A Little Rant from the Monster Hunter ...

Larry Correia is not just a New York Times best selling author, he’s also a rabid right-wing nutjob (good on ya’ buddy) and had a toothsome little rant on “soft Americans” over at his blog:

“This is a great great country that had gotten a little soft and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades,” Mr. Obama said in response to a question about the country’s economic future. “We need to get back on track.” – Barack Obama, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/278769/wait-malaise-french-soft-jonah-goldberg

Yep. That’s it, Mr. President.  We’re soft. We’ve lost that competitive edge. We need to get back on track.

Let’s see, business is noncompetitive… Yet, during the last two years of my professional finance career, we have been through 6 different audits from 6 different government agencies. (total dollar value found to be owed to the government? Zero). As far as finance managers go, I’m not that weird.

Wow. I wonder what value I could’ve been adding to my company during that instead of creating multiple phone book sized reconciliations that no government employee will actually ever read. However, if I’d failed to spend hundreds of hours producing these useless documents, we’d have gotten fined and put out of business.

WARNING: I am about to go on an angry tirade about why American business is not competitive. Spare me the useless offended emails about how not all government employees are bad. Dur. Of course they’re not all bad. Many of them are truly awesome people. I’ve worked with many impressive government employees who have conducted themselves with the utmost professionalism…. But even then there are a ton of you, and you’re all up in our business too. And even if you are one of these good, solid, reliable, smart, hard working government employees, you are also probably the first to admit that many of your coworkers suck.

Ask any businessman, you’ll get the same story. Assuming you can make your way through the paperwork process to actually start your business, the fun begins and never lets up. Heaven help you if your business actually does something that might involve a committee of bureaucrats somewhere, because then you get to waste lots of time begging for permission to exist.

You want employees? Get ready for the DoL. Better get your EEOC reports done on time (one of the only places left where anyone actually gives a damn what color you are). When I opened my first business, I was rather surprised to discover that I had to contact 5 different state and federal entities before I could hire my first employee. You want to actually build something? Get ready for OHSA and the EPA. The approvals alone will eat up an eternity of time you could be productive. And you’d darn well better make sure you do your quarterly filings with the IRS and your state tax commission, or they will eat you.

Read the rest of it at Monster Hunter Nation