What happens when some companies are too big to fail, and the rest are too small to succeed?

I went out of my way to defend John Bolton (twice) not because I'm hoping that Karl Rove will send me the payment I've been accused of taking, but because as I see it, the main reason the guy was singled out (and why some Republicans seem to be turning against him) was because he had the balls to attempt the impossible -- to fire a bureaucrat.

Government bureaucrats are now all but impossible to fire. (Something that even President Bush discovered when he tried to fire the people who handed out visas to Mohammad Atta and others.) For that matter, it's becoming impossible to fire anyone. I'm out of touch with employment law, and I should probably be glad I am, because in the California MCLE courses I took in January, I learned that almost anything can be construed as illegal discrimination. And "retaliation." You can't even fire people for being stark, raving mad. Hire a psycho as your "Director of First Impressions," and when the guy goes bonkers and starts munching the carpet because a customer looks at him the wrong way, you, the employer, may not fire the nut. (Were I the employer, I'd have probably just damned myself by calling him a "nut.") No; you must make "reasonable accommodations." (In other words, your business is now engaged in psychiatrist-directed handholding.)

And they wonder why American companies are "outsourcing?"

I know that California laws are extreme, so the picture I'm painting may be overly grim. But the trend is definitely towards doing to the workplace what rent control did to housing in Berkeley and Santa Monica. The idea is that once you hire someone, you have a duty to take care of that person as a sort of dependent, and you may not fire him, ever.* Whatever happened to the idea of a mutual employment contract based on free will? In this transaction, I agree to pay you if you do what you promise to do. If you don't like me or the work, you can quit, and if I don't like you or your work, I am free to fire you. What's wrong with that?

Unless we are to be reduced to the status of slaves, I see no difference between the right to engage in freely chosen economic transactions, and freely chosen sexual transactions. Just as my body is mine, so is my money, and my business. Yet the old expression "Mind your own business!" is completely alien to the bureaucracy which seems to exist for the sole purpose of minding others' business. Bureaucracy is running (and, in my view, ruining) this country, and those who dare to defy it are few and far between.

The idea that you have no business of your own is unfortunately shared by large numbers of people on the right as well as the left. Moral conservatives (Steven Malcolm Anderson once called them "moral socialists") think that sex and drugs are just as much their business as the economic socialists think your money and your business is their business. (More on drug-laws-as-socialism in M. Simon's comments here.)

The bottom line is that people should not be allowed to consent to that which the bureaucracy deems "harmful."

Whether it's drugs or money, it is not your choice. Your body is not yours. Your money is not yours. Your home is not yours. Your business is not yours. Your children are not yours.

Which means your life is not yours.

* While it's not the prevailing bureaucratic view in the United States, if the government can limit freedom so that an employer cannot fire an employee, what would prevent limiting the freedom of an employee to quit? Anyone who thinks such ideas died with serfdom should consider Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot . . .

UPDATE: Jon Henke thinks "we're in more danger from the loss of economic liberty, than we are from the loss of social liberty." (Via Glenn Reynolds.) I agree completely, although I think there's a logical connection between the two which tends to get lost. Certainly, drug prohibition represents a loss of both economic and social liberty, and the moral justification (protect people from their own evil appetites) is quite similar.

The danger posed by genuine theocrats is much overstated, not only because the First Amendment renders theocracy impossible, but because true religious radicals cannot obtain large scale popular support.