life more fair, and a broad acceptance of people regardless of who they are.
This is why it says “All People Matter” at the top of the blog.
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Texas Liberal began regular posting on July 25, 2006.
I also blog at the Houston Chronicle as one of eight featured political bloggers, and on Where’s The Outrage? which posts out of North Carolina.
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Texas Liberal 
Why would volunteers be needed to run the ferry? There is no government passenger aircraft service between, say, here and Austin, and yet Southwest flights aren’t manned by volunteers.
You’ve constructed a bizarre straw-man caricature of limited-government proponents wherein you demand that they perform current government functions for nothing, and then mock them when they rightly decline.
Besides, considering the warm welcome the Port Authority gave Khamis Gaddafi (son of the Libyan dictator) in January, I’m not sure you should use that agency as a model of the good things governments can do with the money they extract.
We’ve all heard the cries of socialism from the right many times in recent years. The overall intent is to delegitimize government as a whole. Yet the objections seem to be loudest when what is at issue is something proposed by Barack Obama or some other frequent target. Southwest Airlines is a private concern. (Though I’m sure they make use of all sort of government subsidized aviation safety and meteorological services.) The Bolivar Ferry is all government. You’d think there would be an outcry just as a matter of principle.
The Port Authority is not my model for anything. The Ship Channel gets all sorts of government money and it always has. That is the extent of what I’m saying. Where are the objections in principle to the government intrusion into private enterprise?
The overall intent is to delegitimize government as a whole.
I’m not sure whether you’re saying this out of malicious dishonesty or just a misunderstanding of the arguments. Either way, it’s simply false.
Conservatives believe in a government that performs its essential functions. Rule of law and respect for government as an institutiton is maximized when government does what it does well, and that’s all.
By expanding the size and scope, you dilute that respect.
Personally, I don’t think shuttling idle photographer-poets from one lump of sand to another qualifies as an essential function. But if you haven’t heard much of an outcry, it’s because there are bigger fish to fry.
You try to paint conservatives as hypocritical on this, because we might oppose one area of government involvement (say, in medicine or aspects of Social Security) while favoring involvement in another (say, in building roads). In reality, there is no contradiction unless you have the mistaken notion that government must do everything or must do nothing.
Matt–Have to run. Will reply to your misguided comment soon. Though that ferry tranposrts a great deal of commercial traffic and save m oney for business places on both sides of the route. If there are long lines of idle photographers and poets here in Texas, that is indeed a surprise.
[…] Bolivar Ferry In The Houston Ship Channel—How About A Tea Party … Maybe Tea Party cells and small government advocates could muster up volunteer crews to run the ferry and to operate the Houston Ship Channel. Surely the Tea Party has considered raising a citizen-volunteer navy to go along with all the talk . The Port Authority is not my model for anything. The Ship Channel gets all sorts of government money and it always has. That is the extent of what I'm saying. Where are the objections in principle to the government intrusion into . […]
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