How Overlegislation Hurts the Rule of Law | CLIP

When we were speaking offline earlier, you said something very interesting to me, which is that when you have a lot of laws, that actually can create a more general lack of accountability in society, not around necessarily specifically criminal behavior, but all sorts of behavior. In California, we have a lot of laws. Every year, just this state, last year, we had over 700 new laws. Bear in mind that there's counties and there's cities. In LA County, we had a law that if you hand out plastic fork and knife to your customers without them asking, you can get punished. You'll get a big fine if you do it a couple of times. What happens is that how are you going to control that as a restaurant owner? How are you going to make sure your employees won't hand out the plastic knife to somebody? We're having a lot of these kinds of laws that it's very easy to break. What happens is that we could fall into the culture of not following the laws because it would be very hard for people to follow all these laws. One of the things, the contrast here in the US versus the countries I've lived in, is that people really respect the laws. People follow the laws. Relatively. Relatively. They're law-abiding people. In third-world countries or countries that I've lived in, essentially, the laws are there, but nobody follows them because you have friends in the government that they can cover for you. In some cases, when I lived in China, what happens is that there's government officials. That's their business to actually help you break through this mess that is in the legal system. Essentially, you have to always have a relationship with them. There's a lot of bribery, and they have a lot of power. Unfortunately, from what I've gathered, California is headed that way, where we have a lot of laws, and we're making more and more laws. Some of them are not possible to follow. I can be a really good restaurant owner, but I'm hiring my staff from schools. Maybe one of them is in a bad mood, and he hands out the plastic fork and knife. I told him not to do it, but he's doing that. Maybe he handed out to 10 people. Do I have to pay a big penalty for that? What am I going to do? I have to know the person that works in the government office, the bureau that's in control of this. If I have a really good relationship with them, then they won't enforce it on me. So this is what can happen here. We live in an era of censorship and disinformation, and it can be really hard to know what's true and what's false in this information climate. To get honest information and insights you can trust, join us on Epoch TV. You can sign up for your 14-day free trial at ept.ms slash freetrialyon. That's ept.ms slash freetrialjan. That's fascinating because basically what you're saying is creating too many laws, creating this morass of laws, actually creates a situation where corruption becomes more rampant because of that. There's being too much stuff to deal with. That's fascinating. Tell me a little bit about your background. I grew up in Iran until I was 16. Then I lived in Mexico City. Then I came here. Then I went to China and helped a family member build a company. I worked in China. I understood how it works, the system. I had to deal with the government a lot. Then I came back. I tried to build H1 and timed it really well in 2008. Unfortunately, it didn't work out. Then I built a technology company. From there, I decided to join the Epoch Times. I've seen the American culture here, the way the American system works. I've seen it inside companies. We admit to failures. We're not afraid of failures. We talk about them. We say we're sorry and we can recover from it. In China, that doesn't happen. Nobody says they made a mistake. You won't see that. Unfortunately, in California government, we are seeing the same culture that I saw in China, where nobody admits to a failure. We had a big fraud. The Employment Development Department, EDD of California, gave $20 billion of checks to people for unemployment during the pandemic. We even gave it to prisoners, people that were in prison for life. $20 billion. Nobody came out and said, I'm sorry, we made a mistake. We should have ran this department better. Nobody said that. This is something we're losing in the state. There's also other values that we have here. One of them is diversity of opinion and thought. This is something unique to the U.S. You go to a football game and you can see different fans of different teams. They're talking, they're having a good time, and they're watching the game together. You're in a company, the executives allow other differing opinions to come to the table and come up with solutions. In California, we are running this state with only one way of thinking. It's pretty extreme. Even the Democrats, which the majority of the state is Democrats, but within the Democratic Party, there is one voice. They're not even accepting other ideas within their own party. The Democrats here are afraid of questioning or publicly talking anything that could be negative about that ideology. They're afraid of talking about it. Also, another factor that I've seen here in the corporate world, what I've noticed is that we're very action-oriented. We look at problems, we solve them, we make things happen. Unfortunately, in the California government, we are not doing that. We have so many different problems like homelessness, fire, water shortage, drought and water shortage, and power shortage. We are not really dealing with them. We're just having programs after programs after programs and nobody's taking action. We're not taking any serious action. It is very similar to how the Chinese Communist Party was doing things in China. I have this story when I was in China. I got invited to an American Chamber of Commerce event, and the mayor of Beijing was there, and somebody asked a question. They dared to ask this question, like, what are you guys doing about the air pollution in China, in Beijing? The mayor deferred the question to his weatherman. The person who was in charge of the air quality got up and said, Beijing has 260 clear days, and we're working very hard at getting it better. On my table, everybody smiled because we all live there. We know there's not even 60 clear days in Beijing, but nothing happened. This is what's happening in the California government, too. When leaders of the state are talking about issues like homelessness, and they want to allocate $15 billion or $5 billion to build housing for the homeless, when they get up there and say this program has worked really well, nobody's asking a question. We had this program in the state where we were supposed to build studios at $120,000 a studio unit for homeless. The city allocated $1.2 million. People paid the tax to make this happen. Each unit is costing the city between $600,000 to $800,000. When the government officials from the city of L.A. stand up behind the podium and say this is a great program, it's working well, the newspapers will report that. They're not going to give you the data of how it went, where it is, how many houses they've built, how many homeless are off the street because of this program. The media is not telling the people, and the people trust the media.