With Liberty and Justice For All

In The Index of Economic Freedom just published by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal, the US fell out of the listing of top ten freest economies in the world this year.

“The top 10: Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, Estonia (yes, the former Soviet "republic"), Ireland, New Zealand, U.K., Denmark, Iceland and Australia, followed by Chile.”

Can you believe this?

The United States of by God America, the country that wrote the book on freedom and liberty, has allowed our stupid politicians and bureaucrats to take away one of the very freedoms that made us great in the first place?

Actually, I personally can believe this is so because I have some first hand experience with government regulation of business and the dis-incentives that exist as roadblocks into starting a new business.

For instance, there is the so called “Business license.” What a “Business license” really is is a tax on a new business, a TAX ON MONEY YOU HAVEN’T EVEN EARNED YET. The county wants their share of your profits UP FRONT.

Back in the 1990’s I owned and operated a company called Industrial Energy Systems, Inc. We built industrial air pollution control and energy recovery systems--very technical stuff (I told you I was a nerd.) IES operated out of Cobb County Georgia, but we never once sold a single thing to anyone in Cobb County and only a few times did we ever deliver a product within the borders of the state of Georgia.

This didn’t matter to Cobb County when it came to getting a business license. When I paid them for the license they based the license fee on the total income of the business, regardless of where the income came from. Since the license was mandatory, you had no choice but to pay the $200 or whatever and just shut up.

To add insult to injury, one year they changed the way they calculated the license fee to make everyone’s license due on January 1st rather than on the anniversary date of when you started your business. Mine had been in September. At the same time they also changed the “tiers” of license fees and the good news was my license fees went down—so much so that since I had just paid my fee a few months before the change, I HAD A REFUND COMING.

I gleefully spent a couple of additional hours of my time filling out the new license forms and providing copies of the income documentation and mailed the form away to Cobb County. I forgot about the process until six months later when, instead of a refund check, I got a bill from Cobb County for the license fee and a late fee for not filing.

After meeting with the Tax Commissioner personally and making calls to my County Commissioner, I was informed that due to the large quantity of filings they had been delayed in processing some applications and had misplaced a few forms, but since I had no proof that I had filed for my refund (I didn’t take the time to make a copy of my license application,) that I would have to pay the late filing fee. They admitted that they had more money than was required from me, that they probably lost my application because they had lost others requiring a refund, that they initially would have owed me a $75 refund, but since they were the government they couldn’t be bothered with details like RIGHT AND WRONG so instead I still owed them the additional twenty five bucks they needed to cover their $100 computer generated late fee. CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS CRAP?

I paid the late fee…if I didn’t I would be assessed a late fee on my late fee.

Then there is the little game called Workman’s compensation and Unemployment insurance. What a complete and total shell game. I had a business in the early 1990’s with a business partner. Since we had less than three employees, Georgia allowed us to write a letter to the Workman’s Compensation Board excluding ourselves as owners of the business from participation in their Workman’s Compensation Insurance program. We had our own health insurance, so we opted out.

I also wrote a letter to the State Unemployment Insurance office attempting to do the same thing for myself with their product. Well, it turns out that you can’t legally opt out of participation in so called “Unemployment Insurance,” but the State of Georgia, being the highly efficient government entity that it is, didn’t bother to tell me so. Three years later, when my partner and I decided to dissolve our business relationship and close the business, the State of Georgia woke up and decided that we should have been paying for Unemployment Insurance all along and THEY WANTED THEIR MONEY.

Do you hear what I am saying? We were closing the businesses. We had never hired or fired anyone and the state never collected any premiums nor paid any unemployment claims over the three years we were in business, but the State of Georgia wanted all of their insurance premiums, WITH INTEREST, AND WITH LATE PENALTIES. Fifteen hundred dollars worth.

We paid them so the state wouldn’t collect late fees on their late fees. What a ridiculous rip off that was.

See, I didn’t even mention corporate taxes, payroll taxes, and the need to hire an accountant to help you wade through our cumbersome tax laws, but is there any wonder why they say we’re not in the top ten when it comes to Economic Freedom?

HELL NO....