Hello everybody. I am sorry about not getting a full week in to begin the year. What I am learning is that if I work a full day, I need to begin getting ready at 8:30AM and I get home around 10:00PM. That doesn’t leave a lot of extra time to get other things done.

Political muck is still heavily on our minds as the final election results are being sorted out (the Georgia Senate races). But, today I wanted to talk once again about mindset and freedom. You see something happened yesterday that completely illustrates our lack of the value of freedom and reinforces the fact that we don’t really value it as we say we do.

There is a fledgling business near my small town. I don’t really know much of the story other than to say my family has been doing business with it for about four months now. The owner has done a good job with guerilla style marketing, works like a dog, employs around ten people and has compassion in his business dealings. For instance, he doesn’t demand payment before goods rendered, he offers line of credit and he charitably donates probably more than he should. This business is ‘illegal’.

What you say? Don’t go all half-cocked before you hear the rest of the story. The facility and organization is not licensed to do business. Consequently, a ‘competitor’ found out about the operation and reported him to the state. Now, he is in limbo about the entire organization. From an inside source, there are plans to go legitimate in 2021. He has built a business plan that include five franchises beginning in the second quarter of this year.

So that is the quick story. Now, let’s take some time to analyze the situation.

  1. Tyranny is propagated by those that participate in the system. The people that are vested in the rules and regulations have the most to gain by implementing and maintaining systems that exclude competition.
  2. Licensure is a false prophet for the ideals of quality, safety and sanitation. Sure, periodic audits are helpful to implement better practices and establish a baseline of what should be done. They do very little to make sure that they are followed on a day to day basis.
  3. Everybody loves a rags to riches story… or do they? Would you buy an unpermitted house or go to a non-licensed restaurant or buy products weighed on an non-certified scale? We say that we like these things, but our actions prove otherwise.
  4. Sometimes the barrier for entry is too high, until you have means to get there. As someone that went through an IRS audit last year, every undocumented transaction is income unless it can be documented otherwise. Guilty until proven innocent.
  5. The foundation of this country, based on bootstrap will and tolerance for entrepreneurship is dead. Did George Washington get a permit from the ATF to make whiskey or was Benjamin Franklin licensed to provide insurance? I think that they would have thought this a violation of there fundamental rights as do I.

We claim to be a society that roots for the underdog and values the little guy. Yet the proverbial ‘we’ has little tolerance for rule breaking to claim our stake and make our fortunes as our predecessors did. When people are more concerned about what everyone else is doing, they have lost their ability to be creative and compete on merit. That is the essence of freedom. I figured that this day would come, I was rooting for the guy.