Liberal Exemptions
*********************************************************************
If Liberalism and its accoutrements are so good, why exempt some from such?
*********************************************************************
This week, the New York City Council and the Bloomberg administration outlined a series of measures aimed at easing the regulatory burden on small businesses, including
eliminating obsolete violations and reducing the potential for fines.
Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a Democrat who is preparing to run for mayor next year, said the new initiatives are aimed at changing what small-business owners perceive as the city’s “gotcha” approach to the enforcement of codes and regulations. The city needs to develop a more “let’s-work-together” ethos, she said.
The new measures include legislation to require city agencies to identify violations for which a business should receive a warning instead of an automatic penalty and the elimination of obsolete violations. While private industry quickly eliminates obsolescence in its product line, government is quite often native to “old and unimproved.” So the elimination of violations that are no longer of this time can be deemed progress.
Robert Bookman, counsel for the New York City Hospitality Alliance, said “For some time now, we’ve been hearing…government at all levels starting to talk the talk about the value of small businesses, about how we’re the job creators and the taxpayers, and the bread-and-butter of neighborhoods,” he said. Ms. Quinn added “Anybody who’s running for anything in the City of New York should care about small businesses—they should care about the future of them.”
All of this is mellifluous wind song and certainly welcome in a city whose government is constantly contemplating how to separate its inhabitants from their money. But when Ms. Quinn and Mssr. Bookman suggest that government must take care of small business, they immediately and undeniably lurch to the system in which government picks winners and losers, which inevitably brings less than the best from a society. Why is it justifiable to bury a corporate behemoth on Wall Street with endless government regulations but not to bury the sole proprietor or similar small business?
Liberals play a shell game when it comes to whom they will inflict their policies upon
_________________________________________
And not missed are exemptions from Liberal policies.
In the past year there have been a number of “exemptions from Liberalism.” To wit, after Illinois Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a 67% hike in the personal income tax rate while lifting the corporate tax rate to 9.5%, the fourth highest in the nation, he handed out more than $230 million in corporate subsidies to keep more than two dozen companies from fleeing the state. Then there is Mr. Obama’s exemption from the Liberal approach to the war on terror (Guantanamo, military tribunals, drone attacks) along with his administration’s handing out of waivers for parts of ObamaCare (i.e Accountable Care Organizations).
All of which suggest that while Liberals love their policies, they realize that they may not be fully appropriate for the times we are in, or those that they affect.
Such is a stark contrast to almost all Conservative policies that never exempted any from its benefits; certainly President Reagan did not exclude anyone from his tax decreases.
It seems that Mr. Obama and Democrats can campaign for re-election not on what they have done but on all the exemptions they provided from their policies.
-I.M. Windee
