Why I do my best to maintain a healthy state of skepticism when it comes to promises that our government makes and my fellow citizens’ expectations that the government is competent: bureaucracy is stupid. Seriously, vast organizations aren’t just impersonal, they are unthinking. They typically end up being dominated by automated systems and rigid rules that kill off common sense, peopled by incompetents who would much rather follow established protocol than find ways to help the people that they “serve.”

Bureaucracy is stupid.

For Lora and Jamey Costner, a $7,854 federal income tax bill is the painful indigestion that followed two unsatisfying servings of identity theft cooked up by two former Koch Foods employees, records indicate.

The criminal cases involving the Newport married couple and the two illegal immigrants, who IRS records indicate worked for Koch Foods, have been resolved in the court system.

The bitter aftertaste that remains is the unpalatable possibility of having their wages garnished to pay tax bills on income they never earned at the Morristown chicken-processing plant.

“The overall burden of it all is crushing us, please help,” the Costners wrote in an appeal to U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn. “We have done all we know to do.”

The mind boggles at what I read in the rest of that article--and it also challenges the illegal-immigrant advocates who seem to believe that illegal immigrants bring only sunshine, flowers, and cheap factory labor into the country. Immigration is not one of my own personal hot button issues, but you can bet that for the people in the story it will be near the top of the list when they choose a candidate.

The treatment of the victims here is disgraceful. I’m sure that Senator Corker will be able to help them, but it should never have come to needing a Senator’s intervention.

Read the story.

And, yes, this one comes from Instapundit.