Citizens of the Maine who remain puzzled as to how the state has come to be recognized as one of the most highly taxed and business-unfriendly states in the nation need only spend a morning in Augusta watching our lawmakers in action. After expressing in these pages my puzzlement at Maine’s staggering level of taxes, I was contacted by several legislators and encouraged to come and see for myself. “You won’t believe what goes on around here.” they promised. They were right. I didn’t.

As the House session got under way on the morning of Feb. 21, the first bill up for consideration was LD 1516, the optimistically entitled “Act to Support Family Farms”. This bill commits the taxpayers of Maine to spend more than $100,000 each biennium to hire a full-time, Agriculture Department “Senior Planner” whose job, as defined in the bill, is to provide “various outreach, planning and research functions for state farmers.” A Republican representative asked if we didn’t have people in the Agriculture Department who already performed these rather ambiguous duties. He was assured that there was, but that somehow, strangely, farmers continued to go out of business, thus necessitating the hiring of more Agriculture Department planners. A second legislator also questioned the need for such a position, pointing out that the Agriculture Department itself opposes it. “I don’t want to force anything on them that they don’t want, unless it’s to rein them in.” he said. Without much response to this, the Democrats called for a vote on the bill. The result? Yeas 96, nays 42. A new bureaucrat would indeed be forced on a reluctant state agency at a cost to taxpayers of over $50,000 a year.

The second piece of work for the morning concerned L.D. 2043, “To Study School Administrative Unit Organization in Maine.” This work of legislative wisdom asks the taxpayers to fund yet another study to answer the apparently vexing question of whether we could save money by consolidating school administrative districts. Among the mandates of this new commission, strangely enough, is a “review of other research” already done on the question, including a review of the “Rosser Commission” report which studied this question in 1995 and submitted a set of findings regarding “School Administrative Unit cost sharing and consolidation.” Not enough findings though, it would seem, to avoid impaneling yet another costly commission to study the exact same question. A waste of resources, you say? So did one the most respected of House Democrats, Jim Skoglund, who explained rather eloquently that towns already know that they could save money on consolidation but do not do so for the sake of community control, a truth that renders the entire study moot. Despite this, his peers in the majority called for a vote, and passed the bill 75 to 64, promising that yet another study will be completed and stuck on a shelf somewhere. That is, until the question comes up again, at which time a new commission will be enacted to study it further.

The last piece of legislative handiwork I witnessed concerned LD 1594 an “Act to provide Disclosure and Financial Protections to Temporary Workers.” The intent of this bill, it would seem, is to shine the light of government regulation onto the dark deeds of those most nefarious of Big Business bullies, temp agencies. The sponsors of the bill appear determined to ensure that these agencies, which provide temporary and seasonal work, must no longer make a profit doing it. Pages of new regulations touch on everything from what temps are to wear to where they are to get lunch to how they are to cash their checks. These regulations, plus restrictions on fees imposed to cover expenses and overhead, will force temp agencies to raise the labor costs they charge to businesses to such an extent that it would be cheaper for businesses to hire employees directly.

The excesses of this bill, a Republican member pointed out, “would put every temporary employment agency out of business in the state of Maine.” Another rose to read a letter from a temp agency head who insisted that the bill would wipe her out. The response? “These companies just don’t want to be regulated, that’s all,” huffed a member of the majority. Another Republican rose to point out that not a single temporary worker had come before the committee to voice support for the bill, suggesting to him that this was a “solution looking for a problem”. In response to this, a Democrat proposed that temp employees didn’t testify because they would have been threatened with their jobs if they spoke out, though she had no evidence of this. Another Democrat fell back to the argument that “in their partisan and parochial point of view, these businesses just don’t want to be regulated.” Since when it had became a “partisan and parochial point of view” to simply want to operate your business in a free market economy without the government stepping in to ruin it, nobody seemed to say. The bill to regulate temp agencies passed 70 to 68.

By this point I had seen enough. In an hour or so of work, on an evidently typical day at the State House, the Democrats in the Legislature had hired yet another government bureaucrat, invented some pointless make-work for another group of bureaucrats and legislated an entire industry out of business. I watched them demonstrate a preference for state control at the expense of a free economy, and express more faith in government bureaucrats than in ordinary citizens.

Concerns over budget-busting government waste were ignored. Worries that businesses would be ruined by overregulation were dismissed with derision.

It was established as an article of faith that the job of government was to tell a supposedly free people what to do and how to do it. It was almost too much to be believed, but it went a long way to explaining why the Small Business Survival Committee rated Maine the 48th most business friendly state in America. Still hard to believe? Read the Legislative Record for yourself on the internet at http://janus.state.me.us/house/hrecindx.htm. Or better yet, spend a morning in Augusta and see for yourself. You won’t believe what goes on over there. I promise.

Stephen Bowen of Rockport teaches social studies in Camden.