Freedom Line Blog

At this time of “shared sacrifice”, the political class is fond of telling us that there are “no easy choices” to combat the nation’s crisis of overspending. Yet as private companies have cut back on their payrolls to cope with the Great Recession, Washington hasn’t even been firing on the merits, according to USA Today:

Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations.

The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance, says John Palguta, former research chief at the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, which handles federal firing disputes.

The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn’t lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce.

Near the end of Deroy Murdock’s column discussing the insanity of the federal government’s upcoming incandescent light bulb ban in favor of a mercury-laden replacement comes the iconic gem above.

It’s a detailed “how-to” label design provided ever so helpfully by the Federal Trade Commission to guide bulb packagers.  I don’t know whether to be relieved that the bureaucracy is trying to be this helpful in its mandates or crestfallen that taxpayer money is going to finance this kind of project.

As if the Obama Administration’s campaign to bureaucratize the Internet through Net “Neutrality” wasn’t absurd and dangerous enough, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is now going to regulate blogging for the first time.  You read that correctly.

Under threat of $11,000 fine, injunction and other damages per each violation, online writers must now meticulously disclose any free product or other gratuity from any company whose products they have reviewed.  So before you decide to pick or pan some product from the comfort of your computer, you’d better ensure that you haven’t received some gift from the subject company.  

This obviously opens the door to any number of potential prosecutions by the new federal blog police, just as McCain/Feingold laws literally create the possibility of jail time for citizens who actually dare to criticize a candidate within 30 days of an election, First Amendment be damned.  So before you go on Facebook and speak positively of your new favorite brand of bubble gum, you’d better make sure that you didn’t receive it for free in your mailbox or as you exited the supermarket.