After America: Get Ready for Armageddon (13 page)

Got that? If you’ve got a deli, you better have, because New York is so broke they need their nine cents per sliced bagel and their bagel inspectors are cracking down. How does the song go? “If I can make it there/I’ll make it anywhere!” If you can make it there, you’re some kind of genius. To open a restaurant in NYC requires dealing with the conflicting demands of at least eleven municipal agencies, plus submitting to twenty-three city inspections, and applying for thirty different permits and certificates. Not including the state liquor license.85 The city conceded that this could all get very complicated. So what did it do to help would-be restaurateurs? It set up a new bureaucratic body to help you negotiate your way through all the other bureaucratic bodies. Great! An Agency of Bureaucratic Expeditiousness! And, if that doesn’t work, they’ll set up an Agency of Bureaucratic Expeditiousness Regulation to keep it up to snuff.

In such a world, there is no “law”—in the sense of (a) you the citizen being found by (b) a jury of your peers to be in breach of (c) a statute passed 84

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by (d) your elected representatives. Instead, unknown, unnamed, unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats determine transgressions, prosecute infractions, and levy fines for behavioral rules they themselves craft and which, thanks to the ever more tangled spaghetti of preferences, subsidies, entitlements, and incentives, apply to different citizens unequally. But tyranny is always whimsical. You may be lucky: you may not catch their eye—for a while. But perhaps your neighbor does, or the guy down the street. No trial, no jury, just a dogsbody in some office who pronounces that you’re guilty of an offense a colleague of his invented.

One morning, I strolled into my office in New Hampshire and noticed a letter on my assistant’s desk from the State of New York’s Bureau of Compliance informing us that we were in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance.

This was news to me. I don’t live in New York, I don’t own a business in New York, I don’t make anything in New York, I don’t sell anything in New York, I rarely visit New York except to fly in once in a while and catch a Broadway show (which I’ll now be doing on its out-of-town tryout in New Haven). Nevertheless, the State of New York had notified me that I was in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance, and apparently the fine for that is $14,000.

“Fourteen grand?” I roared to my lawyer. “On principle, I’d rather go to jail and be gang-raped by whichever bunch of convicted Albany legislators I have the misfortune to be sharing a cell with.”

“I take it then you don’t want to settle?”

No, sir. I’m proud to be in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance. I’ve put it on my business card. Still, I was interested to read this a few days later in the
New York Times
:

Albany—As Gov. David A. Paterson calls lawmakers back to work on the budget this week, he has announced that the fiscal situation is so serious that he must begin laying off state workers. But there is one wrinkle, as officials try to pare government undreaming america 85

spending: No one knows for sure how big the state work force actually is.86

Oh, my. You’d think that that would also be in non-compliance with the Bureau of Compliance, wouldn’t you? But no, it’s just business as usual.

They can audit you, but no one can audit them. You have to comply with them, but they don’t have to comply with them. The
Times
attempted to get some ballpark figures from the hundreds of state agencies; a few provided employment numbers, but others “seemed unaccustomed to public inquiry,” as the newspaper tactfully put it.

Why wouldn’t they be? Government accounting is a joke. In one year (2009), Medicare handed out $98 billion in improper or erroneous payments.87 A tenth of a trillion? Ha! Rounding error. Look for it in the line-items under “Miscellaneous.” For an accounting fraud of $567 million, Enron’s executives went to jail, and its head guy died there.88 For an accounting fraud ten times that size, the two Democrat hacks who headed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, walked away with a combined taxpayer-funded payout of $116.4 million. Fannie and Freddie are two of the largest businesses in America, but they’re exempt from SEC disclosure rules and Sarbanes-Oxley “corporate governance”

burdens, and so in 2008, unlike Enron, WorldCom, or any of the other reviled private-sector bogeymen, they came close to taking down the entire global economy. What then is the point of the SEC?

By 2005, the costs of federal regulatory compliance alone (that is, not including state or local red tape) were up to $1.13 trillion—or approaching 10 percent of GDP.89 In much of America, it takes far more paperwork to start a business than to go on welfare. In the words of a headline in the organic free-range hippie-dippy magazine
Acres
, “Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal.”90

The most vital element in a dynamic society is the space the citizen has to live life to his fullest potential. Big Government encroaches on this space unceasingly. Under the acronyms uncountable, we have devolved from 86

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republican self-government to a micro-regulated nursery. The book
What’s
the Matter with Kansas?
gives the game away in its very title. What’s the matter with Kansas is that it declines to vote as the statists would like. It surely cannot be that there is something the matter with the statists, so there must be something the matter with their subjects: they’re too ill-educated, or manipulated by advertisers, or deceived by talk radio, or just plain lazy to understand their own best interests. Therefore, it is our duty, as enlightened progressives, to correct their misunderstanding of themselves and decide on their behalf. In a famous interaction at an early tea party, CNN’s Susan Roesgen interviewed a guy in the crowd and asked why he was here:

“Because,” said the Tea Partier, “I hear a president say that he believed in what Lincoln stood for. Lincoln’s primary thing was he believed that people had the right to liberty, and had the right . . . ”91

But Miss Roesgen had heard enough: “What does this have to do with your taxes? Do you realize that you’re eligible for a $400 credit?”

Had the Tea Party animal been as angry as Angry White Men are supposed to be, he’d have said, “Oh, push off, you condescending tick. Taxes are a liberty issue. I don’t want a $400 ‘credit’ for agreeing to live my life in government-approved ways.” Had he been of a more literary bent, he might have adapted Sir Thomas More’s line from
A Man for All Seasons
: “Why, Susan, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world . . . but for a $400 tax credit?”

But Miss Roesgen wasn’t done with her “You may already have won!”

commercial: “Did you know,” she sneered, “that the state of Lincoln gets $50 billion out of this stimulus? That’s $50 billion for this state, sir.”

Golly! Who knew it was that easy? $50 billion! Where did it come from?

Did one of those Somali pirate ships find it just off the coast in a half-submerged treasure chest, all in convertible pieces of eight or Zanzibari dou-bloons? Or is it perhaps the case that that $50 billion has to be raised from the same limited pool of 300 million Americans and their as yet unborn descendants? And, if so, is giving it to the (bankrupt) “state of Lincoln” likely to be of much benefit to the citizens? Government money is not about the money, it’s about the government. It’s about social engineering—a $400 tax undreaming america 87

credit for falling into line with Barack Obama, Susan Roesgen, and the “Head of Behavior Change.” That’s why these protests are called Tea Parties—

because the heart of the matter is the same question posed two-and-a-third centuries ago: Are Americans subjects or citizens? If you’re a citizen, then a benign sovereign should not be determining “your interests” and then announcing that he’s giving you a “tax credit” as your pocket money.

In
Political Economy
(1816), Thomas Jefferson wrote that “to take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—‘the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.’” To do so on the scale modern western societies do leads to two obvious problems: First, you can’t erect a system of socioeconomic redistribution as extravagant as Susan Roesgen favors without losing a lot of the money en route. How much money do you have to take from Smith to give a $400 tax credit to Jones? Government isn’t an efficient delivery system; it’s a leach-field pipe with Smith at one end and Jones at the other and holes every couple of inches with thousands of bureaucrats sluicing all the way along. That’s why we’ve wound up with a situation worse than that foreseen by Jefferson. America is not a society comprising two groups—one that has “acquired too much” and one that has “not exercised equal industry and skill”—but a society dominated by a third group, a government bureaucracy that has “acquired too much” and, to add insult to financial injury, is not required to “exercise equal industry.”

And, when the state is that large, it takes not only the fruits but the fruit pies of your labors.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

aS unamerican aS appLe pie

On the first Friday of Lent 2009, a state inspector from the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture raided the fish fry at St. Cecilia’s Catholic 88

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Church in Rochester. He had been there for his annual inspection of the church’s kitchen, but, while going about his work, he espied an elderly parishioner unwrapping some pies.

He swooped. Would these by any chance be
homemade
pies? Sergeant Joe Pieday wasn’t taking no for an answer. The perps fessed up: Josie Reed had made her pumpkin pie.

Louise Humbert had made her raisin pie.

Mary Pratte had made her coconut cream pie.

And Marge Murtha had made her farm apple pie.

And, by selling their prohibited substances for a dollar a slice, these ladies and their accomplices were committing a criminal act. In the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, it is illegal for 88-year-old Mary Pratte to bake a pie in her kitchen for sale at a church fundraiser. The inspector declared that the baked goods could not be sold.92

St. Cecilia’s holds a fish fry every Friday during Lent, and regular church suppers during the rest of the year. That’s a lot of pie to forego. What solutions might there be? The inspector informed the ladies they could continue baking pies at home if each paid a $35 fee for him to come ’round to her home and certify her kitchen as state-compliant. “Well, that’s just ridicu-lous,” Louise Humbert, seventy-three, told the
Wall Street Journal
.

Alternatively, they could bake their pies in the state-inspected kitchen at the church. As anyone who bakes pies, as opposed to regulating them, could tell the inspector, if you attempt to replicate your family recipe in a strange oven, it doesn’t always turn out like it should.

A local bakery stepped in and donated some pies. But that’s not really the same, is it? Perhaps a more inventive solution is required. In simpler times, Sweeney Todd, purveyor of fine foodstuffs to Mrs. Lovett’s pie shop in Fleet Street, would have been proposing we drop the coconut cream and replace it with state-inspector pie, perhaps with a lattice crust, symbolizing the prison bars he ought to be behind. Problem solved. Easy as pie, as we used to say.

Instead, bye bye, Miss American Pie.

undreaming america 89

No matter how you slice it, this is tyranny. When I first came to my corner of New Hampshire, one of the small pleasures I took in my new state were the frequent bake sales—the Ladies’ Aid, the nursery school, the church rummage sale. Most of the muffins and cookies were good; some were exceptional; a few went down to sit in the stomach like overloaded barges at the bottom of the Suez Canal. But even then you admired if not the cooking then certainly the civic engagement. In a small but tangible way, a person who submits to a state pie regime is a subject, not a citizen—

because participation is the essence of citizenship, and thus barriers to participation crowd out citizenship. A couple of kids with a lemonade stand are learning the rudiments not just of economic self-reliance but of civic identity. So naturally an ever multiplying number of jurisdictions have determined to put an end to such a quintessentially American institution. Seven-year-old Julie Murphy was selling lemonade in Portland, Oregon, when two officers demanded to see her “temporary restaurant license.” Which would have cost her $120. When she failed to produce it, they threatened her with a $500 fine, and also made her cry.93 Perhaps like the officers of Saudi Arabia’s
mutaween
(the “Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vices”) the cheerless scolds of Permitstan could be issued with whips and scourges to flay the sinners in the street.

When life hands you lemons, make lemonade—and then watch the state enforcers turn it back into sour fruit.

It is part of a sustained and all but explicit assault on civic participation, intended to leave government with a monopoly not just of power but of social legitimacy. So, while thanking that local bakery in Pennsylvania for their generosity in stepping up to the plate, we should note that, just as gun control is not about guns but control, so pie control is likewise not about pies, but about ever more total control.

Indeed, we do an injustice to ye medieval tyrants of yore. As Tocqueville wrote: “There was a time in Europe in which the law, as well as the consent of the people, clothed kings with a power almost without limits. But almost never did it happen that they made use of it.”

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True. His Majesty was an absolute tyrant—in theory. But in practice he was in his palace hundreds of miles away. A pantalooned emissary might come prancing into your dooryard once every half-decade and give you a hard time, but for the most part you got on with your life relatively undisturbed. In Tocqueville’s words: “Although the entire government of the empire was concentrated in the hands of the emperor alone, and although he remained, in time of need, the arbiter of all things, the details of social life and of individual existence ordinarily escaped his control.”