Our Government Now Regulates Goat Herders - By Planck's Constant

PLANCK'S CONSTANT
By Bernie on 24 Aug 2011

Avery long, long time ago there were only ten laws one had to obey. These were rather simple rules, easy to understand: don't bear false witness, don't steal, don't kill, don't covet - well, you know the rest. You can tally each of them on the fingers of your two hands.

Today, every single hair on your head would not be enough to keep track of all the rules and ordinances of our Federal government. Since there are more laws than you have fingers, we can say the situation has gotten out of hand.

In my article The Excessive Proliferation of Criminal Laws I gave examples of some of the many bad Federal Laws we have on the books. So many bad laws that it is likely that all of us are likely breaking some law every day without knowing it. The expression "Ignorance of the Law is no excuse" was promulgated at a time when a person of average intelligence could actually acquire knowledge of every law in the land.

There is not a single judge, lawyer, or legislator in this country that knows what is and is not legal. In fact, legislators publicly admit that we cannot know what is in any proposed legislation until it is passed and then we can sit back and see what oozes out of the morass. Yes, that's right, no one knows what is in a new law until after it is passed (1) - that is how complicated things have become.

"Friends" of legislators who discover that compliance with a new law is almost impossible or too punitive will ask for exclusions, exemptions and waivers making that law even more complicated and impossible to decipher. (2)

And just when we thought things couldn't get more absurd, we enter the realm of the Twilight Zone: Our government now wants to regulate Goat Herders.

Human Events, Team Obama Regulates Goat Herders' Workplaces

The Obama administration is setting new workplace regulations to assist foreign workers who fill goat herding positions in the U.S. , including employee-paid cell phones and comfy beds. These new special procedures issued by the Labor Department must be followed by employers who want to hire temporary agricultural foreign workers to perform sheep herding or goat herding activities. It describes strict rules for sleeping quarters, lighting, food storage, bathing, laundry, cooking and new rules for the counters where food is prepared. “A separate sleeping unit shall be provided for each person, except in a family arrangement,” says the rules signed by Jane Oates, assistant secretary for employment and training administration at the Labor Department. “Such a unit shall include a comfortable bed, cot or bunk, with a clean mattress,” the rules state. Diane Katz, a research fellow in regulatory policy at The Heritage Foundation, unearthed the policy in the "Federal Register​," the massive daily journal of proposed regulations that Washington bureaucrats publish every day.

Under the Obama Administration, the nanny state has imposed 75 new major regulations with annual costs of $38 billion.

“This captures what is wrong with government,” Katz said. “I could not have made this up.”

With unemployment holding steady at 9% and government regulations adding more burden to small businesses, such as those run by ranching families, Katz said, bureaucrats aren’t helping.

I am totally amazed, I'm shocked that we don't go out and string up the politicians who pass these outrageous laws, totally amazed. I am waiting for the populace to snap.

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Notes

(1):

Breitbart.tv, Nancy Pelosi: We Need to Pass Health Care Bill to Find Out What’s In It

“But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy. Furthermore, we believe that health care reform, again I said at the beginning of my remarks, that we sent the three pillars that the President’s economic stabilization and job creation initiatives were education and innovation—innovation begins in the classroom—clean energy and climate, addressing the climate issues in an innovative way to keep us number one and competitive in the world with the new technology, and the third, first among equals I may say, is health care, health insurance reform."

(2):

Does It All Matter 2, Political Cronyism: Pelosi’s District Gets 20% of Obamacare Waivers

I once taught a college course on Third World economic and political development. I used to teach my students that one of the attributes of “developing countries” (academic euphemism for the impoverished Third World) is the corrupt politics of patronage or “patron-client relations,” where politicians would dispense jobs and favors in return for votes.

Using that as a defining indicator, America has become a Third World country.

In addition to the hundreds of waivers from Obamacare which we already know, add this doozy:

Nearly 20% of new Obamacare waivers are gourmet restaurants, nightclubs, fancy hotels in former Speaker of the House Democratic Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco.

 

Note:

I think the following video fits right in with Bernie's comments on goat herders and the laws of our Federal Government: