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Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Licensing Fun

I love dealing with the state and insurance companies. It's fun. In order for me to get the particular business license I need, I have to have a bond. However, in order for me to get my bond, I have to have my license. This makes for a fun process.

It seems silly to me that I even need a license to do what I do, but it seems standard now that everyone accepts that the government can "regulate" anything it wants to regulate (ie. can generate revenue from). At some point not only did we become lessors of property from the government, we also became a society where you have to ask permission if you want to conduct business (if you don't believe me, don't pay your property tax and see if you don't get evicted from your land; also see what happens if you don't pay your business license renewal fees - I'm just saying)

Seems to me that this is a pretty silly model for a government.

2 Comments:

Blogger bob_vinyl said...

I tend to agree here. I probably think the government should regulate more than you do, but still not as much as it does and particularly when it does so only to generate revenue. The many hidden (or semi-hidden) sources of government income do a good job of confusing the paying public about just how much waste there really is. It's one of the reasons I oppose slots. It's one of the reasons I'm opposed to the lottery. Eliminating all (or at least many) of these alternative sources of income and simplifying the income tax code (or better yet, replacing it with a sales tax) would give us a much better idea of just what it costs us to maintain our government and whether we get too little bang for our buck (or pay too many bucks for our bang).

7:02 AM  
Blogger The Management said...

"That's what governments are for, to get in a mans way"

Malcolm Reynolds

9:07 PM  

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