The most oppressive aspect of modern Government.

When it comes to the subject of government corruption that oppresses people, it seems these days everyone wants to find the big hidden monster lurking behind the curtain. I think that's misguided, that the most oppressive aspect of our government is not a big hidden secret pulling strings behind a curtain. Rather, it's a huge amount of little things, spread all over, that are visible to everyone, that have been introduced so gradually that we don't even realize the extent to which they affect us.

There are so many little government regulations, requirements, licenses and rules, which any single one by themselves you could easily argue is not bad. But all of them combined raise the bar of entry into markets for the most basic things so high that those markets become completely inaccessible to the vast majority of the population.

An example of what I mean by this is, lets say you bake muffins. A simple staple of breakfast foods, consumed in mass quantities, always in demand. The market can always be open for new types of muffins. But in most states if you wanted to go from baking muffins, to actually legally making money off those muffins, that requires thousands of dollars upfront. It varies state to state. Some states would require commercially certifying your kitchen, all ingredients to be lab tested and labelled, multiple licenses acquired. It can easily go very high into thousands of dollars required upfront to sell muffins. That is crazy.

Thankfully some states recognize the insanity of things like this, Texas being one of them, which has a cottage food law. That allows baked goods to be sold from a persons home without any government oversight. But that is just one item, and one state. If you go down the list of all things that are easy to enter markets for poor people, the most common trend is that most things require many thousands of dollars up front to participate in that market. This ultimately just ends up creating a barrier that many people can never cross. It forces people to have to go work for employers that can afford up front costs, and then keeps them stuck there. As it creates such a mass surplus of available labor, the employers can then pay employees so little. This makes it so that the employees could never save enough to cover the up front costs themselves and start their own business.

Then if any one person does manage to get thousands of dollars up front to do something as basic as selling sandwiches, or tea, or whatever, to people, and they have minor success. The difficulty only increases. For example, the legal stipulations around hiring a single employee at this point are so complex that most people would probably need to go through some sort business course in order to do it legally. In order to do something as basic and apart of natural human social structure as procuring another human to help them.

We have been setting up our government, and our regulations on the assumption that all producers of goods are multi-million corporations that can deal with all the complexity. Perhaps it has done good in some ways. But the dark side to this is that it raised the bar of entry so high, that it simultaneously cut out the possibility that the vast majority of people could ever compete with those corporations. It ultimately created a wall in the market which most people will never be able to cross, and will remain stuck on the unfavorable side for probably their whole life.

The most oppressive aspect of our society is peoples need to create a "safe" society through endless, small, regulations and licenses.