It’s a heedless form of juvenile selfishness. I want to think and act like an 8yo. IOW … If an idea pops in my head, do it.
There won’t be any consequences I care about because a) I don’t think beyond 3 minutes into the future, and b) I sure as hell don’t consider what effect my actions might have on anyone else.
It’s gonna be one gigantic “Hey y’all! Hold my beer and watch this!” Mostly delivered in a country Texas twang with New Yorker characteristics.
But do you know who you don’t have to respect? The government. The government is the one singular hierarchy, out of all of our myriad societal hierarchies, that isn’t on your back.
that’s not true, at least not universally. You need to respect governmental entities and enforcement personnel. If an IRS agent tells you they are auditing your tax return, it’s probably not in your best interests to tell them to go to hell and ignore them. They’re not going away and there will be repercussions if you do. Similarly, if a police officer stops you for a traffic violation, you probably shouldn’t tell them that you are a sovereign citizen and for them to fuck off since they have no authority over you. That won’t end well.
You have an absolute right to tell them to go to hell, too. Bad things might happen anyway when you do, but that’s because those people aren’t following the government regulations.
I’m again going to cite my argument that, with the exceptions I noted, the potential for oppressive regulation becomes greater as government becomes more local. For example, at the level of the federal government the regulations that are created and the agencies that enforce them are things like the FDA protecting the safety of food and medicine, the EPA protecting the environment, the FAA ensuring the safety of air travel, the SEC ensuring the integrity of stock markets, and so on.
Conservatives are always whining that these regulations are burdensome and “bad for business”. Well, sure, if you’re running a big industrial plant that produces toxic sludge as a byproduct, it’s undoubtedly much easier and cheaper to dump it all in the river than to dispose of it safely, but only a sociopath could possibly consider this an acceptable tradeoff.
But by the time you get down to the level of municipal government, you get things like property standards bylaws that can be downright ridiculous. I can think of some examples of the latter. I was reading a story the other day about an older lady who lived in one of those urban houses with a small frontage and therefore quite a small front lawn. For ease of maintenance she installed artificial turf. The city served her with a bylaw violation and made her remove it and lay regular grass, for no good reason except that some pin-headed city councilors didn’t like it.
I myself was once served with a notice that my front hedges were too high. It wasn’t a corner property and there was no issue of any kind of view obstruction. They were in fine shape and attractive, and offered privacy from the street. Nope. Gotta trim them down to regulation height.
This is what I mean when I say I’m open to thoughtful, careful changes to regulation. But that’s not what conservatives say they want, or seem to work towards. They just want to get rid of regulation because it’s “bad”.
Also, and I’m just spitballing here, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that a lot of the local level property standards bylaws and HOA nonsense were supported by conservatives because they think it protects their property value. I know HOA people, and the types who enjoy flexing that sort of petty power are more likely Trump voters than not.
Small businesses can certainly be heavily harassed by government. Some of this makes sense, like cleanliness standards for restaurants, but many are genuinely crazy, and yes, much of the problem comes from municipal government, not national or provincial/state.
As a general rule of thumb, municipal government deals with pickier but more immediate issues, and is run by dumber, more inflexible people.
A bizarre problem a lot of my clients deal with is that they cannot economically build a new facility because the government requires truly astounding number of parking spaces. I have had clients with 30 employees told that if they want to build a new facility, they need 80, even 100 parking spaces, despite the indisputable fact that there is zero chance even half will ever be used. (These are manufacturing businesses, not retail.) Ridiculous crap like that.
I doubt there is a political slant to this. There was a famous case in Toronto where people in a rich neighborhood opposed a child care because they feared for the neighborhood’s “character,” meaning property values, and a few of them were rather famous people with notably liberal leanings. Toronto’s a super liberal city anyway. When it comes to property value NIMBYism, it’s famously politically neutral. Liberal people talk a good game but when immediate push comes to shove, my experience is they’re as ferociously greedy as anyone else.
I suppose maybe the SDMB might skew away from people who own businesses, property. or work in highly regulated industries. I think for the average American, that’s where they tend to encounter frustration with government. Ostensibly these regulations are there for people’s protection. But in practice (as you pointed out) adhering to and documenting compliance with these regulations and can become tedious and onerous. Particularly as enforcement is often inconsistent at best.
I fall into all three categories, unless you don’t consider a sole proprietorship as an independent consultant to be “owning a business”, which maybe it isn’t in the proper sense of the term. But I’ve definitely done the other two, including working/consulting for regulated telecoms and the very regulated banking industry, and with perhaps one exception in the latter I never encountered anything that I considered onerous over-regulation there or anyone who felt that way.
The governance culture at Canadian banks is one of close collaboration with federal regulators to a degree that one gets the impression that to some extent they’re an extension of the government itself; they’ve learned that strong regulation goes hand-in-hand with strong protection and stability. There were three US bank failures in early 2023; no Canadian bank was ever at the slightest risk. Banks and customers alike appreciate the stability of the tightly regulated Canadian banking system.
The one problem with regulation that Canadian banks sometimes have is with the US government’s Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) mandated for US citizens, which is a spinoff of the bizarre requirement for US citizens permanently living abroad to still be responsible for US income tax. It’s sometimes easier for banks to just refuse to open accounts for US citizens. In my view, this is one of the rare examples of government overreach at the federal level.
And finally, as a longtime property owner, although I haven’t had many gripes with regulations at any level of government, those few I’ve had have always been with municipal government. My current gripe isn’t so much with regulations as with extortionate property taxes, much of which money is then spent on unnecessary trivia.
Are we specifically limited to the government of the U.S.A. and/or other modern, ostensibly democratic nations? Because if we’re allowed to consider all human societies throughout history, I don’t think it would be hard to come up with examples of burdensome government.
I have to disagree. While many of us have encountered instances in which we have perceived local regs as unnecessary and ridiculous, I suggest it is challenging to offer bespoke - yet fairly administered and inexpensive - regulation of every potential situation. I’m sure most of us can think of instances when zoning and building codes were unnecessary or onerous. But it is harder to think of the times those same codes discouraged previous owners or builders from substandard work. And, if you truly feel it warranted, you can seek a variance.
Here in the Chicago area, folk often complain about overly burdensome building codes. But when we looked for homes in area with far less strict codes, the quality of construction was vastly inferior.
In the cases of both federal and local regulations that are ineffective/needlessly burdensome, the remedy is the same: public attention. In the case of local regulations, we’d all be better off if journalism were a non-profit activity that is supported at the local level. (Which I think is the only way in a world dominated by the Internet for local newspapers to exist, whether in online or paper forms.)
If you had a local paper to consult when deciding whether to buy a home in a particular town or suburb, and that paper reported on people’s complaints about local rules and regulations, then whatever petty tyrants might be making and enforcing those rules and regulations would be subjected to market pressures. (And maybe voted out of office.)
Also, places across the world with lax or unenforced building codes are the sorts of places that end up with huge death tolls in natural disasters. That’s when you start seeing hundreds or thousands of people die whenever there’s a fire or earthquake or whatever.
As someone who brought up the idea of municipal regulations often being more burdensome than those of higher levels of government, I have to stress that I wasn’t talking about building codes, but about things like bylaws governing property standards like the maximum permissible height of your hedges or the use of artificial turf or paving stones.
Building codes are a matter of public safety, just like the examples I listed before of the FDA, EPA, FAA, etc. I don’t know how it works in the US but in Canada they’re a mix of federal standards that are adopted by provinces, potentially with modifications. Enforcement is often at the municipal level but that’s not where the building codes come from.
But those are oligopolistic businesses in Canada, where new entry is all but forbidden and businesses operate with government blessing. They have to be heavily regulated - and they have little to complain about in terms of government. Government’s their best friend.
They’re also BIG business. Big business controls government as much as the other way around. SMALL business is who gets fucked big time, despite being much more important in terms of economic growth and innovation.
Some of these things sound to me more like HOA bylaws than govt regs. Maybe there is a reason to limit lot coverage w/ impermeable surfaces, if you are gonna complain to the govt when the storm sewers overflow.
And sure, I should be able to grow my hedges and play my music however I want. But when my neighbors are keeping me awake at 3 a.m. and have 4 undriveable cars up on blocks in their front yard… But none of us think of ourselves as unreasonable or a problem.
Most of this is bass-ackwords and smacks of
sycophancy towards governmental authority with a big admixture of emotional blackmail (“you should be grateful to the government and preserve it and serve it because it does so much good for you, and not complain when it’s hurting you, lest you be called out for being ungrateful and conservatiive”). I know damned well that a conservative is the furthest thing from what I am, and don’t give a damn if Zoobi thinks I am (and ungrateful to boot!) so it falls on me to point out what a load of hooey I just read.
There were two governments involved, you know. One that was for slavery and one that was against. Each side wanted to win so they could make their own rules the law of the land.One of those governments ousted the other and imposed their authority over its subjects; rather than being the shimmering triumph of good over evil that you’re making it out to be, it was a clash of disagreeing nations over which would prevail.
Nope. That was the people who felt that authority’s laws oppressed them and rose up against them until the government could not hold up against their resistance. It was dissent smashing down law and order, and law-and-order is always a force for maintaining a status quo that favors money, power-over-others, conformity, and the coercion of conformity.
What is a lynching if it’s not an authority inflicting itself on the subject? Once again you post a situation of one government, one set of rules and the rulers who implemented them, imposing itself on another. Both of those were bodies of power that stood for their rules and their right to enforce them.
Even more wrong than the notion that a benign government empowered and enfranchised women and non-whites. Just about all of the significant gains the GLBT resistance brought about were the result of an unruly bunch of queers and a few open minded heterosexuals, who deliberately set out and broke unjust laws and flouted oppressive rules again and again until those laws and rules fell in ruin.
The government didn’t give anyone any rights, the victims rose up and took their rights.
Haw. Haw. Haw. It was that hilariously incorrect statement as much as the rest of the post which roused me to respond. Government does not protect the aberrant, the nonconformist, the individually-minded. Being different is discouraged at every turn–witness the public reaction to noncompliant social groupings like the Beats, hippies and punks; witness how their hostility and that of the government mesh to injure the dissent. Hell, witness the persecution of small-town local eccentrics by the normal citizens around them who outnumber them. Government is all about coercion of conformity and the punishment of aberrant individuals and it imposes those values on the mass of the citizenry–already a small-minded, snoopy lot who love coercing conformity and suppressing dissent on their own.
I shouldn’t have to even bother pointing out what a mean-spirited broad brush referal to a great many people that is, along with being totally biased by favoring authoritarian governments, and how much it depends on the notion of collective guilt (a false, cruel and destructive construct that–yes!–authority and its body slaves seek to impose on whoever they find to be vulnerable to it). But this is the SDMB so unfortunately all too many readers will calmly, nay, smugly go along with it until they’re the ones standing against the wall or waiting for the blade to drop on their necks. Don’t worry, your executions will be government-sanctioned, public-approved, and according to the letter of the law.
I am sorry if I got you mad. I would certainly assume libertarians and anarchists would disagree with me as well. By definition you see government as evil.
It was a clash between a nation that thought people should buy and sell slaves as property, and one that thought they shouldn’t.
Just for the sake of argument, what would you consider “evil”?
There’s an old saying: “Every regulation is written in blood.” An overstatement? Likely. But too often true.