It's Illegal In California to Give Your Customers Coffee and Donuts ....

Mark Steyn wonders what effect this election will actually have.

A few big things have the American people upset: the attempted hijacking of their health care by the federal government and the smug, condescending arrogance of the ruling class swept into power by the Obamas and their $200 million-dollars-a-day vacations.

But as a small business owner, I know that the real burdens that the American people and the American entrepreneur suffer under were not up for election this year, or the year before, or the year before that. The real rulers of our lives sit in offices with grey metal desks and who tell us that a hardware story owner can’t put out a pot of coffee and a box of donuts for its customers without a kitchen with stainless steel sinks with hot and cold running water and a prep kitchen to handle the donuts. In other words, it’s illegal to run down to Dunkin Donuts for coffee and pastries and put them out for your customers if you live in California.

In my particular business, I’m required to file something called and ADV 1 and and an ADV 2 with the federal regulators and register with the SEC to be allowed to provide my clients with financial advice. Well, OK, so we hired a law firm and tens of thousands of dollars later we’re officially and legally registered.

So, by the way, was Bernie Madoff.

So the crooks and liars who got us into this current financial mess – yes, I’m talking to you Chris Dodd and Barney Frank – decide that they need to overhaul financial regulation to eliminate financial risks, like “too big to fail.” They do this by writing a law - the Frank-Dodd Financial Reform bill - that enshrines “too big to fail” as an official government policy while completely ignoring the two institutions - other than Frank and Dodd- that more than any other caused the financial crisis: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Fannie and Freddie between them guarantee about 90% of all home loans and their reckless lending to people who could not afford their mortgages led directly to the financial crisis that cost millions of families their homes and caused banks around the world to fail.

But back to me. Thanks to the new laws I now have to file a revised form ADV 2 written in prose instead of checking off some boxes and I have to register with the state instead of with the feds. And how will that make the financial world safer for the average investor? Beats me (hint: it doesn’t) … but it’s making my lawyers richer, which may be the purpose of the law all along.

Steyn:

This is the reality of small business in America today. You don’t make the rules, you don’t vote for people who make the rules. But you have to work harder, pay more taxes, buy more permits, fill in more paperwork, contribute to the growth of an ever less favorable business environment and prostrate yourself before the Commissar of Community Services – all for the privilege of taking home less and less money.

And eventually you wake up and find, as in California, that your state is all hole and no doughnut. Just as gun control is not about guns but control, so doughnut control is likewise not about doughnuts, but about ever more total control. Big Government won’t make the coffee, or the doughnuts. It just regulates them. All it makes is small citizens. If next Tuesday doesn’t begin the rollback of unaffordable hyper-regulation, we’ll need a new mass movement – the Alliance of Non-Compliance.