Punk icon and “Anarchy in the UK” mouthpiece Johnny Rotten is being ridiculed by news outlets after he called the cops on a group of homeless people tearing the bars from his windows and setting up tents by his door.
“A couple of weeks ago I had a problem,” he told reporters while promoting the Museum of Arts and Design’s new exhibition “Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986.”
“[The homeless] came over the gate and put their tent inside, right in front of the front door. It’s like . . . the audacity. And if you complain, what are you? Oh, one of the establishment elite? No, I’m a bloke that’s worked hard for his money and I expect to be able to use my own front door.”
Despite living in a swanky LA neighborhood filled with millionaires, the punk rock legend said that the situation has become unbearable, especially because his wife, Nora, has Alzheimer’s.
She “cannot cope” with seeing so many strangers literally attacking their property, he explained.
“My wife’s ill and she can’t cope with this. But at 2 a.m. last week, a brick whizzed through the top floor window, the bedroom. Sorry, Mr. Policeman. I need your help.”
Explaining that the “vagrants moved in en masse,” he added they now live in “tent cities.” And what’s worse, he told reporters, they are aggressive.
“Because there’s an awful lot of them together they’re gang-y. And the heroin spikes . . . You can’t take anyone to the beach because there’s jabs just waiting for young kids to put their feet in — and poo all over the sand.”
But while outlets say that what he’s living now is “anarchy,” as wild, young, and mentally disturbed homeless groups attack his home, it is obvious to any libertarian that Rotten is the one standing for true anarchy. After all, he’s defending his property and isn’t sorry about it either.
By saying he’s worked long and hard for his money and expects to be able to enjoy it while he can, he taught us a lesson on why one shouldn’t allow a group of unruly and entitled young punks vandalize one’s property. But unfortunately, the homelessness issue in LA has achieved troubling levels. So much so that it even sparked a typhus epidemic.
So what good and decent hard workers like Mr. Rotten should do in a place like Los Angeles to put an end to the homelessness? First and foremost, they must let the local bureaucrats know that allocating more taxpayer dollars to “get the homeless off the street” isn’t going to cut it. Secondly, they must think long and hard about moving out of the state.
After all, it isn’t as if Californians were ready to go full libertarian any time soon. And voting with our feet is still more effective than casting a ballot, even if we do understand that public goods don’t exist and that only real anarchy (the kind that truly unleashes the market by abolishing bureaucracy) is the answer.
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