I can finally report that I am driving a legal automobile.

As readers will recall, this was my third trip (see here and here for previous installments in the saga). Actually, it was my third and fourth trip. When I got to the DMV this morning, happily clutching the Fairfax County tax receipt to my chest, I was told that I also needed an emissions test. It would have been nice of the bureaucrats to tell me that on my first trip, but why expect miracles.

So I had to exit the line, go back out to my car, and drive (illegally, once again) to a nearby service station. This interaction with the private sector was predicatably brief, so I was back at the DMV in less than 30 minutes. Unfortunately, Dan Griswold must have been hard at work in the interim since there was now a long line of people, none of whom appeared to be native-born Americans.

But after a 90-minute wait, I got up to the counter, and was able to get registered — but only after dealing with a libertarian quandary. While twiddling my thumbs, I noticed that I could request a vanity plate. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought, to have a license plate reading “anti gov.” But getting a special plate also involved paying more money — funds that presumably would help finance the sloth-like bureaucracy that I despise. After wrestling with my conscience (which usually comes out on the short end), I decided that the cause of freedom would be best served by having the vanity plate.

I feel guilty about giving government more money, but I somewhat compensated by paying for my registration and vanity plate with a credit card, which means at least some small slice of the $103 gets diverted to the financial services industry. It ain’t easy being libertarian, but I somehow muddled through.