This Missouri City Actually Fines People For Having Mismatched Curtains And Other Insane Crap

Stuff like this makes me become more and more libertarian in my views.

According to this, St. Louis and suburbs in the surrounding areas have a crapton of municipal codes that are all at once silly and overbearing. If you live in St. Louis, you could be fined for these reasons and more –

• Having mismatched curtains;
• Walking on the left-hand side of a crosswalk;
• Wearing pants below one’s waist;
• Having holes in window screens, and;
• Having a barbeque in front of a house.

There’s more, as detailed in the video below. What’s worse, residents of Pagedale have even had to take out loans so they can pay the insane amount of fines that the city keeps piling on for the tiniest little things. It’s like the HOA from hell – except it’s the government, so it’s even worse.

The good news is that there’s a legal group called the Institute for Justice that has filed a lawsuit against Pagedale, MO (a predominantly black suburb of St. Louis), saying that their overbearing municipal code and fines is a violation of civil rights. They’ve also produced a video to illustrate just how awful these fines are –

Here’s hoping that the Institute for Justice can help these folks and that the city government will back the heck off. It’s not like these residents have the means and the time to find a new place to live – even if they wanted to move out of Pagedale. The whole thing is completely ridiculous.