It’s “mow the yard” time again in north central Florida, which means it’s “Tom complains about lawn culture” time again for this column.

This year, though, my case against the whole idea of the “lawn” comes with a more compelling than usual news hook: War in the Middle East!

As you may have noticed, the price of one key lawn maintenance ingredient — gasoline for your mower — is way up lately.

As you may not have noticed yet, you’ll also be paying more for a second ingredient, fertilizer.

Both of those hits to your wallet result from war-related shipping woes (in particular, the partial closure of the Strait of Hormuz), and both are likely to drag on for some time even if the war comes to an end soon.

It’s always a good time to consider converting your surrounding green space from a carefully trimmed, lovingly landscaped “lawn” to a more natural (or, if water usage matters, xeriscaped) “yard.” But this year, it’s an even better time than usual.

Speaking of time: According to multiple surveys, the average American spends 150-175 hours a year on “lawn care.”

That’s basically a full week … and four or more “work weeks” out of every year that you COULD be doing something besides mowing, trimming, treating, raking, etc.

And then there’s the money. Americans spend $130 billion per year on “lawn care.” That’s an average of about $400 per person. “Do it yourselfers” spend less (at least in years when a mower doesn’t need replacement); people who can’t or won’t do it themselves spend more having it done. But even at the low end, you’re probably spending several days’ worth of your income every year on the matter.

Unfortunately, many of us HAVE to do that because of local laws requiring us to maintain our yards as “lawns” in the style of 17th century European aristocrats (who, of course, had slaves or servants to do the actual work for them).

By the 19th century, a “lawn” was a status symbol, a conspicuous consumption item that meant you’d “made it” and were no longer a mere peasant with just a “yard” for keeping some chickens and a garden.

Since the mid-20th century, with more general prosperity, the introduction of affordable gas-powered mowers, and the growth of suburban uniformity norms, it’s more and more become a social, and even legal, requirement.

And the costs aren’t JUST to your wallet and to the time you’d rather spend doing other things. There’s also the environment to think of.

I’m not one of those “radical environmentalists” who wants to forbid you to drive a gas-powered car or leave a porch light on at night, but the “lawn” situation is beyond silly.

Even as states and municipalities fight over water allocations from ailing rivers and strained aquifers, about 1/3 of US residential water use — three trillion gallons a year — goes to watering lawns. Yes, really.

Fertilizer runoff from lawns screws with our water supply, too — it leads to lower oxygen levels and algae blooms that harm wildlife, and contaminates human drinking water too.

Speaking of wildlife, our lawn fetish deprives critters of habitat, to their detriment and almost certainly to ours as well.

If all our lawns were consolidated into one patch, that patch would be larger than the state of Florida. We use five times as much land for lawns as we do for growing corn!

We’d all be better off — time-wise, money-wise, and environment-wise — if we abandoned “lawns” in favor of more human-, water-, animal-, and native-plant-friendly “yards.”

A necessary first step is getting governments and HOAs to let us abandon “lawn culture.”

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Since everyone seems to have a sticker shock story lately:  I rolled one of my motorcycles up to a gas pump yesterday and, for the first time ever, spent more than $5 to fill the tank (small bike, small tank — I paid $5.67 for 1.1 gallons of premium).

The obvious reason is, well, obvious.

Since the US war on Iran began, oil and gas prices have skyrocketed. It’s the flip side of the Otto T. Mallery paraphrase: “When goods don’t cross borders, armies will.”  In this case, the engagement of armies — attacks on energy facilities, the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz — is hitting the global, intertwined “supply side” of oil and its associated products rather than vice versa. Same concept, different application.

US government policy in recent years has tended toward aspirations to autarky — “economic independence” at a national level. You’ve heard the slogans. “America First!” “Buy American!” “Energy independence!”

At the level of a society or national government, autarky is a stump-stupid idea. It makes people poorer by thwarting competitive advantage.

That is: Some people in some places can do or make this or that thing less expensively than other people in other places, meaning they can sell at lower prices. The sellers do better because they sell more. The buyers do better because they pay less. Everybody wins!

Well, not exactly. Enterprises that don’t enjoy competitive advantage in Activity X don’t do better if they stick to Activity X. They lose. Instead of coming up with new business models they tend to lean on governments to “protect” them from “foreign competition” at the expense of those own governments’ consumers with tariffs and other trade barriers. In which case everybody loses … except the most politically connected enterprises with the best lobbyists.

The war on Iran is temporarily producing the same result that actual US “energy independence” — usually promoted as proposed autarky in the production/sale of oil — would deliver without “armies crossing borders.”

Almost all  oil and gas produced in the US comes from “tight formation production” — horizontally drilled wells and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to extract the stuff from shale . That’s more expensive than just drilling a vertical well and pumping the black gold out, as is done in the Middle East.

That’s a “competitive disadvantage” for US oil companies. The only way for US oil production to be profitable is for the price per barrel to be kept artificially high through “protectionist” measures … or war. The US producers can only profit by increasing YOUR costs.

At the level of the individual American, on the other hand, a certain amount of “energy independence” — autarky! — makes a good deal of sense.

Some Americans AREN’T experiencing sticker shock at the pump because they don’t drive gas-powered vehicles. And some of those Americans aren’t paying more for the energy to power those vehicles because they’re generating that energy themselves using home solar or wind mechanisms (or, in the case of non-electric bicycles or just plain walking, their own bodies).

It’s not total autarky. “No man is an island” and solar panels, turbines, bicycles, and calories have to come from somewhere. But it’s a lot closer to autarky than daily reliance on distant sources subject to constant political machinations or military developments.

While it’s obviously difficult, if not impossible, to become the mythical entirely self-reliant “rugged individualist,” there’s something to be said for protecting your daily life from the whims of politicians who don’t understand — or maybe just don’t care — that global free trade produces maximum prosperity.

From weaning ourselves off gasoline to planting home gardens, etc., a certain amount of “autarky” is really just smart self-defense.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants $200 billion for the Trump administration’s illegal, ill-advised, undeclared war on Iran.

Well, maybe. “That number could move,” he says, to get “properly funded for what’s been done, for what we may have to do in the future, ensure that our ammunition is refilled, and not just refilled, but above and beyond.”

You won’t need two guesses to guess which direction “that number” will likely move in.

Will Whiskey Pete get his requested allowance bump? According to the Washington Post, unnamed “White House officials” think he’s aiming too high, and some members of Congress seem to agree.

The correct congressional response — if you think it will help, by all means pass the recommendation on to “your” “representatives”  — is a big fat goose-egg, for at least two reasons above and beyond the war being stupid and evil.

The first reason, of course, is that the war is illegal. Since Congress hasn’t declared war, the executive branch has no authority to wage war. Congress shouldn’t fund something that only Congress has the power to approve when it hasn’t exercised that power.

The second reason is that the Pentagon’s coffers are already full beyond comprehension.

The  FY 2026 “National Defense Authorization Act,” signed into law by US president Donald Trump last December, provided about $900 billion in taxpayer dollars to the US armed forces. And that’s not even the entire military budget. Non-NDAA spending brings the check to more than $1 trillion.

That’s a lot of money. It’s a lot more money than any other regime on the planet spends on “defense,” and it’s being spent to “defend” a country that  faces no credible threat of invasion and whose rulers have to constantly drum up arguments in order to pretend that it has any substantial “enemies” at all.

Only one other regime on the planet — China’s — spends as much per year on “defense” as the EXTRA money Hegseth’s panhandling for.

After more than four years of all-out war, the Russian and Ukrainian regimes are spending, respectively, about 3/4 as much and about 1/3 as much on their war machines as Hegseth’s request for MORE.

The beauty of the situation is that all Congress has to do to take control of the situation is the same thing it’s been doing: Sit on its hands, with one of those hands gripping the budgetary wallet tight.

They don’t even have to say “no.” They just have to NOT say “yes.”

We should be in, if not done with, the “trial” phase of the Constitution’s impeachment/removal protocols by now, but so far all we’ve seen is a bunch of hand-wringing and a couple of failed attempts to exercise sub-constitutional control with “war powers resolutions.”

If Congress doesn’t even possess the testicular fortitude to refrain from shelling out billions every time Hegseth sticks his hand out, what is Congress even good for?

The question kind of answers itself. I predict that Congress will fall all over itself showering your money on the nation’s most famous DUI hire.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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