The Plain Truth is so Happy That You Have Been Enjoying Bob’s Broadcasts.
2000 years ago, a newscaster that we know of as Jesus Christ warned us about false Christianity. The warning was not against the devil but against false Christianity…about people who come in His name and deceive many.
Yesterday, I was talking about government regulations and how it’s costing all of us a lot of money. One of the topics that Ronald Reagan and now Donald Trump talk about is regulations and I’m from the government and I’m here to help kind of idea. The worst words any businessman can ever hear. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to belabor yesterday’s point and go on to a second story about EPA, OSHA, regulations, etc.
Hi, this is Bob Barney with the Plain Truth Minute at 7-11 in the morning and I am happy to go on with the story about, yes, my wife and I and my family run an automotive paint manufacturing company, so we fall under fire marshal rules because we burn… our products are solvent-based. We fall under OSHA, we fall under the EPA, and these bureaucrats from the government are not really here to help anyone. They’re really there to help themselves and to make themselves feel good…it is the little guy syndrome. As you know, the little guy syndrome is about power, and they want to make sure that you understand they have a lot of power. So what they do is they go against you with everything they’ve got and they make things up as they go. They make up rules as they go knowing that in order to fight them, it’s going to cost you a lot of money and sometimes it’s best to pay the fine. The problem when you pay the fine is that you’ve really admitted guilt that you really are not guilty of and so therefore, you’re always like a felon to the EPA or OSHA.
What this forces good companies to do, like myself and my friend across the street from me, is to have a full-time lawyer on staff to always fight these malicious lawsuits or these charges that are brought against us by regulatory agencies who are just trying to flex their muscle and it’s like I said yesterday, it’s why so many companies, big companies that can afford to do so, move overseas. They don’t move overseas because it’s cheaper labor. They move overseas because of government regulations and here is today’s example of these stupid government regulations:
My paint plant, where we manufacture our paint, is located in a very small town in Virginia and the town has a city water system that is very small. The water tower is less than 200,000 gallons and so where we manufacture paint, any place you manufacture must have a sprinkler system. We do have the sprinkler system there where we manufacture and so therefore we’re legal according to fire code regulations. Although the idea of a sprinkler system in a solvent-based paint plant is ridiculous because what does water do when paint is on fire or solvents on fire? What happens when gasolines on fire, do you know? Well, if you spray it with water, it comes to the top and flows down the street on fire and it actually sets more fires. You should have, if you’re going to have anything, a chemical suppression system but no, they only recognize water sprinkler systems. We just saw in Georgia an operation that was a pool chemical company that when the sprinkler systems went off, there are certain chemicals when water touches them that actually explode and cause a fire and an explosion, and it burnt down a chemical plant.
Yes, a sprinkler system which was mandatory for them to have, was the cause of the explosion because it should have never been in there in the first place.
This is where you have stupid regulations and I’m going to even go farther with my own example. So, because the rest of our warehousing does not have sprinkler systems, only because, not because we don’t want to have sprinkler systems to follow the code, the fire code, the national fire code, it’s because the town cannot provide us enough water and they will not let us put in a sprinkler system. Because of this, we have to maintain all of our raw material products that come in drums or totes so all of the liquid stuff that is flammable, we cannot store them inside any of our warehouses, whether we have electricity that could cause possibly a spark or not. We could have, if you put up a warehouse with no electricity in it at all to house these chemicals, it would be illegal. We cannot store any flammable products that we have inside of a building that’s not sprinkled, even though a sprinkler would actually magnify a problem if there was a fire in the first place.
So where do we have to store them according to the fire marshal and the fire code? We have to store them outdoors. We have to store them in the elements, in the rain, something could happen to them, they would spill, they could get into the water system, they could get into the river system, all kinds of problems could happen because you don’t store them in a building where they would be more protected. Some drive-by shooter could start shooting rifles into them and who knows what would happen there. But here it gets even more stupid.
We have to keep these products outside in the elements and then we have to worry about protecting the product as well as the containers from the rain and the rust, so we have to put some kind of a plastic bag over them or something like that, many things of which the fire marshal doesn’t even want you to do. These are the regulations that are inflicted upon small businesses and even large businesses that make no sense. They are sincerely not helping anyone; they’re certainly not protecting anyone and they’re not stopping anyone from having a fire or getting hurt.
In fact, if you really think about it, it’s actually causing more potential harm if we follow these forced regulations. If we did not follow them at all and we maintained all of our products within buildings that would protect them from the elements and from anybody trying to cause any harm through terrorism, there is hell to pay. Yet, this is your government, I’m from the government and I’m here to help and you can realize now that if you’re in business like me and my wife and our family and you have to deal with the government regulations all the time every day of your life, you realize just what a burden they place upon you!
What happens therefore when you have a full-time lawyer on staff, you know, for $120,000 a year, and then you have to follow all these regulations that don’t make sense, you are doing all kinds of things that just cost money…and then you wonder why there’s inflation even when there’s not inflation of interest rates or of the fuel? All because of regulations. Regulations probably are a third of all the costs of any commodity that you buy from food all the way to your paint for your car or your paint for your floor of your garage or the hardware you buy at a Home Depot or from a Lowe’s.
You all know the story about the ladder that has to have 50 warning signs because of regulations and because of lawsuits. That’s the problem with regulations and we need to do away with a lot of regulations if we’re going to succeed.
This is Bob Barney, thanking you for listening again to another episode of the Plain Truth Moment, at 7-11 in the morning. Until tomorrow, goodbye for now.