RED TAPE
Death by 10,000 Paper Cuts
Paula Devlin
EtherZone
September 17, 2004
The United States Constitution provides for "government
of the people, by the people and for the people". The current
state of affairs is witness to the crime of government of lawyers,
by lawyers and for lawyers. Our legislatures and bureaucracies
are bloated with legal eagles who have never done an honest day's
work in their lives. These high-end parasites are committed to
justifying their existence by regulating those who are responsible
for capital formation and make real money.
Every aspect of our lives is
increasingly controlled by so many laws it is humanly impossible
to know all of them. The one true God got his laws across to
mankind in ten sentences. But when men became gods, laws multiplied
geometrically in every little fiefdom where man took himself
to be the ultimate arbiter of right and wrong.
When the majority believed in a final judgment and man was expected
to regulate his behavior accordingly, there was no necessity
for laws defining everything. Civilizations that become so enmeshed
in regulations have collapsed because they no longer produced
anything. We have become dominated by the chattering class: people
without souls, ethics or productive abilities yet with enough
unearned capital to control those who produce it.
The only professions not afflicted
by the curse of suffocating regulation are the legal profession
itself and artists. (Organizing artists and artisans is like
herding cats. As soon as they figure out how to do that, they
will.) Those who have other talents that actually produce something
have their productive ability reduced by an onerous (and growing)
burden of paperwork. It doesn't matter what the profession: doctors,
financial professionals, mineworkers, manufacturers, educators,
trainmen, ranchers, insurance companies, pension plans, banks,
restaurants, distillers, etc. The list is endless and the regulations
enough to sink the nation.
If someone wishes to bake cookies
and sell them to tourists passing through town, they must deal
get a proper license from the health department and have their
kitchen approved for commercial purposes. That means no pets
in the house, among other things. You can't just bake cookies
and sell them any more than a kid can set up a lemonade stand.
Living in a rural community
does not allow freedom from this legalized sadism. What got me
set off this week was a signature guarantee requirement. Our
firm was attempting to transfer some 401(k) assets from one custodian
to another. The appropriate paperwork, as we understood it, was
sent off on August 31 with the requisite signature guarantee.
Two weeks later all of the parties receive a letter from the
current custodian with a new set of hoops through which to jump.
Being country bumpkins, we were quite puzzled by the gradations
in the Medallion Signature Guarantee. We soon learned that the
surety bond for our E designation was inadequate to cover the
value of the assets to be transferred. That went into effect
last February without any appropriate notification.
The next challenge was to find
a Medallion Signature Guarantee that met the surety bond requirements.
That took several hours. That part cannot be completed until
the boss gets back from vacation next week. In the meantime,
the receiving custodian has had to generate a letter of instruction
that not only tells the current custodian where to send the funds
but also that they are willing to accept them. We have been working
on this case for over three months and the current custodian
is assuming that the new custodian is going to be surprised by
an influx of money, which is probably less than in costs to keep
a presidential campaign on life support for a day.
This custodial transfer has
reduced the productivity of four organizations, not counting
the current custodian. Additional hours have been spent telephoning,
faxing and filling out more forms to please the regulatory ogres.
Commissions have been delayed and the ability to add money to
the economy has been delayed.
The assumption that all are
criminals and must be treated as such reigns. Doing business
on a handshake, which was based on Christian ethics, has been
destroyed. Innocent until proven guilty is history.
As another example, this week
the Forest Service started some controlled burns to eliminate
the underbrush and dead wood in some forests. The smoke can be
seen for a hundred mile radius. Trees killed by pine bark beetles
are going up in smoke, useless to everyone. Time was when the
forest needed cleaning, the local citizenry or the logging companies
took care of it. The forest was treated like a large garden.
Now that there is a huge, idiotic and unconstitutional federal
bureaucracy, taking a rock, much less a combustible (and possibly
humanly useful) stick out of federal land is a federal crime.
How is this different from
what Robin Hood and his merry men opposed?
Why is it politically correct
to murder an in utero person yet politically incorrect to take
dead wood out of a forest? What malicious ideology spawned these
hate-filled regulations? It is inimical to the basic premises
upon which
our nation was founded.
"When
in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people
to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with
another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate
and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's
God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind
requires that they should declare the causes which impel them
to the separation." (Declaration of Independence, July
4, 1776)
Is there any
hope that we can throw off the yoke of bureaucratic oppression
spawned by the legal profession without a violent conflict? We
need to have a national referendum that makes it an illegal conflict
of interest for any lawyer to hold any legislative office. That
would be a good start.
September 17, 2004
Paula Devlin
Paula Devlin
is a former New Englander who bolted to the Rocky Mountain West,
where the air is clean, the stars are brilliant and men still
put their pants on one leg at a time. Paula is a regular
columnist for Ether Zone.
Paula Devlin
can be reached at: pdevlin@bacavalley.com
"Published
originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and
hyperlink intact."
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