Plucky Job Creators vs. The Crushing Fist of the Deep State - An Old, Old Story

By Business Editor Samuel Insull
with Legal Correspondent Saori Shiroseki

The jackboots of liberal elite deep state job killers struck again, this time in Virginia, coming down like the proverbial ton of bricks on a hard-working small business owner.  Or, as The Washington Post described it,

The manager of a laundry business in Virginia was accused of pulling a 13-year-old girl’s hair while ordering her back to work. Other teenagers told investigators they were forced to toil through grueling 11-hour overnight shifts before school. And a new mother was grabbed by the arm and shaken when she asked for help taking care of her infant son, who was strapped in his stroller “with his bottle tied to the chair” while she worked, court records allege.

She's not being groomed to be a Lesbian!

Prosecutors say those were some of the conditions workers endured at Magnolia Cleaning Services, a Williamsburg-based business that cleaned linens for hotels and timeshares. Its owners and managers were charged with operating “a family-based labor trafficking enterprise” that smuggled over 100 migrants from El Salvador, including minors, and forced them to work under threats of violence and deportation, officials said Wednesday during a news conference.

Who will save us from overreaching Biden Administration shock troops like this, you may ask.

There's a clear answer: Republicans.  Just ask them. 

One of the many dark-money institutions established by plutocrats to provide, um, intellectual heft to Republican attacks on regulation, the Heritage Foundation, calmly explained the problems caused by government regulation:

The Biden Administration’s regulatory agenda for 2022 reveals complete indifference toward the social and economic chaos perpetrated to date by the President’s progressive policies. Few, if any, of the thousands of looming regulations are necessary or beneficial notwithstanding the enormous costs, and many will erode free enterprise and individual liberty....

[T]he White House boasts that federal agencies will “build on significant progress the Administration has already made advancing our priorities and proving that our Government can deliver results—from confronting the pandemic, to creating a stronger and fairer economy, to addressing climate change and advancing equity.”

As with so much of the Leftist manifesto, this conceit about government’s efficacy and beneficence is misguided. In actuality, the Biden Administration has failed to check the spread of the coronavirus.  [But unlike his Republican predecessor, he did manage to limit the death toll by requiring vaccines and masking, – Ed.]

Its unconstrained spending has contributed to the worst inflation in 40 years, while 18 months of welfare and unemployment profligacy has intensified an unprecedented labor shortage and supply chain crisis. [Seems like only yesterday! – Ed.]

There are also billions of dollars being funneled into destructive climate initiatives that actually undermine rather than enhance environmental quality. The Administration’s preoccupation with racial and gender equity is also exacerbating what Heritage Foundation scholar Mike Gonzalez has dubbed America’s “grievance caste system,” thereby sowing discord and resentment.

For the Biden Administration to assert that more regulation and even bigger government will “improve the lives of the American people” mocks the challenges facing the nation and betrays the fundamental principles of its Founding [including or excluding slavery? – Ed.] . Now more than ever, citizens must demand that Congress reclaim its oversight responsibilities and lawmaking authority and codify rigorous rulemaking standards. Otherwise, the Biden Administration’s radical regulatory agenda will reduce America to “nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

So regulation is bad because it treats us like cows. That's a view.

While the Biden Administration seems content to turn us into sheep, this farrago of nonsense has had a more profound effect in the many Republican-ruled states, where child labor is now regarded as a good thing:

When Iowa lawmakers voted in mid-April to roll back certain child labor protections, they blended into a growing movement driven largely by a conservative advocacy group.

"Free market rules! Two cents please!"

At 4:52 a.m. on April 18, the state’s Senate approved a bill to allow children as young as 14 to work night shifts and 15-year-olds on assembly lines. The measure, which still must pass the Iowa House, is among several the Foundation for Government Accountability is maneuvering through state legislatures.

The Florida-based think tank and its lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, have found remarkable success among Republicans to relax regulations that prevent children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. And they are gaining traction at a time the Biden administration is scrambling to enforce existing labor protections for children.

The FGA achieved its biggest victory in March, playing a central role in designing a new Arkansas law to eliminate work permits and age verification for workers younger than 16. Its sponsor, state Rep. Rebecca Burkes (R), said in a hearing that the legislation “came to me from the Foundation [for] Government Accountability.” 

And you thought it came to her in a dream!

What could go wrong with letting 14-year-olds labor all night on assembly lines or, as in slaughterhouses, disassembly lines?  According to CBS News, plenty:

Children are working dangerous jobs at JBS meat processing plants in Minnesota and Nebraska, hired illegally for overnight shifts and tasks that left a 13-year-old with caustic chemical burns, federal officials say.

The U.S. Department of Labor this week asked a federal court to issue a nationwide restraining order against the world's largest meat processing company's plant clean-up provider, Packers Sanitation Services, or PSSI, to stop it from employing dozens of workers under the age of 18. A U.S. district judge in Lincoln, Nebraska, granted the temporary request on Thursday, a department spokesperson told CBS MoneyWatch in an email.

An investigation launched in August found that PSSI hired at least 31 children — ranging in age from 13 to 17 — to fulfill the company's sanitation contracts at JBS plants....

Which is the point. Despite endless bleating from Republicans and their owners about the supposed threat to “free enterprise and individual liberty,” regulation has a purpose. 

In the case of child labor laws, it's to protect children (and also to let them get an education). 

In the case of climate changes initiatives, it's to keep us from broiling or drowning, or both. 

In the case of vaccine and mask mandates, it's to keep millions of us alive. 

Those facts are not in dispute, despite the best efforts of disingenuous propagandists like our friends from the Heritage Foundation. Behind any regulation there's a reason. If there wasn't, it could be voided by a court under the Administrative Procedure Act [Stop snoring back there – Ed.] 

Using the skills his pappy learned in slavery

You'll be amazed to learn that the Republican indifference to the lives and fortunes of poor children and other intended beneficiaries of government regulation did not, despite the shrieks from our newly-minted Republican allies about the dangers of “Trumpism,” begin in 2017. The attack on government regulation sung to the tune of ‘Yankee Doodle’ goes back many decades, to the days when then TV pitchman Ronald Reagan inveighed against the assault on liberty that was – Medicare.

Once elected, St. Ronald of Bitburg assured us in his first inaugural address that "Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem." 

His solution to the problem of 13-year-olds working on the kill floor of chicken plants was to overthrow the Government of Nicaragua.  You had to be there.

The Republican Party's fervid and unshakable opposition to regulation as a method to solve problems up to and included mass extinction events is at the core of the party's appeal to voters and more crucially the rich and powerful who write the checks that keep them going. 

To be fair, there are a few regulatory initiatives that Republicans approve of, including those regulating the reproductive rights of women, the medical rights of children with identified conditions such as gender dysphoria, the right of the State of Texas to chop up desperate refugees seeking asylum, and the right of any yahoo, no matter how ignorant or bigoted, to control what everyone else's children can learn in school.

But that's different because those regulations don't “mock[]s the challenges facing the nation [or] betray[] the fundamental principles of its Founding.”

And if you still don't understand, we have a cartoon from Prager “U” in which Frederick Douglass explains it all to you.