The Cure Is Far Worse Than the Disease With This Gov’t Program

Joel Salatin|January 25, 2022

Editor’s Note: We’ve said often that the government is the greatest threat to your wealth. And as Joel shows below, it’s not just about higher taxes or inflation or bogus laws. It’s a threat that hides even in supposedly “good” programs that start with the best of intentions. Read on to see yet another way the government forces its way into your pocket. And share your thoughts on this critical idea at mailbag@manwardpress.com.

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I’ve written about workers’ comp before, but coming off our annual audit, I can’t help but rail afresh against this obscene system.

Workers’ comp no doubt started with good intentions, when some negligent employer created an unsafe working situation in which an employee was hurt. Adding insult to injury, perhaps the employer did not help the employee get medical care and rehab.

We can all agree that’s a bad situation. Our hearts break for the employee, and we’d like to penalize the employer somehow.

But as bad as that situation is, what we’ve created is far worse.

Square Peg, Round Hole

Here we are, a small farm business, using apprentices, subcontractors and salaried folks to produce, process and market directly to consumers.

None of this fits a box in the workers’ comp portfolio.

If you’ve never done a payroll, it’s hard to imagine what a workers’ comp audit is like. It’s an annual event that examines every person who received a paycheck, what they do within the business and what the business does. It compiles all that data and creates an invoice payable to an insurance company that goes into some sort of pool to help people injured on the job. All of this is mandated by the state.

Our audit was conducted on the phone by a person who’s never heard of our business, doesn’t know me from Adam and has never visited our place. Yet they had the authority and audacity to probe and guess about every aspect of our business and force everything into boxes on a regimented form.

Every year the struggle is something different. This year’s struggle had to do with our marketing techniques.

For direct sales in the food sector, two categories exist. One is “mercantile,” which refers to supermarkets, where groceries are sold at an average 35% markup. If a store spends less than 65% of its gross income acquiring goods, then apparently it falls into some other designation.

The other category is “frozen products,” which are shipped to cold storage by rail or in refrigerated trucks.

These are the two options. Our farm does both and neither.

We have an on-farm store where we sell fresh and frozen products, including craft products like cheese, pasta, kombucha and ferments made by neighbors. We also ship frozen products across the U.S. and deliver within 200 miles, but these go straight to customers. They don’t go to cold storage and certainly don’t ship by train.

Extortion

When Teresa and I asked if we could see the designations, or definitions, of these categories, we were told they’re not public information. They’re intellectual property owned by the auditing/insurance outfits. We just have to take the auditor’s word that these are the only categories that exist and that as she reads the definitions to us, she’s doing so accurately.

Mind you, this is a person we’ve never met who is trying to fit our abnormal business operations into a regimented category.

We’re trying to keep our payments as low as possible. She’s trying to turn over every stone. But we can’t see what our options are. Legally, we must comply with workers’ comp payments, but we have no recourse to examine our options.

If that’s not an example of extortion, I don’t know what is. Of course, it’s legal extortion, since the general assembly says it’s okay.

The bottom line is that this government meddling keeps any business from innovating. This kind of licensing and regulatory requirement puts anyone who thinks and practices differently at a risk in terms of compliance.

Conformity is the ultimate objective, regardless of platitudes about caring for workers. Ultimately, reasonable people measure a project by its outcome, not by its intentions.

Shared Responsibility

Philosophically, this program absolves workers of culpability, which isn’t fair, either. If the bottom rung on a ladder is wobbly, don’t step on it. A worker sharing no responsibility for noticing dangerous situations creates brainless workplace environments.

What needs to exist is shared responsibility between employer and employee when it comes to keeping things safe in the workplace. On that note, if a worker falls off a perfectly functional ladder and breaks a leg, why is that the responsibility of the employer?

What strikes me is the arrogance of politicians who enact these programs, assuming their web of bureaucrats will care more about my employees than I do… and that, through a phone audit, they can peer into my workplace and identify risks.

The cure is far worse than the disease.

And heaven help you if you file a claim. That triggers an avalanche of paperwork and sends bureaucratic investigators swarming over your premises.

The result is that small businesses like ours pay many thousands of dollars into a program we dare not use.

I’m not sure the Mafia is any worse.

We spend hours filling out forms and answering inane questions like, “What does your business do?” The auditor tries to understand a business she’s never heard of. Bean counters up the ladder check boxes and put numbers in regimented formulas.

Ultimately, the insurance company sends us a bill, making a tidy profit as the muscle for the politicians’ extortion.

Sounds almost like fascism to me.