Another FINE mess

Big Daddy Government. He’s your buddy; he’s your pal.

As much as the Left wants us to believe that “better living through bigger government” is our future, I have a hard time swallowing idiocy like this.

From the New York POST:

A Health Department inspector bizarrely slapped a Brooklyn bagel shop with $1,650 in fines — because sesame and poppy seeds fell to the floor while the bagels were being made during working hours.

The owner of B&B Empire Bagel Cafe — who appealed the violations and lost at two separate hearings — says the inspectors must have holes in their heads. How is he supposed to make seeded bagels without some of the tiny goods spilling onto the ground?

—-

“Look,” explained Gormakh, “a few seeds are always going to be dropped when you are dipping the bagel in the seeds. They don’t all stick like glue.”

“Now imagine the seeds from 100 bagels. Any place where bagels are produced will have these problems.”

Still, city regulators were unsympathetic.

These are seeds, fer cryin’ out loud. Seeds? In a bakery? Yeah, we can’t have that.

On a larger scale, you may have missed this one from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — When the companies that supply motor fuel close the books on 2011, they will pay about $6.8 million in penalties to the Treasury because they failed to mix a special type of biofuel into their gasoline and diesel as required by law.

But there was none to be had. Outside a handful of laboratories and workshops, the ingredient, cellulosic biofuel, does not exist.

—

Penalizing the fuel suppliers demonstrates what happens when the federal government really, really wants something that technology is not ready to provide.

—

“From a taxpayer/consumer standpoint, it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense that we would require blenders to pay fines or fees or whatever for stuff that literally isn’t available,” said Dennis V. McGinn, a retired vice-admiral who serves on the American Council on Renewable Energy.

Plus you have Obamacare, and the new debilitating regs on coal-fired power plants, and …..the list goes on and on.

—————————-

This is governmental efficiency in action: punish the people who are risking everything to make a go of it in this moribund economy, even when it defies any sense of proportion or logic.

Of course, you’d have to be pretty gosh-darned paranoid to think that instances like these are intentionally destructive.

I mean, where would you GET such an idea?