You can’t get a whole lot more Democratic than Fairfax County,
just outside of D.C.  Barack Obama carried Fairfax 60-38
against John McCain in 2008. That’s six percentage points higher
than Obama’s statewide margin, which Fairfax helped inflate because
it is the commonwealth’s largest locality: 13.5 percent of
Virginians live there. Four years before, George W. Bush carried
Virginia with 54 percent of the vote – but not Fairfax, where John
Kerry got 53 percent.

The county board of supervisors reflects the split as well.
Seven of the 10 members are Democrats. That makes its recent stance
on state government rather amusing.

Each year localities around Virginia draw up their wish lists
for the General Assembly session that convenes in January. Virginia
is a Dillon Rule state, which means that localities are under the
thumb of state government and must go hat in hand to the
legislature to get permission to do many things. Fairfax recently
completed its wish list for the 2012 session.

And what do the supervisors want from Richmond? “I think the
simple message is, ‘Please try to leave us alone,’ ” says
Supervisor Jeff McKay.

How very Tea Party of them. Perhaps Fairfax should replace its
county seal with the Gadsden Flag – that yellow banner, popular at
Tea Party rallies, with coiled snake and the legend, “Don’t Tread
on Me.”

That’s not the only way in which heavily Democratic Fairfax
sounds sympathetic to the Tea Party rabble. Like those grassroots
conservatives in tricorner hats, the county also thinks
it is Taxed Enough Already.

Fairfax is one of the richest counties in America. With a
median household income in six figures, it comes in second only to
the nation’s richest county, next-door Loudoun. And yet, as
reported recently in The Washington Post, the
county’s wish list “includes other perennial desires: that Northern
Virginia taxpayers see more of the money they send to Richmond, for
example.”

“Overall, the county would be pleased if the Virginia General
Assembly would stop using Northern Virginia as its piggybank,”
continues The Post. Translation: Fairfax does
not want to “spread the wealth around,” as Barack Obama put it to
Joe the Plumber. But wait – Obama says spreading the wealth around
is “good for everybody.” Does the county disagree?

When asked why he robbed banks, Willie Sutton famously replied
that that’s where the money is. Same goes for Northern Virginia:
The heavily populated, high-income region generates a big chunk of
the state’s wealth. Where else should legislators look for revenue
– Pearisburg (population 2,700, median household income
$40,000)? 

 What happened to making the rich pay their fair share?
 

Dig deeper into the county’s wish list and you find other gems.
It wants more state aid to localities, and opposes any funding cuts
(“erosions of the social safety net”) that might leave localities
on the hook for Medicaid costs. Translation: Let’s have lots of
health care, paid for by someone else. There’s limousine liberalism
in a nutshell. As George Mason University’s
Bryan Caplan once explained, “The wealthy but
uncharitable socialist ceases to be a mystery once you understand
relative prices. Voluntary charity is costly to the giver, but
voting for charity … is virtually free.”

The supervisors also want to prohibit protests at funerals. They
support efforts to fight global warming by mandating cuts in
greenhouse gas emissions. They want the power to prohibit
discrimination based on sexual orientation. They also oppose the
push to protect property owners from eminent-domain abuse.

In brief, then, Fairfax officials are eager to order other
people about. They just don’t want to take any orders from
Richmond. Unfortunately, the Dillon Rule says they have to.

Funny thing about that rule. It was named after John Forest
Dillon, an Iowa Supreme Court justice back in the Tammany Hall era
who thought little of local government. He believed that “those
best fitted by their intelligence, business experience, capacity
and moral character” did not generally enter local government. So
local governments needed close  watching.

That’s not wildly different from how much of contemporary
liberalism looks at ordinary citizens. In the eyes of contemporary
liberalism everyday Americans need the firm guidance of their
liberal betters lest they make poor choices or, through their
choices, produce results liberals dislike, such as
unbridled commerce or economic disparity.