. . . when even the richest man in the world is pestered and fined by petty local government bureaucrats over government paperwork “mistakes.”
Bill Gates has a daughter who is a competitive horse rider/jumper, so he owns a home in Wellington, Florida, an epicenter of that sport. He was recently informed by the local government bureaucracy (the “Village of Wellington”) that his horse manure bin was too close to a canal. (City and County government golf courses are among the biggest polluters of South Florida canals, but that’s another story).
Being an environmentalist who has given away millions to environmental organizations, Gates immediately built a new horse manure bin in the spot designated for him by government. He was nevertheless fined $148,000 for not filling out the appropriate government form before having his horse manure bin built. His lawyers talked the fine down to $30,000, which is still a good piece of extortion work for the local pesteaucracy.
So many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of government regulations have accumulated over the past several generations that we are all now at the mercy of any nitwit/moron/jerk/sufferer of small-man syndrome who weasels his (or her) way into the lowliest of jobs in the smallest of government bureaucracies. Once implanted there, they make full use of all the levers of bureaucracy that have been built up over more than 200 years to push the rest of us around and make us jump through their financial hoops in order to stroke their own phony self importance.
8:06 am on June 16, 2015
