It is unreasonable for them to use their power to coerce the sort of treatment from people that they mistakenly believe they are entitled to.
This is the case whether you consider them flunkies or community heroes.
When I go to the convenience store to buy a donut, I am nice to the clerk behind the counter. When I go through customs, I am nice to the agent behind the counter. How are those mistakes?
Well I mean, clearly they do get to do that, but that is a problem, not excusable behavior.
I treat clerks nicely because I am a decent person. I treat government officials in positions of power over me nicely because, aside from being a decent person, I understand the score.
Frankly I wish American culture were such that I could just give people $50s instead of putting on the song and dance. Either one is bribery, neither particularly morally superior to the other.
The irony is that in Arrington's situation the border agent tried to educate Mike that this was a rule that could be safely bent in the interest of expedience, but it was Mike himself who insisted on perfect procedure.
Fail to pretend to be a friend to that cop, DMV worker, or private security guard at the front desk of your buddies apartment? Good luck not getting hassle or at least artificially degraded service.
EMT or firefighter? Taxi driver? Doctors and nurses? Train ticket puncher? Just like the burrito vendor, no pressure to be their "friend".
Some jobs either attract people with a sense of entitlement, or cultivate a sense of entitlement in otherwise decent people. The root cause of this? Who the hell knows, but everyone who perceives it is not imagining things. If you haven't noticed it, then perhaps you need to tune in.
Am I somehow special? I doubt it. Maybe I don't have problems with government employees because I approach those situations with positive expectations and I try to be nice to people.
Maybe I do that because I actually know a few people in customer-facing government roles and they are no more entitled or abusive that anyone else I know.
I can tell you though that from their perspective, abuse is a frequent occurence--usually from folks who walk through the door with a sense of persecution. A lot of people view anyone behind a government desk as fair game, since, after all, everyone knows the government is out to get us.
I'm not saying it justifies rudeness, but I can see being quite thoroughly paranoid about signing a federal form that contains a known inaccuracy. The agent's opinion that the discrepancy was unimportant might not have been shared by her superiors.
If people can be subject to federal prosecution for signing a form prepared by government workers, those workers should consider it their job to make sure the contents of that form are absolutely accurate.
You add in state and municipal codes and you probably are breaking the law right now as you read this and probably in multiple ways.
Consider what you are saying. "Government workers should consider it their job [to be] absolutely accurate." Do you really want a vehicular safety inspection when you get pulled over for speeding? Especially given that the tests for which are written so that any commercial vehicle with any wear and tear at all will fail some aspect.
"Standing your ground" on principle is fine I guess if you have as large an ego as Arrington; I would rather focus on what is important and get sh*t done. I also really would advise taking anything he says when it comes to anything he has a vested interest in with a grain of salt. He has less than a stellar record on honesty when it comes to self-reporting.
Perhaps. But if that's true, I don't know which laws they are or how I'm breaking them.
Consider what you are saying. "Government workers should consider it their job [to be] absolutely accurate." Do you really want a vehicular safety inspection when you get pulled over for speeding?
You have completely twisted what I said. First, I said if someone can be prosecuted for signing a form prepared by government workers. You left that critical condition out entirely. Secondly, and more broadly, I'm not talking about government workers demanding absolute accuracy of us -- I'm talking about them demanding absolute accuracy of themselves.
IANAL, obviously, but it does occur to me that once the customs worker encouraged Arrington to sign the form anyway, should he ever have been prosecuted for doing so -- which I agree seems unlikely -- he had, I would think, a valid entrapment defense. Of course, he probably had no proof that she said that, but being able to argue it might have been sufficient anyway. So I agree, he probably should have signed the form.
But I don't really care about that. Arrington is not collecting a salary paid by my tax dollars; he is simply a citizen attempting to protect himself. Whether he made the right choice or not here is for him to figure out. What I care about is the behavior of my government, which I pay for and which claims to be acting on authority vested in it by its citizens, of which I am one.
But in this actual case, the agent seems to have done the opposite--try to help bend the process so Mike could get on with his life. Mike is the one who decided to, in his own words, "stand on principle."
As to how serious that particular bend is, I don't personally know. I would tend to assume that a trained federal agent might have a better handle on that than Mike Arrington, though.