Government is destroying enterprise with malice aforethought, not just in the U.S. but in many Western countries. Most of them are sliding into recession. From Elizabeth Nickson at elizabethnickson.substack.com:
This is an easy fix – you just have to demand it
When I drove 20,000 miles through rural America a few years back, I was struck by the dilapidated nature of, well, just about everything. The towns were rundown, there were thousands of abandoned farms and ranches and family houses. Sidewalks broken, every other shop was abandoned. Fields ran untended, forests filled with brush and fire ladders, hangers-on in trailers with a junkyard dog and rifle racks on trucks. Hunting was a necessity, not a sport.
In sharp contrast I grew up in a country village of 500 surrounded by tidy productive prosperous farms, and we were a going concern with stone and brick buildings, and beautiful crafted family houses, lawns and weirs, a village pond with ducks, mature trees. Some estates, but not vulgar monstrosities like today. Everyone adult chipped in. It was vivid, active, close-connected, multi-generational and I never wanted to leave.
What the hell happened?
I didn’t fully understand until a hydrologist in Denver, retired from a career at the Department of Interior, told me at lunch in an Olive Garden, that in the mid-70’s, the blanket instructions coming down from DC switched from enabling business and development to preventing it. He, in his retirement, had a small ranch and on his wells, four meters from four different federal and state bureaucracies, indicating just how closely he was being surveilled. Over the years, regulations had come down so thick and punitive, near everyone operated in a catch-22 situation. You might hurdle one set of regs, only to discover that your success meant another set of regs cancelled you. It was so irrational it was fiendish, I thought to myself. Now of course, I see it as actually fiendish, the work of evil. The government was deliberately ruining peoples’ lives, drawing them down, impoverishing them, with malice.
I’m wondering of all of these Chongo’s taco wagons on every corner have the proper permit?
When Pappy went away from the Army to try domestic life before returning and starting again at private he drove a truck on long haul as it paid by the mile.
No need for permits and truckers laughed at the “comic books” as they called the log books back then.
Now it is all digital and a cousin in California went from driver to CEO but recently got out due to all the limitations.
These things happen when you let the Leviathan snout under every tent in the interest of muh convenience and the I only obey look at my virtuous signal mindset.
The gov middleman hand in everything is only ruinous and it produces nothing while skimming off the top.