Free minds and hoop-jumpers
I finished jumping through several more bureaucratic hoops yesterday when I thought about why I was doing all the jumping. I am a jumper because I want to ply a trade out of my home workshop when I retire and earn a little additional income. I suppose a case can be made for certain regulations but please - enough is enough!
We have too many rules. It may astound you to know that each week, government entities at all levels pass more than 1,000 new rules. At the federal level alone, there are more than 150 agencies with more than 6 million employees whose sole mission in life is to regulate what you do, where you go, how you live, and who you are. You must be protected from yourself and others, must be 'helped' at every turn, and of course are too stupid to figure out that you are not supposed to eat hair spray or copier toner.
I am a conservative kind of guy with a libertarian bent and the fact that all levels of government insist on maintaining near-total control over me is vexing. Although the rule czars most always make mistakes and are incredibly inefficient, I would hold them in contempt even if they were perfect.
Big government is not the answer
Every time the government tries to control and thus make life better for you, it must use force. It must make criminals out of people who are not criminals. Smoke in the wrong place and you are a criminal. Ride with your 11-year-old in the front seat of your car and you're a criminal. Use a cell phone in the wrong place at the wrong time and you're a criminal.
Somehow, some way, we have fallen into the nasty habit of rewarding gross government incompetence by providing it with more power to be incompetent. As our local, state, and federal governments grow, we lose more of ourselves and our lives. The Founding Fathers envisioned limited government and for roughly 150 years, that's what we had. Had, that is, until the 1930s and the New Deal. Then the gloves came off, government controls and regulatory power grew, and the vision of limited government died an agonizing death.
I am no anarchist and I understand the need for rule of law. But do we really need so much? Whatever happened to government offering limited protections for its citizens while leaving them free to pursue their own interests? I'm going to ponder this later, but right now I have to limber up to prepare for today's hoop-jumping schedule.