Orlando Gets a New Treasure: Getting to the finish line in spite of the looters

A friend of mine just opened a new restaurant in Orlando, Florida. Every time I hear about one of these success stories, where an entrepreneur is able to leap all the hurdles placed in front of such an endeavor to open a new establishment I find myself enjoying the announcements more than I should. To me, these types of things should be common place in America. Ideas should be allowed to flourish, and actually encouraged. But the way things are it’s a minor miracle when something like a new restaurant opens because there are so many regulations and looters involved in the process of innovation. By the time all the regulations are satisfied, the permit issues are written, the taxes are paid in addition to all the requirements involved in funding the enterprise; it is only the strongest projects with the most money behind them that survive.

The reason is that America has allowed socialism to permeate every single government position in our country so the amount of government employees that are involved in any entrepreneurial activity directly impacts the chance that a project will survive to actually open. The situation is so bad that John Stossel of the Fox Business Network and Glenn Beck discuss John’s attempt to open a lemonade stand in downtown New York. Watch this video so you can see how difficult it is to even start a business, let alone defend yourself from all the looters who attempt to rob you with law suits and excessive taxes once the business is established.

This is why I get so infuriated by government organizations, primarily schools that push for tax increases. Every business you see is a minor phenomenon. The fact that you see many businesses in your neighborhoods is evidence of 5 to 6 failures for every success. So when a new restaurant is seen opening in your neighborhood or a shopping complex, you are seeing the lucky ones who made it. If an entrepreneur is politically active and gives money to a lot of charities, they find that their chances of success increase dramatically, because paying off officials with political support and getting the crazy emotional mothers of a community appeased with charity work calls off the looting dogs as long as the money flows, but it takes money to pay off such fools. So only the luckiest of the lucky gain the ability to use their money to pay off the trolls who set up shop in our political system.

It is not the “permit” department at your local government office who creates jobs and new ideas. It’s not the regulator of any agency. It’s not the bureaucrat in any capacity who does anything, but creates a barrier for the dreamers, for the entrepreneur. These barriers push up the cost of playing the game so that only those who have been lucky enough to squeeze through the cracks before the looters realize that there is money to be made, make it, because that’s the only way one can achieve success these days. The business needs to either be established or have large financial reserves to combat the looters in court and in politics, or the business must fly under the radar of convention and arrive before the looters realize that the new business is going to be profitable.

I know this tragedy first hand. I’ve been involved in many business start-ups and all of them were made unnecessarily hard by excessive regulation. I once had a building code permit issuer tell me I had to prove to him that the HAVAC unit he was demanding I buy was not required under the Cincinnati Building Code. I spent an entire weekend reading a boring book to prove that the HAVAC unit was not necessary for my change of use submission. In a book of over 750 pages I found one sentence that disqualified my project from the imposition. Once I found it, the administrator gave me a rubber stamp with a smile on his face, as though it was an office joke whether or not I’d find the one sentence out of the thousands that would exclude me. It was literally like finding a needle in a hay stack.

But that wasn’t the end of the road. That was just one issue out of 32 similar complaints by the CBC office, and that was just one organization that had their teeth into my project. There were as many as 7 such agencies that my project had to comply with just to open and my choice was to do the work myself, or hire out a small army of lawyers, engineers, architects and other professionals to do the work of arguing each item for me. By the time all those employees are hired just to meet the cost of compliance the project budget increased by nearly a half a million dollars.

So these days I just write books, and study philosophy. I hire out my expertise because it’s unattractive to argue with all the fools in any endeavor that catapults the idea generators into the quick sand of the social looters. I determined a long time ago that since I refused to play the pay-off game because I find it ethically questionable, and too expensive on the front end, that I have no chance of getting anything off the ground in this modern environment. But I have friends who aren’t so restricted by such limits and they have managed to do the nearly impossible and open new shopping complexes, and restaurants. And for that I admire them.

That is why I get very angry when I hear people proclaim that my friends, are “rich” and they owe their school system more, or they “owe” the township more in taxes, or they “owe” Barry Obama more! They owe their state government more when it is proven that there are too many government workers to pay whose only purpose is to create more bureaucracy, which in turn drives up the cost of compliance as shown above. Anyone who says or thinks such things are correct thinking are fools—and socialist sympathizers. They are parasites to everything America has stood for and are destroyers of its future.

So I do salute with utmost respect my friend and the opening of his new restaurant. The small-minded and looter mentality will look jealousy at him and proclaim that he should do more for his community. They will say that he is wealthy, and if he has enough money to buy a restaurant then he has enough money to pay more in taxes. What those same fools don’t comprehend is that it will take years to return to my friend the money he invested, not just in opening the building, but the cost of fighting the looters along the way. And they don’t know that my friend has plans that will fuel his own retirement in the future and that these restaurants are part of that plan. He has no plans to draw a government pension or a check of any kind. He plans to take care of his own business the way every American should. And every time there is a new cost to him, a new looter who attempts to rob some of his money from him because they are too lazy to do for themselves, it pushes my friend’s retirement further into the future. The ultimate cost is to my friend who has worked hard, created jobs, and fought his way through every kind of red tape imaginable. The cost to the looter is nothing. They simply show up and demand money for doing nothing. It is my friend who must make more money to pay for more looters who have attached themselves to those who create, like my friend.

So congratulations are in order to my friend and those like him who have survived well enough to open a restaurant in the golden land of Orlando, where imagination still counts for something, and making money is expected, and not chastised as criminal behavior by the lazy looters of the government employee. The next time I’m in Orlando, I will stop by for a visit and pay homage to the great ordeal that has become of starting a business in modern-day America as controlled by the looters, the moochers, the derelicts, the welfare recipients, and the mentally deficient who occupy the jobs that make opening a restaurant such a pain in the ass.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Location Scouting for Middle Earth: The Hobbit Blog part 2

I’ve been covering the production of The Hobbit filmed by Peter Jackson as an example of something that is of quality observed before its actual creation, the evidence of that quality can be seen clearly in the web blog below. For a review of the previous posting (CLICK HERE). In this episode Jackson has finished his first block of shooting and the cast is being allowed to break while the crew continues on with their tasks. What is particularly interesting in this episode is again the relaxed manner of the production and extreme efficiency. Many people do not realize how much effort goes into location scouting. After the crew leaves on their respective vacations Jackson and the rest of the crew grab some helicopters and head off to scout out the second block of shooting. This is an ominous task in a remote location such as New Zealand because as Jackson states, they will have to supply trailers, restrooms, catering tents and other none shooting items that will fill two football fields with crew and other personnel.

This is a wonderful video that once again shows why Peter Jackson is currently the best in the business. All this behind the scenes stuff will do nothing to harm the final impression of the film, because the goal of the production is to shoot scenes that hide everything shown in these video clips with the content of the story. It is hard to see an endless supply of mountain ranges and pick the proper shots that fit perfectly into the context of a story created by J.R.R. Tolkien many years ago, yet the crew is doing just that with great attention to detail.

I cover extensively at this site films that are literary adaptations, and they are hard to translate. I have openly supported the film version of Atlas Shrugged which can be seen by CLICKING HERE.

Also we have covered A Brave New World which can be seen by CLICKING HERE. (The whole movie can actually be seen at this link)

Both of those film adaptations suffer greatly by the weight of the mighty books. Great works of literature such as those are very, very difficult to translate into film. The film versions leave something to be desired because in the mind of the reader, it is very difficult to capture the essence of what images are painted across the mind conjured up by the words. Even the Harry Potter films suffered from this to some extent even with the big budget attempt. Brave New World and Atlas Shrugged have so many characters and the scope of the work is so vast that the production value comes across almost like a television show. The essence of the story still gets conveyed, but the theater experience as a separate entity does suffer.

In Tolkien’s work, which I find particularly attractive, the characters are smart. The wizards are wise, they read big ancient books, and the hobbits are cultured. So the detail to capture on film requires literally thousands upon thousands of craftsman to supply that added texture which Jackson effortlessly incorporates into his film version. The ability to juggle all these tasks while flying in a helicopter and finding just the right shots to reflect what Tolkien intended in literature, which will be ridiculed by a loving public all of whom interpreted the information independently, and is a truly laborious task. But as seen in that clip, Jackson is on top of every aspect of the production like a man who has already been there and done it. Yet he is doing it in the present.

It’s the mind of Jackson that makes this adaption of The Hobbit head and shoulders above similar attempts. I enjoy the effort that goes into just about any film, but one of such quality like The Hobbit begin and end on the set with the smallest detail and being at the front of the train in thinking.

Another interesting fragment to be taken from this short clip is the crew who left for vacation. One of the reasons that those who work in the film business tend to not be much grounded in a political philosophy is because they do travel the world so much and touch so many cultures while shooting on location. They are not particularly in love with capitalism or socialism or any variation in between. They just want to know when they get paid, and if they can get in and out of an airport. Political philosophy is up to “other people.” It works well for their nomadic lifestyles but caution should be used when listening to these actors when they give interviews and they are asked political questions. Chances are they don’t know much about politics. They might know something about Obama because they were invited to a fund raiser and had the opportunity to meet him, so in relation to other politicians, they probably don’t know much about what’s going on and will support Obama—because they shook his hand. Actors tend to become absorbed in whatever project they are working on, so the outside world gets lost to them.

Personally, I find these little breaks into the world of Peter Jackson’s production of The Hobbit to be welcome voyages into a land I wish so much the rest of the world could conceive. In films the cast and crew work so hard to make an idea come to life. The idea might be a fantasy about Hobbits, Wizards and dragons, but the reality is a group of individuals who make those ideas into a story that reflects the vision. Films—particularly ones adapted from classic literature are about big ideas that must be turned from a fantasy into a reality by minds that have so much vision that they can spot the elements in the randomness of the living world. And that is a talent worth celebrating as the quest for revisiting the wonders of Middle-Earth presses upon us in the months to come.