West Elbert County Sun, 1/8/09
- “Extensive sampling at the ranges and elsewhere on the property have shown a level of contamination that is much less than we anticipated, and except for the bullet impact backstops, much less than we have ever seen at shooting ranges.”
- “None of the lab-confirmed samples have triggered the level of concern we established with the Colorado Dept. of Public Health and Environment, 1100 ppm lead in soil, nor even the department’s default level of 400 ppm. Therefore 40+ years of shooting by the Boy Scouts has not generated a significant hazardous condition, as one might otherwise expect.”
- “Jeffrie Hermann, executive director of the BSA Denver Area council, noted that the BSA has incurred more than $600,000 in expenses to date on this special use permit application[.] ” Note: This does not include costs for shooting range relocations and the indefinite future costs of regulatory compliance.
Case SU-08-0032, Special Use Review Permit, Peaceful Valley Scout Ranch Shooting Facility
Complainants have succeeded in diverting hundreds of thousands of present and future charitable dollars that could have benefited the Scouts, into county, state and federal regulatory industries, and accomplished nothing.
If the scouts ever need shooters to come out and fire off a few rounds in the direction of the complainants when the winds are just right for maximum sound effect, I’m available.
“There cannot be any doubt that this bureaucratic system is essentially antiliberal, undemocratic, and un-American, that it is contrary to the spirit and to the letter of the Constitution, and that it is a replica of the totalitarian methods of Stalin and Hitler. It is imbued with a fanatical hostility to free enterprise and private property. It paralyzes the conduct of business and lowers the productivity of labor. By heedless spending it squanders the nation’s wealth. It is inefficient and wasteful. Although it styles what it does as planning, it has no definite plans and aims. It lacks unity and uniformity; the various bureaus and agencies work at cross-purposes. The outcome is a disintegration of the whole social apparatus of production and distribution. Poverty and distress are bound to follow.”
“The champions of socialism call themselves progressives, but they recommend a system which is characterized by rigid observance of routine and by a resistance to every kind of improvement. They call themselves liberals, but they are intent upon abolishing liberty. They call themselves democrats, but they yearn for dictatorship. They call themselves revolutionaries, but they want to make the government omnipotent. They promise the blessings of the Garden of Eden, but they plan to transform the world into a gigantic post office. Every man but one a subordinate clerk in a bureau, what an alluring utopia! What a noble cause to fight for!
Against all this frenzy of agitation there is but one weapon available: reason. Just common sense is needed to prevent man from falling prey to illusory fantasies and empty catchwords.”
Bureaucracy, Von Mises.