By Evelyn Pyburn

Following the experience of the heavy hand of government laid upon small businesses over the past year, one must hope that business people are rethinking their ideas about benefits of any “health and safety” they think emanate from the helping hand of “big brother.”

The experience lays bare also the emerging reality of how businesses are being used by government.

More and more business owners are being forced by government to function like an extension of government – at considerable expense and under ominous threats  — burdens that detract considerably from their ability to function as a successful business.

From being tax collectors and health care providers, to enforcing smoking laws or policing citizen conduct, businesses have become an uncompensated department of government over-reach. It’s time that it be identified for what it is and stopped.

Part of the strategy of coercion lies in the regulatory and licensing process that has been heaped onto business for decades, now. Sometimes that has happened with the willing cooperation of some businesses as they hoped to gain some advantage over their competition.

But, given that the past few months have blatantly demonstrated how the regulations and licensing and permitting powers they granted to government can boomerang, one has to hope that thinking business people will seriously reconsider their ideas about regulations and any competitive advantage they might think it gives them. Hopefully they have seen how serious the loss of their liberties can be.

 At every turn, business people who wanted to claim their civil rights to produce and serve and exchange value for value, with willing fellow citizens called customers, their freedom has been usurped by unelected, well-paid bureaucrats utilizing unlegislated laws and under threat by non-police police, of fines and imprisonment. Non- compliance has meant the very real possibility of losing their business, their livelihood, their investments and life savings. If that doesn’t incentivize a moment of reconsideration, nothing will.

Absolutely none of this in any way reflects the characteristics of a free county, and it sets in place an escalating course that can only get worse and utterly destroy the foundation of what has been the most vital business environment that has ever existed. Stopping it means reversing many of the existing restraints on business and it all begins at home and in the state legislature where it was initially implemented.