Whether the USG is a collection of well minded do-gooders, an inept bureaucracy that can't tell one hand from another, a literal collection of antichrists, or absolutely none of the above: the USG has guns.
So do the militiamen in Montana, so what exactly is your point?
The bobbies patrolling the streets in the U.K. are unarmed but people still seem to respect the rule of law over there, companies can still be seized, etc.
In fact there are probably even a few Western democracies without so much as a military that still could pass laws to nationalize a business.
"Guns" are the least of your problems with government from a day-to-day point of view.
The "gun" narrative, in addition to being literally true, also has the rhetorical advantage of emotionally short-circuiting many people of a particular ideological bent. While you fume about being explicitly associated with the violent force that implicitly enables your everyday actions, you're unable to reply in a fashion that will convince the majority of people who don't have irrational ideas about guns.
(I don't necessarily mean "you" literally, but surely we've seen enough guns-r-bad silliness online to know that it exists.)
From our point of view guns are the core of the problem. An individual can decide not to buy something if they don't like it. Apple can tell Google to piss off when they don't like the terms of a deal. But you can't tell the government to go and pound sand if you don't like the opinion of a regulator.
They have the power to send in the SWAT teams and not vice versa. Try fighting USG on anything of substance and police will quickly appear, and with them guns, and then your choice is to die, to be imprisoned, or to submit.
The Buckyballs owner just had to submit. CPSC put him out of business:
mpyne, because you are within the federal government you don't see its bad side. Most of your work is just office work. Your agency is not about to be banned by another agency. The worst thing that can happen is that the budget is not substantially increased.
Things are a sight more dangerous for non-government businesses in the US today, at least those which are in politically unfavored categories (like Keystone XL) rather than politically favored ones (like the green energy companies).
While once in a while it so happens that political favor coincides with technological merit, as in the case of Tesla, most of the time innovation means pissing people off. Innovation and consensus are antonyms. Innovation is not democratic, committees don't make breakthroughs, and it'd be nice to not have to deal with a regulator waving a gun in one's face when your disruption disrupts their assumptions.
