All this talk about Collectivism and Individualism has been great reading and philosophy to toss around and debate all day long. However, the debate still lingers like a skunk on the side of the road but only seems to get more stretched along more highways with more dead skunks.

What do I mean by that?? If your time and money is important to you then accepting our current government interest, especially, taxes and regulation of every kind should be questioned and reformed due to cost/benefit ratio not being met on either front. We all are trying to figure out the TRUE cost the government has on our lives in every aspect they seem to waste resources. They seemed to have hijacked all our resources, especially our most valuable ones, time to fix their constant mistakes and using our own money to fight ourselves. It’s getting more pervasive in uncountable ways. However, their number one reason when they do intrude into our individual lives is that they must make sure compliance is increased for the governments’ interests. If one resists their intrusion in anyway it is not looked at as protecting yourself from them to assure your information is accurate; it is deemed eluding/resisting in some respect and we are fined more or forced into courts until they get their results they want.

Being a CPA, we tend to joke in our profession that if we could bill the government to fix their mistakes we wouldn’t need the clients at all. Not to mention the incredible lack of respect of time it takes to live life into account for anyone and then IRS won’t keep up with simple technology (i.e. email) to make everyone’s job easier or so time consuming for security concerns to use, it becomes not worth pursuing.

Most citizens will agree that all government agencies are stepping up enforcement, including the IRS. Now the IRS is coming after the smallest of Corporations for not paying the officer a salary (FICA taxes also known as Self employment tax or simply known as Social Security & Medicare) on such a low amount of income that was never required before that it looks like a civil information war over every aspect of the code to nail down every meaning before Bush leaves office. Every loop hole that they can fill is being filled in all laws in all professions and plans. With every case they impose and enforcement of rules winds us up more and more in this Web. If the government thinks the american citizens sees putting money is a fake retirement account as just another tax as a benefit to them they really are dillusional. Now they want to treat our healthcare the same way?? Haven't we learned from the last Medicare debacle??

We as people need to come up with more ways to use broiler plate letters for fellow citizens to send in to protest all enforcement, prohibition, or government interest policies that only intrude into the individuals’ life that only expands government to force ideologies on the masses. Cross professional informing of laws that affect one another detrimentally if passed or how they are panning out so first opportunity we can use jury nullification information appropriately to rid ourselves of poor laws/regulation. Although many laws are supposed to only affect a minority of the population, it does seem like more and more current laws seem to pervasively affect our every day lives with eating up more time and money to assure we ‘comply’ with all the CYA orders we have come to require in each and every industry. There always has to be a head to be chopped off if something that goes wrong. We know fighting the government usually costs more than just paying them what they want. They know this and milk it for all it’s worth.

We need some major reform sooner than the next election in four years. If we listen to David Walker (former Head of GAO) we can not sustain these entitlements we have promised everyone from every special interest that asked for it. True he is working with Peterson G Peterson Group with is CFR and their ideas are the wrong reform but the concern and urgency is there none the less.

Federalism has taken over and we probably need to rewrite the Federalist Papers ALL over again to make them pertinent to today’s world and debate past the theory and give the people some answers. I am willing to be a part of ‘The Papers’ anytime. Because of this new world of specialty niches we should make sure we equally spread through the professions like the government interests do to sell their ideas to the public.

So the question still arises…. IS the governments’ interest more important because they are supposed to represent the collective and that is more important than the individual because government is helping/protecting someone weaker in that collective?? Is it as simple as catering to every special interest is the goal of the collective so it can never represent the individual?? And the more tax/regulation the individual allows the government to impose, the further from the individual we get? So my question is how can the government work for the individual when we are getting so far from individual interests/rights being important??