If Nick Stafford wanted to make a point, we suppose he made it.
The Bristol Herald Courier reports Stafford made the lump sum payment of 300,000 pennies for a new Corvette after trouble with his local DMV in September.
Stafford wanted to find out which of his four houses, which span two counties, would be best to register the Corvette at for his son. After making a phone call to his local DMV in Lebanon, it was routed to Richmond.
But, Stafford wanted to speak to Lebanon, and instead invoked the Freedom of Information Act request to get their direct number. Employees at the Lebanon DMV answered, but told him the number was not for public use. After multiple calls, his question was answered. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Stafford requested nine additional DMV phone numbers but was denied. He filed three lawsuits over the matter.
“The phone numbers are irrelevant to me,” Stafford told the Bristol Herald-Courier newspaper. “I don’t need them. I told the judge ‘I think I proved my point here.’ I think the backbone to our republic and our democracy is open government and transparency in government, and it shocks me that a lot of people don’t know the power of FOIA.”
The DMV was satisfied with the court’s dismissal of each lawsuit, too.
“We are pleased that the court agreed with our counsel that the argument was not a sufficient request to invoke the FOIA statutory penalties,” said Brandy Brubaker, a spokesman for the state DMV. “We make every effort to share information with citizens as state and federal law allows.”
Still, this was not the end for Stafford.
He then hired 11 people to carry in five wheelbarrows full of the 300,000 pennies to pay the sales tax on the new Corvette, which by law, is an entirely valid form of payment.
In the process, DMV employees were paid overtime for their work. Which, by the way, is paid for by local taxes.
Comments
Sounds like a good liberty-minded person to me. 😉
He doesn’t have a real job to occupy his time, so instead he’s wasting the government’s time and our tax dollars. That isn’t freedom for everyone in my book, that’s freedom for him to waste my money. If freedom isn’t free, I sure don’t owe Nick Stafford my own freedom.
I know libertarians who have paid their property tax in pennies as a form of protest as well! Good way to raise awareness of the truth that government does not want us to know we have REAL property rights. Educate yourselves here:
http://constitutionpreservation.org
&
Good for him lol 🙂
I’ve heard of people paying tickets this way. Come to think of it a few I know.
Phyllis Schafly – the woman who made a million dollar career out of telling women they shouldn’t have money making careers, and should be pregnant in the kitchen, unlike herself.
Nick Stafford – the guy who cost the taxpayers more time and money as he “made a point” about government being forced by idiots to waste government workers time and tax money.
Note that he wasted his own money on the wheelbarrows which were all brand new and the labor for five workers, thus fulfilling Cipolla’s law on stupidity.
If you want to make a point, don’t just replicate the problem and thus increase the problem like some Alt-Rite Andy Warhol, instead show us how it should be done properly.
He wants a Corvette, but he doesn’t want to pay the tax to build the roads to drive it on? Maybe he is going to fit it with a track drive conversion kit and use it on his farm paddocks? That will sure be impressive to his favorite sheep…
Instead of being honest and figuring out for himself which of the “four houses in two counties” he would use his Corvette in the most, like a welfare cheat he tried to rig the system by calling a government worker to force them to acknowledge which was the least amount of contribution to his own community he could manipulate his way down to. Because he didn’t get his manipulation given to him on a silver plate, he did this in revenge to every red blooded American taxpayer. Why does he have the time to do this? Probably because he’s a landlord with no actual work to do.
This guy sounds like a major pain in the ass to me! Way too much time on his hands to pursue such trivial issues.
Strange that there is no limit to the number of coins used in a single payment.
In the Euro zone, there is a limit of 50 coins in a single payment, with possible variations per country.
In the German Deutschmark times, penny coins of 1, 2 and 5 Pfennig were legal tender only to the amount of 5 DM, if I remember correctly.
In the US most currency is labeled that it is legal tender and valid for all debts both public and private.