CREATORS VS CONTROLLERS

 

In the early 1980’s a handful of people, out of work thanks largely to the intentional misinterpretation of the science surrounding an owl specie, came together to form their own business and a new beginning. Within two years the five original brave souls had diminished down to two of us foolhardy enough to believe that we could, with our limited resources, survive and grow our fledgling company. The past 31 years have been almost equal parts rewarding and tumultuous as our technical expertise and drive to succeed have kept us ahead of all challengers.

It is easy to identify your competitors in the market selling custom design-built industrial production lines. In fact you see the same company names as competitive bidders over and over as the years go by. In the beginning we saw them as hated rivals and often as not patent infringers bent on using our own high tech solutions against us in the market. Time gives perspective and today I view the competition differently. Yes they pulled all of the dirty tricks and some of the offshore companies used government support to unfairly win closely contested contracts. In the end they made us stronger, they forced us to hone our skills and improve our products so that the customers selected us despite the higher capital costs. Now, after three plus decades in business we can clearly see with hindsight that our largest challenges did not come from creative competitors at all, it is crystal clear that every threat to the continued existence of the company came from those attempting to control us through regulation and theft of capital. I have chosen the word theft intentionally when referring to the constant drain on our working capital resources by government agencies through taxes, licenses fees, permit fees, import duties and penalties of every description. One builds, over time, a mental picture of countless legions of faceless bureaucrats continuously writing regulations and tax codes to stifle progress.

If you can create, by the use of your own time and capital, products with market demand and enough margin (profit) to fuel the growth of your business and then save that capital from your own personal desire for money it is infuriating to see most of it stolen though taxation. City, County, State and Federal taxing authorities take half or more of a company’s net earnings every year and use it to fuel their own growth and pay more bureaucrats to control those of us who create. In private business we start every day with the absolute requirement that we must get it right, we must build cost effective and safe products within the limits of the government red tape while withstanding constant inspections from OSHA, DEQ, Federal and State Bureaus of Labor, State and Local Fire Marshals and tax audits. The recent explosion in the size of government and the burdens of new regulations are breathtaking. One agency after another seems to pop up that holds out their hand for a fee to be used to inspect and regulate us. Ayn Rand used to say that government bureaucracies force business to buy and load the guns to be used against them. In my experience the fastest way to infuriate a government employee is to point out that our taxes pay their salaries. My most recent experience, last week, included a State employee chastising me for questioning the legality of her imposition of a $40,000 penalty against us. I pointed out that 18 years ago when the survey team of state contractors came on our property and mapped a wet lands our permission was not asked for nor were we presented with a warrant and that this constituted an illegal search under the fourth amendment. Her response was that the fourth amendment did not apply in this case. Next I proved to her that the area of fill in question was done eleven months prior to the State findings being published which declared the area to be wet lands. She contended that despite the fact that we did the work before it was possible to know that the state was going to declare it a wet land we were still at fault and subject to the penalty. We showed her that all of the work had been done in accordance with valid building permits but it failed to modify her position. She did in fact say that my questioning of her authority might result in her increasing the penalty by a further $97,000 dollars. I was instructed to sign a confession letter she would type for me which would cede to her final authority over the amount of our penalty before she determined what the amount would be. I did not accept her demand for a blank check and we are fighting the ridiculous assertions in her complaint.

I can’t count the number of times some tyrannical bureaucrat has demanded that we waive our legal rights. We don’t waive them, we don’t load the gun for them to shoot us with, and we fight them and sometimes prevail against the tyranny. I say it is a sad reality in our country today that the controllers have the upper hand and government backing in their war against the creators of all the things that the controllers want to improve their quality of life. The wet lands discovered by the trespassing state contractors did in fact exist in 1996 thanks to our neighbor’s failed septic system. The system was repaired and the area dried out before they even published their findings!