“Freedom Dies With Each Paper Cut” - By Jonah Goldberg - The Corner - National Review Online: My dad is 67 and told the feds that he was out of farming due to this ridiculous bureaucracy and storm trooper treatment. Their arrogant reply, “well the law lets us inspect your land and homes one year after you have left farming, so you can’t keep us off your land next year either.”This of course elicits the old joke about the bureaucrat walking down the hallway at the Department of Agriculture and hears uncontrolled sobbing from another bureaucrat's office. He goes in and asks what's the matter? The sobbing bureaucrat heaves out with: "My farmer died!"
Lose a tobacco farm with Mexican labor, big deal right? We have many hundreds of thousands of dollars in tractors, equipment, and vehicles locally. We buy hundreds of thousands of dollars of seed, fertilizer, and pesticides locally. We have accountants and lawyers (sadly) and bull dozer operators and IT help and use carpenters and pest control and the roto rooter man. And we do have American citizens on the payroll.
The farmer that quizzed the President is absolutely correct. The federal government is now the enemy of farming. No one is going to want to do it when this generation retires, and it’s happening fast. Of five siblings, only one tries to farm and he is subject to the same treatment.
I’m not a pessimist, but I fear it is too late to save us. The regulatory monster has won. And even as we sleep, it grows in size, scope, and arrogance. Freedom dies with each paper cut.
Yes they are.
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