All in the Numbers

I received an email the other day that had been forwarded on to me.  It looked something like this –

All you Need to Know about Government Bureaucracy: 

** Pythagorean theorem:…………………………………….24 words.
** Lord’s prayer:…………………………………………………66 words.
** Archimedes’ Principle:…………………………………….67 words.
** 10 Commandments:……………………………………….179 words.
** Gettysburg address:………………………………………..286 words.
** Declaration of Independence :………………………….1,300 words.
** US Constitution:……………………………………………..4,501 words.

And then it went on to list the word count on the government regulations for the sale of cabbage at over 26,000 words.  When we went to verify that information, it turned out to be misleading.  But we did verify that the USDA Grade Standards on tomatoes are a staggering 6628 words (more than lettuce at 5624 and potatoes at 2363).  The point is that government regulations are overtaking us as the largest problem that we face in conducting business.

The recent bright spot was the admission that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was too onerous and daunting to implement by January 1, 2014.  So, while we have to talk to our customers about the 10% or greater increase in transportation costs due to the truck driver’s hours of service regulations changing, the artificial floor prices imposed through the Tomato Suspension Agreement or the lack of workers to harvest a crop forcing a tomato grower to not plant in Ohio, we have dodged the proverbial bullet on the healthcare for another year.

What the email writer was trying to say is that we spend too much time on regulations and not enough on what is truly important.  If we would all concentrate on maintaining honest and ethical relationships with each other, the rest would be simple.