A lot of serf mentality in the business world too. Almost all businesses will accept statute or regulation on the face of it without putting up a fight either due to legal advice or they consider it’s too costly to deal with court.
I remember the HIPPA stuff on medical privacy when it came out. The law itself only said docs couldn’t share with anyone but patient and designees. Sounds fine on the face of it until the legal advice rolls in - if you don’t document your record release, you stand the chance of being sued and certainly don’t use email - what if your admin staff types in the wrong email address!!!
So, even though there is no problem with them handing you your own records, you wind up encountering resistance and hassle to get something that would otherwise be simply handed to you without “incident” because they have been worked up by the legal world to see a lawsuit under every rock. Being sued all the time for other reasons doesn’t help either.
But the above is not the worst of it in my mind.
If you want to talk about serfdom, look at how businesses reacted to the drone bit. When the FCC said they were “looking” at regulating it, everyone screeched to a halt and waited for their regs to come out before even attempting to put into practice its commercialization.
This was actually a “wow” moment for me. A critical difference between being governed in the US vs being ruled everywhere else is that in the US you don’t need to “ask for permission” (supposedly).
Government is given an itemized list of what IT can do via the constitution and if it’s not listed the government can’t do it. If there is no prohibition via statute or reg, you can do it, period. If a subsequent statute or reg comes into play, you are “grandfathered”.
In other countries, it is the complete reversal, it is the serfs who are restricted. The de facto rule is that if something is not specified as being allowed to do, you are not allowed to do it. You must first ask the government permission to do it.
This is exactly what happened w/the drone commercialization. Instead of businesses saying, “Well, there are no regs yet, so let’s consider them model airplanes and get started!”, they cowed and waited for the FCC to tell them what to do.
Imagine if that’s how it went down w/internet stuff. In that case, I probably wouldn’t be posting this now!
Well said. You are in good company. Here's how Algernon Sidney expressed the same idea in 1682:
“Liberty solely consists in an independency upon the will of another.”