Yesterday was April Fools Day and it was also the day that my Russian fiancee, Helen, had her interview with the American Embassy in Moscow for her visa.  The man who interviewed her said she qualifies, but she is missing one piece of documentation they need - her birth certificate.  Her mom sent her a copy March 4th and it never arrived - got lost in the mail.  It will take her two weeks to get another copy and then she'll be able to get her visa and come to the United States.
I figured they weren't going to give her a visa without her birth certificate because I know what sticklers governments are for paperwork.  The stacks of documents we had to file for this visa application and the length of time it has taken to get this far has been quite an education in bureaucracy.  On my end I had to file an application and about 20-30 pages of support material.  On her end she had to fill out an application with over 200 questions, supply police reports and other records, including financial records from me which had to be sent to her in Russia. 
Anyway, forgive me, but the whole experience just makes me want to vent a little of my frustration about the inflexibility, illogical and essentially unreasonable nature of government bureaucracies and paperwork.  For starters, just think how many trees have to be cut down each year just to create the paper to run government bureaucracy!
When I see people pushing for government regulation of this or that, I think - why do you want to create more bureaucracy.  I tell people, "if you want anything done as inefficiently and in the most costly manner possible, ask government to do it."  If it was a private company that had to review and approve visa applications and make money doing it, it would be done a lot faster and a lot more efficiently, but of course, there are some things that governments have to do.
I think what bothers me the most however is that we have millions of illegal aliens who didn't have to go through this massive bureaucracy to get here and still get the benefits of being in America.   Several years ago I had a class scheduled before the Nature's Sunshine Convention in Salt Lake City which was to be team-taught by Canadian named DeAnna Hansen.  She made the mistake of telling the border officials that she was coming to teach a class and got detained at the border.  She called me and I tried talking to the border officer who told me he was just protecting American jobs and economic interests.  I said, well, you're certainly not protecting my economic interests because not only do I have 50 people who have paid to be at this class (which my American-based company is making profit from), but I also plan to record this class and offer it for sale as a product.  He still didn't let her through.
Afterwards, I went online to try to find the visa application I would need to get DeAnna to be able to come to America and teach a class legally.  Not only were the forms so confusing and difficult that I probably would have had to hire an attorney to help me fill them out, I couldn't even figure out which form I needed to file! 
I sometimes feel like our system rewards people who dodge the system and punishes people who try to do things legally.  Have you ever felt that way?
The odd thing is that we've allowed numerous American manufacturing plants to be shut down so American corporations can open overseas manufacturing plants where they can hire cheap labor and get rid of American jobs.  Of course Americans love this on one level.  It means we can buy lots and lots of cheap goods from other countries.  Unfortunately, when we buy from other countries, but don't sell as much as we buy we wind up with trade deficits and our dollar loses value in international trade (which is happening right now, by the way!)
It's not that I care much one way or the other.  Either open up the borders and make it easier for people to enter the country legally or keep all the restrictions and be tougher on people who are here illegally, but it doesn't make sense to me to just allow millions of people to be here illegally and then make it take over 10 months and a mountain of paperwork to get someone here legally.
Okay, so government doesn't have to make sense, does it?  It's government and bureaucracy and paperwork are just part of the way government operates.  Still, I wish Americans could vote in some government officials who would drastically reduce the size of our bureaucracy before it buries us all in a mountain of paperwork!