The government’s war against business, energy and jobs continues:
I got a permit to open up an underground coal mine that would employ probably 125 people. They’d be paid wages from $50,000 to $150,000 a year. We would consume probably $50 million to $60 million in consumables a year, putting more men to work. And my only idea today is to go home. What’s the use? I don’t know. I mean, I see these guys — I see them with tears in their eyes — looking for work. And if there’s so much opposition to these guys making a living, I feel like there’s no need in me putting out the effort to provide work for them. So as I stood against the wall here today, basically what I’ve decided is not to open the mine. I’m just quitting. Thank you.
As some have already noted, for some people Atlas Shrugged is a cautionary tale, for others it’s a how-to manual.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Actually, there are parallels on other fronts as well:
“As federal criminal statutes have ballooned, it has become increasingly easy for Americans to end up on the wrong side of the law. Many of the new federal laws also set a lower bar for conviction than in the past: Prosecutors don’t necessarily need to show that the defendant had criminal intent. . . . The U.S. Constitution mentions three federal crimes by citizens: treason, piracy and counterfeiting. By the turn of the 20th century, the number of criminal statutes numbered in the dozens. Today, there are an estimated 4,500 crimes in federal statutes, according to a 2008 study by retired Louisiana State University law professor John Baker. There are also thousands of regulations that carry criminal penalties. Some laws are so complex, scholars debate whether they represent one offense, or scores of offenses. Counting them is impossible. The Justice Department spent two years trying in the 1980s, but produced only an estimate.” Yet we retain the fiction that everyone is supposed to know the law.
From the book: “There’s no way to rule innocent men… When there aren’t enough criminals, one declares so many things to be a crime… that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.”
We really are living it, and she really was prophetic.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related, somehow: the Anglosphere, before the lights went out.
I hear and agree. It’s not just government to blame, either.
In the unlikely event that I, at some time in the future, become once again able to set up in business again – I’m not going to, particularly in any business that needs premises.
Here in the UK, a business person has to pay business rates – a factor of five higher than for a domestic property of similar value and with less to show for it (not even garbage pickup, for example). He has to act as an unpaid tax collector, with severe penalties for getting it wrong. (Payroll tax and VAT.) He has to keep detailed employment records, and if it becomes necessary to get rid of an employee for any reason he has to jump through hoops to satisfy yet any government inspector of his fairness. And so on and so on and so on ad infinitum and ad nauseam.
To use a slightly crude Britishism, STUFF IT. I’ve gone Galt.
Regarding the AJP Taylor quote, even more tellingly, the only nation to require passports before 1914 was … the Russian Empire.
And the Russian “passport” was primarily an internal control document, like the pre-1994 South African passbook. It was intended, among other things, to keep Jews and other undesirables out of the zones they were not permitted to inhabit. If you read Mark Twain’s foreign travel accounts, one of the most eye-opening parts was the passage where he describes actually having to deal with passports in Russia. It’s clear that the idea of being forced to carry a state-issued identity document struck him as the essence of despotism.
Sorry, that should have been “yet another government inspector”. My bad.