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What is meant by being against Big Government?

It's worth watching. It exhibits how bureaucratic regulation has gotten entirely out of hand, and is infringing heavily on the lives of many ordinary people who lack the means to hire platoons of lawyers to deal with stacks of complex regulations, with expensive compliance requirements.
 
But I will add this:

Everyone is against government, everyone is against taxes, until they themselves need help.

I suspect Houston - like everywhere - had a few of these "down with government" types, that now that Harvey wiped the place out, may appreciate their fellow citizens helping them out.

Becoming lacking in food, shelter, water, power, and clothing, has a way of humbling the most hardened person.

Hopefully they'll change their attitude, and consider helping someone else out in the future, when that someone has a time of need.
 
Goshin said:
It's worth watching. It exhibits how bureaucratic regulation has gotten entirely out of hand, and is infringing heavily on the lives of many ordinary people who lack the means to hire platoons of lawyers to deal with stacks of complex regulations, with expensive compliance requirements.
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Which in my opinion, is the true reason we have a stagnant economy. Sure, outsourcing sucks, but....those are large companies doing that. The US economy used to be fueled by small companies. But the large companies learned to kill competition by buying politicians. It's why Goldman Sachs donates billions to both dems and reps every campaign season.
 
Chomsky said:
But I will add this:

Everyone is against government, everyone is against taxes, until they themselves need help.

I suspect Houston - like everywhere - had a few of these "down with government" types, that now that Harvey wiped the place out, may appreciate their fellow citizens helping them out.

Becoming lacking in food, shelter, water, power, and clothing, has a way of humbling the most hardened person.

Hopefully they'll change their attitude, and consider helping someone else out in the future, when that someone has a time of need.
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You're failing to understand the nature of this thread, likely because you didn't watch the vid.
 
KevinKohler said:
You're failing to understand the nature of this thread, likely because you didn't watch the vid.
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You know what, I'll respect this comment.

Yeah, wasn't going to devote 45 mins to this now. So I shot out a general comment.

If there was some OP guidance to some highlight or epochal point in the video, I would've scoped that out.
 
Chomsky said:
But I will add this:

Everyone is against government, everyone is against taxes, until they themselves need help.

I suspect Houston - like everywhere - had a few of these "down with government" types, that now that Harvey wiped the place out, may appreciate their fellow citizens helping them out.

Becoming lacking in food, shelter, water, power, and clothing, has a way of humbling the most hardened person.

Hopefully they'll change their attitude, and consider helping someone else out in the future, when that someone has a time of need.
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Not really the point of the video. It doesn't really address taxation or gov't aid, but the exponential excess of bureaucracy making life (and especially entrepreneurship) almost impossible.

I am pretty definitely in the "opposes big government" camp, but that doesn't mean I want NO government... just more limited gov't.
 
Goshin said:
Not really the point of the video. It doesn't really address taxation or gov't aid, but the exponential excess of bureaucracy making life (and especially entrepreneurship) almost impossible.

I am pretty definitely in the "opposes big government" camp, but that doesn't mean I want NO government... just more limited gov't.
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Yeah, understood.

I might check out the video when I get back tonight. It really wan't fair for me to comment, without watching it.
 
countryboy said:
The problem is, you don't want to watch the video, because it reveals the truth. You support big government bureaucracy. :shrug:

"Some smarmy Fox guy"? You've never heard of John Stossel? You must be very young. :roll:
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I watched the video and I agree both with the video and with @Mr Person.
I think the video is very good and right on what they complain and @Mr Person also very clear and right on what he says.
 
Mr Person said:
It's a 45 minute video. What portion are we supposed to listen to?

I skipped around a bit. There was some smarmy Fox guy repeatedly snarking at people over the concept of protecting ecosystems. There was the guy in the still saying he wasn't going to comply with regulations requiring him to provide modern facilities since he wanted to set something up to show how "primitive people" lived. These are people complaining about government regs that affect one specific aspect of their lives.




See, the problem is that when I hear people complaining about "big government", they are not complaining about specific regulations that are overbroad in some way that affects them personally. They're just reiterating some general complaint. It's used around DP as a political slogan, contrary to the OP's assertion that actually, when people complain about "big government" they're like the people in the video.

The only way to placate someone who complains about "big government" but doesn't bother to elaborate on what precisely it is they are annoyed with would seem to be to go back to something much more like the Articles of Confederation, where you had a virtually non-existent federal government and a bunch of pretty much independent states. After all, when the complaint is 'big government' full stop, only an absurdly overly-simplified solution of 'small government' full stop is a rational answer.

But that would take a mass societal judgment that we don't care about having things like generally applicable laws of commerce, general standards requiring companies to take basic measures to make sure the food they sell isn't ripe with botulism, so on and so forth. Most of don't actually want that.

So yeah, I don't know what more should be said other than that it makes perfect sense to complain about an overbroad government regulation that negatively affects one as an individual, but no sense to simply complain about "big government." Further, that I rather dispute the notion that most people who complain about "big government" are like the people in the video; they're not, since the people in the video are complaining about specific things they don't like......

....not simply complaining about some abstract notion of an unacceptably sized government.






________________________________
And if the OP's creator or others consider this post off-point, then give me more to work with than "here, watch this 45 minute video"
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I'm a fiscal liberal, more so than Democrats, so, no matter that I have some libertarian sympathies then end result is I'm pro "Big Government." I also prefer strong leadership to an inefficiently run democracy of imbeciles. Enter through the door: China. And why China and Russia can raise more people out of abject poverty out of their entire enormous countries than yahoos in the tiny City of LA can a relatively few Americans in their speck of geography (relative to the mass geographical size of China and Russia).

But Big Government can grow a bureaucracy so incredibly large, one that feeds itself, that a nations economy slips further left on the economic graph of economic efficiency. This has been historically--and to this day--a major problem with Latin American countries.

Those bureaucracies are fueled in part by battalions of lawyers. The private sector hires battalions of lawyers too (as with banks and credit cards). In both cases those battalions of lawyers produce mountains of paper work, worded so complex, that often times many lawyers can't fully understand them.

Either way--private or public--they are meant to confuse, wear down, and subjugate the "little man" to the larger institution (be that government or the private sector such as a bank issuing you a credit card).

The New York City process for concealed carry permits, shown in the video, was inefficient particularly relative to Wisconsin and the City of Milwaukee.

The frog case in the video was even more crazy.

There is a difference between wise leaders and standard issued career politicians.
 
Fenton said:
Its a long video, so it would be nice if it was summarized by the Op in some way.
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The over simplified summary is this:

A government bureaucracy can keep expanding into all spheres of life, and with assistance from teams of lawyers hired by a city, state, or Federal Government, produce university textbook size of written laws for just a single issue: such as land use requirements for an endangered species of frog seen on a private property (in which say the owner, a developer, had hoped to develop the land for some use to extract profit from it e.g., development of residential homes).

In example of the land use for the frogs: owner by law must uproot all [hundreds or thousands] of trees, replant new ones, build 3 ponds, routinely drain the pounds x number of day etc.

But imagine the laws on that being a quarter or half the size of an old telephone book. And you're a retired machinist and not a corporate lawyer with a doctoral degree in your area of law.
 
Kal'Stang said:
This video shows perfect examples of what most people that are against Big Government are talking about when they talk about it.

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As an example:

There are 1,337 words in the Declaration of Independence.
There are 7,652 words in the U.S. Constitution including all the amendments.
There are 783,137 words in the King James Bible.

Constitutional Lawyers spend years discerning the content and intent of the U.S. Constitution.
Theological experts spend a lifetime studying the content and intent of the Bible.

Now consider just Obamacare alone:

There are 381,517 words in the Obamacare law that passed, and as of four years ago, October 2013, all the expanded bureaucracies dealing with that single act had published approximately 11,588,500 words of legally binding legislation or roughly 30 words of regulation for every word in the Act itself. All this volume of regulation took up 10,535 small type single spaced pages in the Federal Register.
https://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/penny-starr/11588500-words-obamacare-regs-30x-long-law

And many more thousands of words in rules and regulations have been added since 2013.

There is no human on Earth who has the time, patience, or stamina to read all that, let alone understand it. A business can have a whole battalion of legal eagles trying to make sense of all of it and they would not be able to do so.

The federal tax code as of 2015 was more than 12 million words and growing.
https://taxfoundation.org/federal-tax-laws-and-regulations-are-now-over-10-million-words-long/

Now add all the laws, rules, regulation governing land use, products, food, health, safety, environment, education, transportation, communication, etc. etc. etc. etc. and it is a pretty good bet that any person could commit one or two misdemeanors or even felonies on any given day. Certainly no corporation, no matter how large, can afford enough legal counsel to avoid committing one or more infractions at any given time.

Peter Schweizer in his excellent book Extortion spells out how politicians encourage contributions to their campaign coffers and Super Pacs by suggesting to this or that executive that such and such a law could possibly be enforced or that they are considering imposing this or that law. The reason McConnell, Schumer, Ryan, Pelosi et al are in those jobs is they are all masters at using the law, rules, and regulation to let's say do a bit of arm twisting?

And THAT is the BIG GOVERNMENT that thinking people abhor and rail against and that the Founders tried to make sure would never exist in the United States of America.



 
Chillfolks said:
Because my detached garage is not defined by the city as a livable dwelling I'm legally not allowed to give guitar or trombone lessons in it. If I give them in my home my front door needs to be widened and a hand rails installed in my bathroom.
I do this on weekends to help people learn music not as a profession.


One day a city inspector may show up and I'll stop. Untill then let's jam
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The plan is to make it difficult to just anyone enter in the business game. Too much bureaucracy is very often a disguise way to protect bigger business from smaller competitors.

Despite the fact that such load of red tapes make it impossible to may people to be self-employed, it actually create a lot of professional jobs because the more the red tape (+ the bigger the business) the more companies have to hire professionals to deal with red tapes, the more bureaucrats are hired and limiting the competition make the market more profitable for those who can afford play the game, which means that government also earn more in taxes.


To be honest, people who defend that the Gov. have to use strategies to attract big corporation such as lower taxes among other things, with the argument that they generate Jobs, should not be annoyed with such big red tapes, because they are one of these strategies to give advantages to corporation and a lot of red tape is influenced by corporation lobby.

But the truth is that small and middle size companies as back bone of an economy hire more people than corporation.

And an other thing that I think is highly probable to be true, is that the future is about automation and very few jobs remaining. While governments and society don't actually think about a way to adapt society and an economy based on automaton, we should expect governments getting increasing crazy bureaucratic, as an alternative to keep artificially creating bureaucratic jobs and taxes because their mind are still in the 20th Century.

Here a nice interview with the author of Utopia for Realists (Rutger Bregman).
 
Chomsky said:
Yeah, understood.

I might check out the video when I get back tonight. It really wan't fair for me to comment, without watching it.
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Hey, it's a long video. Let me be quick to admit I sure as hockey sticks don't watch every video everyone posts on here. :)


It's pretty good though. I watched over half of it before I had to go do other things; probably catch the rest later tonight.
 
Goshin said:
Hey, it's a long video. Let me be quick to admit I sure as hockey sticks don't watch every video everyone posts on here. :)


It's pretty good though. I watched over half of it before I had to go do other things; probably catch the rest later tonight.
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Hah! :mrgreen:
 
Chillfolks said:
Because my detached garage is not defined by the city as a livable dwelling I'm legally not allowed to give guitar or trombone lessons in it. If I give them in my home my front door needs to be widened and a hand rails installed in my bathroom.
I do this on weekends to help people learn music not as a profession.


One day a city inspector may show up and I'll stop. Untill then let's jam
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Do you charge?

If not, or even if you do, here's my position, if they want to curtail you in any way...THEY have to PROVE you are running an establishment.

I live in Vancouver, the "left coast" were Greenpeace was founded and flourished. We have a leftist city hall. There are so many regulations no one can know them all. They have even gone so far as to write a law banning nukes, as if that law could stop an ICBM.

Whether a government is big or small it will have regulations, some of which are stupidly entertaining...However what people don't realize is that you are seeing this in silo form. What people don't get is that most are unenforceable and others are simply too costly to pursue. Or, too may people are breaking the law to enforce it, which is what happened to pot here.

Here, it is against the law to smoke cigarettes in a public park. The parks board annually pays some 50 people to do nothing but pick up cigarette butts and trash because the law cannot be enforced, as soon as a park ranger is visible people drop the butt and go "what cigarette?", ...and now you have a couple hundred thousand spent in trying a "Who to believe" case that you could loose legally and will loose in the public's mind.

Government is inevitable, but like this thread every complaint I have ever heard is completely non-specific or they are talking about asinine **** that's never enforced.

Were it me wanting to teach music lessons in my garage I would simply go "what lessons?" and let them prove try to prove whatever. I ran a business out of my home without a business license for eleven years. About every three years they would send me a letter, which I ignored.

That's it. A letter. They knew they would have to get search warrants etc. for what would be a $500 fine, at best


In closing, a right wing party won election 12 years ago based in part in "cleaning up" big government, making it more open.....

After three years a special task force reported removing 11 laws from the books, one of them making it illegal to cut down a dogwood tree, and amended some 70 others. No one noticed
 
Chomsky said:
You know what, I'll respect this comment.

Yeah, wasn't going to devote 45 mins to this now. So I shot out a general comment.

If there was some OP guidance to some highlight or epochal point in the video, I would've scoped that out.
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I agree. Honestly, I wasn't gonna watch it, either. I don't even watch porn that's 45 minutes. I was planning on watching a minute or two, but it was actually pretty good, so I watched the entire thing. And no, I'm not exactly a huge fan of stossel. He just comes off as smarmy, to me. And I get it, he's gotta engage with a, how would you say....maybe, not the most educated audience (Fox News).

But the OP vid delivers. Some it's bull****, like being incredulous at the audacity of requiring a license to professionally prepare taxes (LOL), but most of it is legit, and quite revealing of the mindset behind over regulation, the nature of our problem. I mean, cities/states allow established companies to determine if another company with a similar product can open in their vicinity? I've first hand exp with this, so I know it's true. The vids not bad, if you can tolerate Stossils delivery on the info.
 
KevinKohler said:
You need a license to be a wedding planner. Obtaining the license involves 1 three hour class, which, in CT, costs between 700-1000 bucks.

The company I work for wants some of its stores to expand to have beer and liquor. But they can't, but the cities allow the existing liquor store owners a say on new liquor sales licenses issued.

In order for me to have my own photography studio, I either have to have a separate entrance to my house, at which point I have to modify many aspects of my house, or, I have to use a separate building. But not my garage, but it is not climate controlled.

In order to sell food, at, say, a county fair, your "kitchen" has to be inspected by a health inspector. Fair enough. But that kitchen can't be your kitchen at home, unless, again, it has its own separate entrance from the rest of the house. And the appliances must be specific brands, "rated for food service". So, instead of a 100 dollar microwave, it must be a 900+ dollar microwave. Not a thousand dollar stove, a 5k+ stove. Not an 80 dollar deep fryer, a 2500+ deep fryer. Etc.

That specific enough for you?
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I agree, those all examples of what seems like ridiculous amounts of government busybodies, like the type you have as neighbors and hate them for it, but got elected to local (touch, city, county, government), which compounds their impact.

However, without knowing the reasoning which instigated these regulations and legislation, it is hard to evaluate whether any of them are justified.
They may be. Or, more likely, they may not be; and be little more than the work of busybodies elected to government.
 
eohrnberger said:
I agree, those all examples of what seems like ridiculous amounts of government busybodies, like the type you have as neighbors and hate them for it, but got elected to local (touch, city, county, government), which compounds their impact.

However, without knowing the reasoning which instigated these regulations and legislation, it is hard to evaluate whether any of them are justified.
They may be. Or, more likely, they may not be; and be little more than the work of busybodies elected to government.
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Can't fathom what logical reason a government official would have to allow established business owners a say in allowing a new business of the same type to open in their vicinity.
 
KevinKohler said:
Can't fathom what logical reason a government official would have to allow established business owners a say in allowing a new business of the same type to open in their vicinity.
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Fair, but I'm willing to give it a chance if there a good reason for it.

At one time antiseptics were deemed unnecessary for surgery. Granted, most patients died from post surgery infections. At one time there wasn't a health code for restaurants either, nor requirements for vaccinations. I'm willing to hear the arguments before deciding the merits of the case.
 
eohrnberger said:
Fair, but I'm willing to give it a chance if there a good reason for it.

At one time antiseptics were deemed unnecessary for surgery. Granted, most patients died from post surgery infections. At one time there wasn't a health code for restaurants either, nor requirements for vaccinations. I'm willing to hear the arguments before deciding the merits of the case.
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I'm not against regulations, even the hard to uphold or expensive ones, so long as their purpose is useful, and serves a valuable purpose.

Here's the issue with hearing an argument (presumably made by those who write the regulation) for every reg prior to deciding their use....the time it would take to hear those arguments and resolve their relevancy exceeds the time it takes beauracracy to write two more.
 
KevinKohler said:
I'm not against regulations, even the hard to uphold or expensive ones, so long as their purpose is useful, and serves a valuable purpose.
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Agreed. Just as useless or excessive regulations needs to retired.

Here's the issue with hearing an argument (presumably made by those who write the regulation) for every reg prior to deciding their use....the time it would take to hear those arguments and resolve their relevancy exceeds the time it takes beauracracy to write two more.
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Check me if I'm wrong, but shouldn't this happen as part of the process before passing / adopting each regulation? Surely all that would have been recorded / scribed somewhere.
 
The ideal government size is zero. We don't live in an ideal world, so we can't have no government, but the government should be as small and un-intrusive as possible. The government also shouldn't do anything that people can do for themselves.
 
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