From the Torrington Register Citizen Published February 23, 2012. The original is available at the link below, but I have lightly edited and updated the text below.
http://www.registercitizen.com/articles/2012/02/22/opinion/doc4f45aed025592524008729.txt
Too much for the taxpayer to deal with
I have been looking for a simple way to explain what is wrong with America for a long time and today’s news in the Torrington Register Citizen shows it simply. We have too many laws, too many politicians, too many lawyers, too much government mandated insurance and too many prisoners. The taxpayer just can’t pay for it all.
Innocent children, as many as two million of them nationwide, were brought to this country by cars and trains and boats and planes, and their parents decided to put them in the school system. Because of that decision as many as 35 years ago, and a complicated and seriously broken set of laws, our government has decided to begin deporting them.
These people have broken no laws. There is no law against “being” in America and they were dependent when they arrived. And they are deportable and they have no chance of ever being “legal” in the only country they have ever known. Does anyone think there will be any change to our immigration laws any time soon?
And then there is a guy who began fixing cars in a garage without getting, what, seven or eight permits and licenses? How long should he go to jail?
As a business owner in Torrington I know it is practically impossible to do anything according to the law. So I don’t. I continue what I have been doing for years and not start anything new because, hey, I could go to jail, or go bankrupt trying to avoid breaking way too many laws.
Only government employees and lawyers benefit from these laws. Well, there are also those businesses licensed by government employees to do work and thereby have a government sanctioned monopoly on all work and charge more to pay the taxes, permits, lawyers, professionals and government inspectors.
These are the businesses that hire lobbyists and contribute to campaigns so that they can keep their monopolies. Just ask the guy who wanted to repair cars in his garage. Or Microsoft, who sued me for $2 million dollars and lost.
My industry is not yet licensed, but when it is I will have to charge a lot more for my services. In China they can build a skyscraper or a bridge in a year. In the US we are lucky to break ground in five years or finish in a decade. Watch the U.S. become regulated into bankruptcy and largely unregulated Latin America increase their quality of life because they have newer infrastructure and more productive manufacturing.
The U.S. Congress costs us about a million dollars per congress person per year in salary and benefits paid to each of more than 500 of them. That is over $5 billion (with a B) a year. And they get nothing done. Would we be better off with more politicians? Will we ever have fewer politicians?
I’m just saying there are too many laws, and too many politicians, and too many lawyers, and too many government employees, and too many prisoners, and too many illegal immigrants, and no way to change any of it or pay for it all. If our government were a business it would be time to cut out some overhead. The only people to benefit from our system are the politicians and lawyers and government employees, and the monopolies they created.
Kent Johnson
Compatible Computers
Torrington
