Off The Editor’s Desk – 6-15-2021
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Only a Government Bureaucrat!
Only a government bureaucrat could have figured this out and I was dumb enough to pay the bill. Last week I received a bill from the Colfax Post Office and also a bill from the Glenwood City Post Office telling me that the Post Office box rent for this newspaper is due before the end of this month.
The rent for each box is $122.00 for one year, $244.00 total. So I pay the post office $244.00 for the privilege of driving to the post office to pick up my mail. Next door to my office in Glenwood City, the business has a mailbox on the curb and the Post Office delivers his mail to him without charge. (What, no sales taxes added?)
So, I could put up a mailbox in front of our establishment and not pay the box rent. But, I feel that the box has more security than it being at the curbside. But, then I could choose not to pay the rent and ask for my mail in general delivery, if there is still such a thing. So the government bureaucrat came up with a way to collect funds from me to drive to the post office while some of that money is spent to provide (RFD) “Rural Free Delivery.”
In another matter about government bureaucrats, is that our country is capable of building great things, but not in a timely manner.
George Will’s column in Sunday’s St. Paul Pioneer Press is a good example of how we have enacted new rules that have slowed down construction projects in this nation.
Will writes: “Construction of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge took four years in the 1930s, but, after a 1989 earthquake caused one-third of the Bay Bridge to be replaced, it took two decades. A nation planning to quickly spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure should wonder why the repair proceeded so sluggishly, and why the inflation adjusted cost of building a mile of the interstate highway system tripled between the 1960s and 1980s.”
If you are as old as me, you can remember, the construction time line for the new Stillwater Bridge over the St. Croix River. That time line spanned two centuries, mostly because of government red tape.
Will continued: “The Claremont Institute’s William Voegeli considers this evidence of ‘activist government’s inability, or unwillingness, to do one thing at a time. Government cannot simply repair a bridge; it must do so while complying with an ever thickening, sometimes-immobilizing web of ever multiplying environmental, labor, safety and other mandates. They also now include, as part of what Voegeli calls the Biden administration’s ‘shock-and-awe statism,’ Washington’s obsession with equity, racial distributions of government goods and services.”
Today it takes ten years or more just to satisfy the large number of rules our bureaucratic friends have placed on our backs before workers can even get to work on an infrastructure project. So Biden wants a Trillion or more for his repair bill. That money will get spent, but will it be on the needed repair, or will it just vanish into someone’s pockets with the tax paying public coming up with the money over the next hundred years?
If the Native Americans had put in place all the rules and regulations that are in force today, in the fifteenth and sixteenth century, there would have been no immigration into the Americas and we would still be living in Europe under the rule of some king or queen.
Thanks for reading! ~Carlton