Americans love to laugh at ridiculous regulations. A Florida law requires vending-machine labels to urge the public to file a report if the label is not there. The Federal Railroad Administration insists that all trains must be painted with an “F” at the front, so you can tell which end is which. Bureaucratic busybodies in Bethesda, Maryland, have shut down children’s lemonade stands because the enterprising young moppets did not have trading licences. The list goes hilariously on.
But red tape in America is no laughing matter. The problem is not the rules that are self-evidently absurd. It is the ones that sound reasonable on their own but impose a huge burden collectively. America is meant to be the home of laissez-faire. Unlike Europeans, whose lives have long been circumscribed by meddling governments and diktats from Brussels, Americans are supposed to be free to choose, for better or for worse. Yet for some time America has been straying from this ideal.
No laughing matter, indeed. The Obama administration is promulgation new regulations at a rate of 700 per month. Allow me to describe only three, each of which profoundly affects my family farm business:
a) As if over 28,000 words were not enough for an official definition of “cabbage” — and the entire Constitution, with amendments, is far less than 8,000 words — the USDA will henceforth require me to obtain a federal permit to grow and sell cabbage entirely within the state of Kansas. Because if someone would buy my Kansas-grown cabbage in Kansas they wouldn’t buy a California cabbage, and [i]THAT[/i] affects “interstate commerce”.
b) The EPA intends to regulate my “release” of dust, whether from working my fields to control weeds (without chemical herbicides) or even driving along the gravel road to my farm. It appears I shall have to file a report of my dust “release” each and every time I work the land or drive to town.
c) The Department of Labor has also decreed that because farming is such a “dangerous” occupation, no person of “minor age” (usually meaning 18, and certainly no less than 16) shall be employed or in any way involved with agricultural activities, [b]including the children of the farmer[/b].
There are several more I could list in detail, and that’s just agriculture, and just in the last few months. It keeps coming and coming from this administration which, far more than any other in American history, wishes to control any and all aspects of ordinary life. They are sick with their own hunger for power.
They are also unbelievably stupid politically. Eliminating this endless morasse of idiotic regulation would cost the federal government almost nothing, yet it would trigger an economic resurgence that would not only help in their campaign for re-election but boost revenue to the Treasury.
Right now we’re not hiring anyone, but I’ve got five jobs waiting on what happens in November.
It’s just as bad here in California! Here, high schoolers can’t even work at summertime jobs (like I did as a kid in upstate New York) to earn spending money or to save for college! Those jobs go to illegal immigrants. Out-of-work farm laborers sell oranges from their pickups on roadsides, and the law comes down on them for not having a business license or meeting “health safety standards.”.
One passage in the article that speaks to me:
“Barack Obama’s health-care reform of 2010 had many virtues, especially its attempt to make health insurance universal. But it does little to reduce the system’s staggering and increasing complexity. Every hour spent treating a patient in America creates at least 30 minutes of paperwork, and often a whole hour. Next year the number of federally mandated categories of illness and injury for which hospitals may claim reimbursement will rise from 18,000 to 140,000. There are nine codes relating to injuries caused by parrots, and three relating to burns from flaming water-skis.”
Indeed. And God help you if you you code the wrong item. Let us say that somebody comes in with an injury caused by a cockatiel and you put in “parrot: instead of “other avian”. This automatically becomes “fraud and abuse” and assuming that this “fraudulent” coding error was picked up on a review of 10 charts, would result in not only that single charge being rejected, and fined, but it would be assumed that that 10% of all your charts for the past 3-7 years were similarly “fraudulent”. That is why we have to pay special, highly educated “coders” to pour over all our charts making sure that they are in compliance. These coders need to have their skills upgraded expensively every six months, which is when the new regulartions come out. All this costs money. My 30 minute follow up appointment keeps 10 people in my office busy with documentation, scheduling, compliance monitoring etc, and takes about an hour and one half of other people’s time.
When I was a medical student, physicians still worked out of their home offices and their wives managed played receptionist, nurse and office manager. No more. It is illegal. You have to maintain a separate residence for both insurance, liability and tax reasons, you have to have malpractice, and you have to have an army of people to keep you from inadvertantly breaking the law. Costs would be one 10th of their current costs if we could get rid of the senseless regulation that has been written.
Just to cheer you guys up on the other side of the pond, consider the form of torment that our UK administration inflicts on us called Health and Safety. Consider, in fact, the report in this morning’s newspapers about a man who suffered an epileptic fit in a shallow pond in a park. He fell face down. The water was about ankle deep. Firemen were called. They refused to wade into the water because they had not been trained to work in water; health and safety rules required a specialised team to be called. A policeman offered to go in but was sternly warned off by the fire officer. Of course, when the ‘specialised’ team arrived half an hour later the man was dead. The fire chief, by the way, was quoted in the papers as saying that his men had done the right thing and should always do it this way. No politician seems to think it important to deliver us from this kind of madness.
We can’t reduce the regulatory burden – that would result in less revenue to the federal treasury from fines and penalties. Plus less work for DoJ lawyers, since this would represent a lesser chance of one accidentally giving a wrong answer during a federal inspection. Remember, if you don’t remember some factoid correctly, and you make a misstatement, even innocently, that is lying to a federal officer, and you can go to jail. That’s why it’s always best to answer every question with “to the best of my recollection, …â€.
Terry Tee,
The same (#4) scenario recently occurred in Alameda California (San Francisco Bay).