If They’re from the Government, They’re Not Here to Help

(Chuck Muth) – Ronald Reagan once famously said: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

For the record, it’s my opinion that government assistance should be provided only to citizens who can’t help themselves (such as autistic children), not those who won’t (such as drug addicts).

And one group of people who absolutely don’t need government assistance are entrepreneurs and business owners.  The only thing they need is for the government to get the hell out of the way, out of their hair, and out of their pockets.

But that’s NOT what’s happening.

As our friend Steve Moore of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity noted in his newsletter today, the fastest growing industry in America right now is…government.

“During the just-ended first half of 2023 federal, state, and local governments added 380,000 workers to their payrolls,” Moore points out. “This was more hires than any industry in America. It was more than mining, manufacturing, construction, wholesale, and transportation — COMBINED.” 

And Nevada is absolutely part of the problem being created by the government’s “help” for entrepreneurs and small business owners.  Let’s start with the Governor’s Office on Economic Development (GOED).

Created under then-Gov. Brian Sandoval in 2011, GOED uses tax breaks to “bribe” companies to relocate to Nevada – while existing Nevada companies, who have demonstrated their commitment to the Silver State for years, get squat.

Want to lure more businesses to Nevada?  Great.  Cut taxes.  Cut red tape.  Cut anti-business bureaucracies, laws, and ordinances.  Do that, and businesses will beat a path to our door.

Next that should be on the chopping block: The Office of Small Business Advocacy (OSBA), currently administered under the office of the lieutenant governor.

The stated mission of the OSBA is to “help Nevada’s entrepreneurs…navigate hurdles related to licensing, funding, and business regulations.”

But, um, entrepreneurs and small businesses wouldn’t need such “help” to “resolve issues that arise in the administrative, regulatory, or enforcement functions of a state agency” if there weren’t so many administrative, regulatory, and enforcement roadblocks and red tape in the first place.

In addition, the people who SHOULD be involved in fixing such problems should be the people who caused the problems in the first place: elected officials.

They pass these anti-business laws and ordinances.  Why should taxpayers pay for bureaucrats to serve as middlemen to fix the problems caused by lawmakers?

Then there’s the new Office of Entrepreneurship, created in this year’s legislative session by Democrat Assembly Speaker Steve Yeager, who – in typical overblown, hyperbolic political fashion – characterized the new agency as a “game changer.”

No it’s not.

As the Las Vegas Review-Journal editorialized this morning, “this legislation is silent on creating a welcoming tax climate for small businesses or thinning a regulatory thicket that too often erects needless hurdles to job creation and enterprise.”

The editorial concluded…

“Creating a new state bureaucracy – operating outside the purview of open records laws – to help small businesses navigate the maze of red tape imposed by the existing bureaucracy is a timid and misguided approach to promoting entrepreneurialism.

“If lawmakers were truly interested in smoothing the road for small-business development in Nevada, they’d order a review of the state’s entire administrative code and regulatory apparatus with an eye on shrinking the bureaucracy, not adding to it.”

Exactly.

It should be noted that Yeager also single-handedly killed Opportunity Scholarships this session in the State Assembly for low-income, minority children, which threatens to force hundreds of Nevada students back into the “failure factories” we call “public schools.”

You wanna help promote job creation and small business?

Start by giving kids a decent education.  Do that, and they’ll figure the rest out on their own – as have so many entrepreneurs and small business owners who have succeeded without the government’s “help” in the past.

Your Feedback Requested

Leah Aldridge – a Trump-supporting kook out in Pahrump who’s ticked off that I’m “undecided” in the GOP presidential contest that’s still six months away – wrote…

“I always knew you were a jerk, Chuck.  Go (expletive) yourself.”

Now, that’s par for the course from certain unhinged elements of the Trump camp who’ve obviously never read “How to Win Friends & Influence People.”  Interestingly, this kind of vile vitriol never seems to manifest itself in supporters of the other Republican candidates.

But that’s not my question.

A few weeks ago, I featured some other profane messages I’d received, with the profanities spelled out exactly as they were sent to me.  That’s not what I did above with nutjob Aldridge.  Her obvious f-bomb expletive was deleted and replaced with “(expletive).”

Now, the problem with this is, if you didn’t know that it was me who replaced her expletive with “(expletive),” you’d get the false impression that she was a somewhat nice, sane, rational person without a potty mouth.

But a couple weeks ago, when I left the profanities in exactly as they had been submitted to me, a good friend suggested I delete the profanities even though I was quoting the author correctly and they weren’t my own words.

In the past I’ve left them in, as written, out of a sense of accuracy, even though the words used were offensive to a number of people.

So what do you think?

Should I reprint text exactly as it’s been sent to me…or delete the f-bombs and such and replace them with “(expletive)” even though it gives the author credit for civility that isn’t due?

For the record, though, I’ll continue to accurately quote Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo as saying his goal in office is “getting sh*t done.”  I think everybody can deal with that one.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Save the Date

Monday, August 21, 6:00 – 8:00 pm.  Citizen Outreach will be hosting a one-of-a-kind cocktail reception/dinner in Las Vegas featuring Nevada Congressman Mark Amodei and Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo.  Additional details to follow.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

“If @SteveYeagerNV and @Nicole4Nevada cared about Nevada children, they would have supported Governor Lombardo’s call for increased funding for opportunity scholarships. Instead, they blocked his proposal and defunded them.” – Valeria Gurr, Senior Fellow, School Choice Now

Mr. Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, publisher of Nevada News & Views, and founder of CampaignDoctor.com.  You can sign up for his conservative, Nevada-focused e-newsletter at MuthsTruths.com.  His views are his own.