At my last apartment, we got a new neighbor who ran a food truck and dumped the food truck's trash in our apartment's trash bins.
This obviously introduced many issues. The (~6 very large) bins were always full by 3 days after pickup and then overfilled all over the back of the complex for the rest of the week. Rodent and especially ant/fruit fly issues exploded. The smell was atrocious. The bins were directly behind our kitchen door, and we didn't have AC, so our kitchen door had to stay closed. The kitchen door was key to the airflow that would naturally cool the apartment, so the entire apartment was miserable.
Worst of all, the neighbor did not take any of the bins to the curb each week, was unresponsive, and our landlord was predictably unhelpful. For many weeks I patched the issue by hauling this guy's business trash to the curb every single morning (which is a lot more work, and much more unpleasant, than it perhaps sounds like).
Before that experience, I would probably see rules like "food trucks must file a form proving they have a legal place to dump their refuse" and consider it to be absurd red tape.
Nice story. Laws and regulations are broken all the time, but only used/prosecuted very rarely when the circumstances are egregious and the parties are pissed. E.g. violent criminals in jail have committed 10-30x more violent crimes than the single one they have been convicted for. Similarly most minor infractions go completely unnoticed and unreported because no one cares. The laws are are there to make things prosecutable and punishable. But they are not there. You can operate many businesses completely outside the law without running into any problems as long as you are courteous, unnoticed, and do no harm. You respect the laws in spirit, but not in practice. E.g. you don't do all the paper work, but you also are a good citizen and respect the rules in spirit if not in practice.
>You can operate many businesses completely outside the law without running into any problems as long as you are courteous, unnoticed, and do no harm.
The problem with this is that if you're doing it enough to make a living off of (i.e. not a side gig) it makes you a massive target for enforcers looking to issue fines. And there's always the Karen who'd rather narc on you than politely ask you not to do something that you didn't even know was pissing them off.
Yeah. One of our other neighbors ran a tutoring side business out of her apartment, which was technically illegal but of course didn't bother anyone and went unnoticed.
> Seems like a separate issue of your neighbor not being very considerate and dumping (illegally?).
Refuse externalities are a systemic issue for food trucks. They were the #1 reason for complaints about food trucks in my city. There are news articles about beach towns banning food trucks and an article about Portland considering a ban in certain areas because of trash issues. This case was egregious but the problem is not uncommon.
> The thing is, red tape shouldn’t be there to enforce compliance. He could have done that even if he’d paid the fees, which maybe he did?
He went on to dump in city trash cans (illegally), was fined, then arranged for a dumpster. He claims, and I believe this is true, that he didn't know either residential or city trash was off-limits. (I believe it is true because getting away with illegal dumping when done intentionally is super easy... you only get caught when you do it in broad daylight in front of a cop because you don't know it's not allowed.)
Given that issues with trash from food trucks are predictable and known, simply asking for proof that the food truck owner has access to a dumpster or other waste management option seems pretty reasonable. If the food truck owner has a proper waste management plan then describing it should take a few minutes max ("I am paying XYZ to use the dumpster located behind 123 Main St."). If they don't have a plan then this is a net positive for them because they'd almost certainly otherwise end up with either fines or a revoked license.
Even assuming a 1/200 success rate at reducing illegal dumping, requiring a waste management plan would cost 20 hours (amortized over hundreds of people) and save 40 hours (amortized over 1 person). The actual savings are probably much higher because 1/200 is unrealistically low -- I'm willing to bet most illegal dumping of food truck waste is not intentionally illegal.
Why is it incumbent on the rest of society to subsidize food truck owners at the tune of 2x time?
"Our neighbors have a lot of trash" is not a complaint that a city inspector is going to take seriously, and in any case our city was very landlord-friendly/human-hostile. In most cities waiting for the leas to be up and then moving out is always easier...
We resolved this by threatening the neighbor to go to the office that permitted his food truck.
If food truck regulations didn't exist, we would have been SOL until the lease was up.
> Or refuse to haul the trash entirely.
This was an impractical option.
On an 85 degree day, our apartment would stay below 75 (and below 70 until late afternoon close to the end of the workday) if we kept the large front windows open, the kitchen door open, and some well-placed fans. It would heat up to 85 very quickly if you closed off the airflow. Working in 85 degree heat is highly unpleasant.
To say nothing of the rats and fruit flies/ants, which were impossible to keep out of the apartment even when we kept the doors and windows closed.
Sounds like your neighbor did have a legal place to dump refuse so adding that rule wouldn't have helped, and then everyone in Boston would have a 93rd step in the process.
I've spent 2 years trying to get permission to have electricians put wire back into conduit that is already there in a building I own.
Saturday thieves broke into my outdoor containers (because I can't get an occupancy permit) and stole over $20,000 worth of stuff. I can't install security lighting and security systems without power to run them!
This stuff is really getting to me and I feel like I'm in an Ayn Rand book.
> Sounds like your neighbor did have a legal place to dump refuse
Well, no. After he stopped using our residential bins, he started dumping in city trash cans, was fined, and then ultimately paid for use of a dumpster.
> so adding that rule wouldn't have helped
He wasn't aware that either of his illegal dumping methods were illegal, and changed his behavior when he was informed (in the second case by a fine). So a form probably would have, in fact, prevented the situation from happening.
> and then everyone in Boston would have a 93rd step in the process.
I probably spent 40 hours on this issue. Much of that time highly unpleasant (cleaning out rodent traps, taking out cheap trash bags that would break and make a mess, spraying down gross trash bins and the back sidewalk, etc)
A one page online form that takes 5 minutes to fill out, for every food truck in the city, consumes perhaps 20 hours of time on the high end. So this one event I experienced already pays a net 20 hour profit to society.
I'm not the only one who has had issues with food truck trash disposal -- it's actually a fairly common issue for cities and one of the primary sources of complaints my city received about food trucks. A quick google search shows that other cities have similar issues and some even ban food trucks because of trash issues.
I'm sorry about your building code issues, that sounds very annoying and unfair, but only Ayn Rand could complain about filling out forms when a business is literally trashing someone's home ;-)
I think there is a fundamental misalignment of incentives between the government and its citizens. Governments as an abstract entity might have an interest in thriving entrepreneurship and economic growth, but the individual bureaucrats they employ do not. And its those Bureaucrats that design and apply processes.
As a result, most western countries now have an ever growing apparatus of bureaucrats who are not accountable to the citizenship and who's sole reason for being is the facilitation of process. In order to increase their relevance and hence influence and paygrade, it is in their best interest to increase the amount of process and the role that process plays in everyday decision making.
What worries me is that I don't see any remedy to this. Germany, a particularly bad offender when it comes to process and red tape has been attempting "Bürokratieabbau" - bureaucracy reduction since 1997. As a result we now have a commission for bureaucracy reduction which manages several operating bodies for bureaucracy reduction, all with their own processes and guidelines.
I'm honestly worried that this might grow to a point of collapse.
Bureaucracy is a natural outcome of maturing processes.
It used to be easy to do things. But then business owners would do things that would make citizens say, "they shouldn't be able to do that." So rules/laws were made to prevent people from doing it.
You can go on a mission to reduce redtape, but the results will probably be temporary. Contrary to the way some people think, these regulations aren't put into place willy-nilly, they are the natural outcome of people cheating the system and causing others harm.
It's not just governments either. Anyone who has worked at a startup and a huge mega corp sees the difference in how easy it is to deploy something. Startups have no guards in place, while megacorps need sign-offs from various departments, etc.
They're also the result of businesses creating regulatory moats. All this red tape to open a restaurant is great if you have a restaurant and don't want competitors spinning up left and right.
Right, the rules were put in place to reduce bad behavior. The question is, did the government accurately predict the cost of the rules / red tape itself?
I think the steelman of the GP is that the red tape was not accurately predicted. Most citizens can probably agree "all else equal, we don't want a pub in the middle of a residential district open till 4am with drunkards wandering the streets". But did they also properly opening a local business should be so hard that each business effectively has a local moat, raising prices and reducing restaurant selection?
Also, the opinion that unresponsive bureaucracy needs to exist seems defeatist on the side of government regulation. Why can't we design better permitting processes that both ensure crazy pubs don't open in the middle of a suburb, and yet also make opening most normal businesses a 1-day affair?
> But then business owners would do things that would make citizens say, "they shouldn't be able to do that." So rules/laws were made to prevent people from doing it.
By "citizens", I assume you mean other business owners trying to keep new entrants out of the sector, or putting themselves in place to approve those that do.
There is an interesting "parable" [1] from the 70's that goes over this and lays it out for what it is, which is basically always a form of regulatory capture.
Bureaucrats report to (mostly) elected politicians (in the US).
Politicians report to the public. The public complain about food poisoning, not about 92 forms to open a restaurant. The politician tells their bureaucrats to “do something” about all the food poisoning by under regulated restaurants.
The regulatory bureaucracy is a lagging, indirect response to bad behavior by previous individuals and businesses. It’s never going to absolutely prevent bad behavior just as speed limits do not actually prevent speeding, but it is a legal tool or cudgel to inhibit the behavior and punish it in retrospect. And that in turn is both to reduce the cost of government from dealing with responses to bad behavior and ensure the politicians get reelected.
I think that's how it should work - but unfortunately not how it does. Both Trump and Obama complained about what people would refer to as the "deep state". Here's a quote from Putin of all People describing the phenomenon:
I have already talked with one US President, and with another, and with the third - Presidents come and go, but the policy does not change. Do you know why? Because the power of the bureaucracy is very strong. The person gets elected, he comes with some ideas, and then people come to him with briefcases, well dressed and in dark suits, like mine, but not with a red tie, but with black or dark blue, and they begin to explain what he should do - and everything changes at once. This happens from one administration to the next.
I don't think there's a misalignment at all, the complexities come when the governments try to build water tight systems.
For example, let's say that to do some specific work the law says a degree is required. Normally, a degree is something that a university gives to its successful students so it shouldn't be that big of a bureaucracy to hire someone for that job, right?
firts, they start by simply taking the xerox copy of the diploma. Then someone starts hiring people without a diploma and forges a fake xerox copy and gets caught? To solve this, bureaucrats introduce a requirement for diploma registrations so they can check against fakes.
Congratulation, now you have an office visit step where you go show your original diploma.
Unfortunately, some people start showing fake diplomas. Once the bureaucrats catch on, they introduce a protocol with the universities to start checking the diplomas. Unfortunately, some universities say they can't accommodate that, others say they can do it moving forward but can't to for those who graduated more than 5 years ago. Also, some people studied abroad, others have their institutions merged or seized to exits.
Congratulation, now you have multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. You will need to fill the correct form.
What you describe is the exact reason we should question your very premise. "For example, let's say that to do some specific the law says a degree is required."
Why is the government in the business of requiring degrees for financial transactions? Maybe that's valid for a doctor, but it's certainly not valid for a hair dresser.
Why do bureaucrats have an incentive to make their own work harder? How do you explain then how easier is to do taxes in bureaucratic Europe compared with the USA?
I will say that the worst burocracy is created when private companies meddle with the government affairs.
Because that keeps them employed, plain and simple. Almost no self-preserving human being would optimize themselves out of a job without something better waiting in the wings. Creating more work and harder work does the opposite, it allows them more security.
Even if it doesn't mean they want to make more work (like how most developers wouldn't maliciously add bugs to create more work), it does mean the incentive to make less work without a way to preserve oneself is extremely low.
What people call "The Government", in this case, is the Municipal Corporation of Boston.
This corporation profits from a monopoly control over many aspects of people's lives and special legal privileges within its geographical boundaries.
Like any other human organization it's true "purpose" and "motivation" is the collective desires of the people that run and make up that organization. Which is, mostly, going to be:
Financing the life styles and political ambitions of the people running it. That is how it works once you strip away all the flowery language and idealism.
People get involved in city government because it benefits them. It may be a stepping stone in a career in bigger government. Maybe they are looking for stable income, cheap benefits, and solid pension. Or cushy job they can't get fired from. Or its social status; they enjoy having power over people's lives, they enjoy having their opinions matter and being perceived as a person of importance.
Lots of different motivations. The corporation's motivations are their motivations. Its purpose is their purpose.
> As a result we now have a commission for bureaucracy reduction which manages several operating bodies for bureaucracy reduction, all with their own processes and guidelines.
The first order of business for any bureaucracy is to ensure its own survival.
Nobody wants to eliminate their own well being. Everybody wants security in their job. And everybody wants more money and a promotion, for the most part.
With large very stable organizations like government corporations anybody that wants to make more money (ie: get a promotion) will usually have to wait for the guy above them to retire or quit, which can take years. Sometimes education can open doors, but mostly it's going to be people leaving the organization that have been there longer then you have. Things like seniority ensure there is very little opportunity for growth.
The main opportunity for growth for a government bureaucrat is laterally... Meaning new agencies or bureaucracies need to be created that they can move into and have seniority there.
So once a bureaucracy has secured its own survival the second order of business is to grow new bureaucracies.
Which is exactly the pattern we see in all governments.
>People get involved in city government because it benefits them. It may be a stepping stone in a career in bigger government. Maybe they are looking for stable income, cheap benefits, and solid pension. Or cushy job they can't get fired from. Or its social status; they enjoy having power over people's lives, they enjoy having their opinions matter and being perceived as a person of importance. Lots of different motivations. The corporation's motivations are their motivations. Its purpose is their purpose.
You listed many reasons, and built a long argument on the implications of these reasons. Perhaps this was an oversight but it’s worth mentioning that civic engagement for its own sake is a fairly natural instinct and is arguably more important than any of the other aforementioned factors.
Keep in mind that a heavy burden on opening new restaurants also serves all existing restaurants. That is, if you've an extant operation, barriers to entry are in your own interest.
This makes the constituency for strong regulation not only all diners, but all existing restaurants, with the constituency against strong regulation being whomever happens to be currently trying to open a new restaurant in the area.
Balance of power goes to obstruction.
See also Mancur Olsen's classic "The Logic of Collective Action" (both a short paper which captures the essence, and a book which dives into greater detail and more examples).
This is a great perspective that has allowed me to navigate society effectively
For example, when it comes to taxation the outcome is that certain kinds transactions are incentivized, leading to no tax, while no individual bureaucrat or politician or resident would seem to agree about the ability of not paying any tax, the aggregate tax revenue services collaborate with a tax filer and support that ability
The problem is not necessarily the individual bureaucrats. They're annoying and add unnecessary complexity/paperwork. It goes a level deeper than that...
The problem is entrepreneurial support organizations (typically organized as a "non-profit") that the government awards economic development grants to, who are then supposed to support the entrepreneurs. These are often incubators, accelerators and/or venture support/investment organizations. Universities sometimes fill this role as well.
These organizations take a MASSIVE cut of the funding to cover their "overhead" before any money goes to the entrepreneurs. The amount of the allotted government funding that goes to entrepreneurs to actually grow their business is tiny after the various "non profit" organizations get their hands on it.
I've seen state funded business plan pitch competitions that cost far in excess of $2M to put on their annual pitch event, with teams of 5+ employees "working" full-time on them. I've seen a party planner get paid $195k to put on a one-time demo day for 300 people. I've seen consultants get hired for $15k to put on a one-day sales workshop for founders. A successful founder paid $170k to give a speech at a demo day. Universities charging 53% overhead rates to run government funded programs. Program directors paid $200k+ to work on an accelerator that runs for 3 months of the year. I could go on and on.
All of this was government funded in the name of "economic development." How many of us on HN could start a brand new business if we got even a fraction of this funding instead of wasting it on pomp and circumstance that masquerades as economic development?
I guess the bureaucrats could/should realize this is a waste and put a stop to it, so perhaps it is back to being their fault. But these "non profit" orgs whose mission is to "support entrepreneurs" have no qualms about pulling up to the trough of government fundings and sucking it dry before it goes to actual entrepreneurs...
(Source: I've seen this spending first-hand since I work at once of these places, which is why I'm posting this under a newly created alt account. Trying to do my tiny part to stop it, but it's systemic and hard to change.)
This is all absolutely true. "Economic development" is a weird world.
There is a logic: elected officials want to be seen as supporting new business growth but of course can't literally invest taxpayer money in seed rounds. It's not reasonable or sane, of course, but that's why it happens...
Anyways, I think that sort of thing is mostly in the past by now? I don't see it happening much around here anymore. Perhaps there's a new grift.
> Governments as an abstract entity might have an interest in thriving entrepreneurship and economic growth, but the individual bureaucrats they employ do not. And its those Bureaucrats that design and apply processes.
This is exactly same in corporations - they are also full of bureocrats.
I can spend 5 grand on AWS rltomorriw and noone will raise an eyebrow
but we arent allowed to get a rmmmtablet to test the application qewe are developing actually works as intended
this phenomenon also happens within businesses and in a more bizarre fashion. look at all the layers of management a startup will slap on at some point in it’s life because it’s commonplace at other companies and Google. look at the processes like Jira, stand ups, sprint planning, etc etc that the management class will institute and defend because it creates work and meaning for their position.
People couldn't get the permits required to do the work to fix the problems that needed fixing, or it was just easier to just go start over in a place that let you raise your goats or whatever in peace without needing to fill out 92 forms for each one.
It's logical for any entity to attempt to capture more resources. Thus a government wants more government. Bigger budget, more salaries, more bureaucracy therefore.
While I'm sure many will argue about government control vs entrepreneurial freedom, what fascinates me most is the inefficiency. Reading that it takes '77 steps' or '63 steps' or whatever doesn't bother me. My programs have thousands of steps, but the wall-clock step time makes them disappear. No it's the inefficient parts, in-person visits, lack of consolidation, processing delays. All the things that computers are supposed to have solved by now.
I'd reframe this movement not as 'business vs government' but 'everyone vs inefficiency.'
Most of those steps exist because of some asshole who did asshole shit.
You need to have an inspection by the water board to size the grease trap because some asshole dumped his cooking waste down the drain and created a fat berg that clogged the sewer. You need fire inspections because assholes block emergency egress, disable smoke alarms, etc. We have health permitting and inspection because people will do things like not fix freezers or leave a tray of raw chicken in 90 degree heat on a tray perched in the grease trap.
Entrepeneurs are great, but many will cut corners to make it work. I’d rather not get poisoned to advance their dream.
There's no such thing as absolute safety. There are only tradeoffs. You don't get safety for free. You have to pay very dearly for it in wasted time, unnavigable bureaucracies, and ultimately lost productivity. Those costs impose a real burden on real people's lives. In some cases that tradeoff is worth it, but you should always be thinking of it as a tradeoff.
A restaurant is one thing, but anybody who has ever hired somebody in the trades to do work on their house knows that the default is not pulling permits at all. If you hire an electrician to add a switch to the light in your closet he's not even going to bother. In many contexts the permitting process is so slow and stupid and inefficient that almost everybody ignores it.
You can't keep upping the ante forever and expect people to go along with it. In the end you might just make things worse.
Exactly. The rules may be complicated, but I bet if you threw them all out they'd mostly gradually reappear one by one over the years in response to problems that occur.
> We have health permitting and inspection because people will do things like not fix freezers or leave a tray of raw chicken in 90 degree heat on a tray perched in the grease trap.
We are about to have a natural experiment take place related to this. In several states they have amended their health codes to take away the power of inspectors to actually do anything when they find such code violations other than tell the restaurant that they should fix it.
Their county/city health departments can only act now when there is verified report that someone was actually seriously sickened due to the restaurant's actions.
People can do harmful actions unknowingly. There's not much use labeling any inproper action as "asshole." Most of the time people are just making honest mistakes where they didn't adequately consider all the outcomes. You've either got to stomach honest mistakes, or implement rules that prevent them from ever happening. People aren't magically born with the ability to "not do anything an asshole might do"
correct. and to continue the reasoning, we experience this as bureaucratic inefficiency because the inspectors / regulators / etc are chronically underfunded relative to the growing number of users requiring their service. and that's for two related reasons: the bureaucracy is a lagging response as you and others note, and our government has gotten woefully incapable of forward thinking (because of multi-decade sabotage).
Nah, the assholes are the exception, not the rule. This level of bureaucracy is never for the good of the people.
You could have a process that approves things optimistically and have inspections coming later. You could have some form of certification program that let's you say "It's not my first rodeo. I know what I am doing, please let me do it and I take full responsibility for any shit that might happen if I deviate from the best practices."
+1. I agree with your point and I think you are absolutely right but your answer seems to fall into the trap the parent was warning about.
Having controls does not mean that they must be inefficient. In fact, bureaucracy and inefficiencies are the enemies of the end goal because they tend to devalue the work of government agencies (or whoever enforce those controls). And then you end up with a libertarian outlet like Institute for Justice telling you that you need half a century to open a donut store.
Yeah, there may be some shock at the 92 number, but really what is a step? I can probably come up with a shocking number of steps to make coffee in the morning... I think it's more important to understand if the process is well defined/laid out and if the overall time from the first to last step is reasonable. Plus, depending on the situation, I'd rather the work be in my hands because I know I would be efficient, at least.
Yea, the article would've been more interesting (and probably more convincing?) if it had detailed what some of the steps actually are. I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that inefficient regulation is an issue, but just quoting an opaque number of "steps" seems, if anything, to make the case less convincing by making it feel like they're obfuscating.
If you can't afford (in terms of time as well as money) to put up with it you can screw right off. The city doesn't need or want your low buck development.
Making the process inefficient raises the floor of the minimum viable business. And, more importantly, it raises the floor for who can start one so that you don't get people closing up shop and being bankrupt when something bad happens.
The institutions designing these processes are chock f-ing full of people of questionable intentions. You hear "affordable prices" they hear "trashy clientele". You hear "thin margins" and they hear "can't afford to be taxed more than they currently are". You hear "small family owned business" and they hear "people who have no other assets we can threaten to lien in the case of a dispute". And just to be clear, these people aren't evil (well their actions are, but they're done with good intentions). It's just that the regulatory agencies they work for are set up in such a way that the 2nd and 3rd order "nice to push for but not technically within the scope of what we do here" opinions of all the people involved seep through. At its root this is a diversity problem. There aren't enough Ron Swansons and people who've been f-ed by government bureaucracies working for government bureaucracies so you get bureaucracies doing things that are completely and totally tone deaf.
Edit: And before anyone puts any more words in my mouth, they have no intention of making the process onerous and exclusionary. They have just settled into that equilibrium over the centuries because that is the local maximum their crude "did our last round of changes do what we wanted or not" hill climbing algorithm has found.
I agree it's entirely possible that some bureaucracy is intended as a trial by fire. That said I think that is a tiny minority of the time. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
The people implementing these regulations don't have the time, resources, or expertise to create holistically efficient systems. Instead they can have meetings, write rules, have more meetings, vote on the rules, and then add another step to a process that assumes you go to an office and fill out a form because that's how it was done the first time someone had to come up with the permitting process.
If I approach a rule maker and say "you're trying to over regulate!" then I'm challenging their raison d'etre without demonstrating understanding of their limited toolset. If, on the other hand, I say, "let me reduce your costs, save you time, and help you collect money faster" then (I believe) I'm going to have a better time. It's for that reason that I feel the "everyone vs inefficiency" argument is more likely to succeed.
Obviously 92 steps is a lot, but if you want to improve the situation, it's no use just saying "this is terrible, make it simpler!", you need to consider:
- Which steps are unnecessary? Unless you have the view that the bureaucracy is just designed to be hellish, you need to figure out what each step is trying to achieve, and what would be lost if it were removed.
- Can steps/agencies be merged? If there are nine government agencies involved, you could simplify the procedure by moving the responsibilities to fewer agencies. But there are limits... at the extreme, if you made just one government agency responsible for restaurants, you'd make opening a restaurant easier, but - congratulations! - you've effectively just created a new government agency for restaurants. Now you've added to the bureaucracy!
Your second point reminded me of an interesting different between US government services and German government services. Not for businesses but for individuals. Here we have, since the 1980, “peoples offices”, either run buy the municipality or the county (never both) to address most common in-person government interactions for folks. This allows not only consolidating multiple interactions in one visit but also increases the geographic density of the offices as they have a lot more visitors.
The services they offer range from registering your apartment (doubles as voter registration), getting IDs, passport, and driver licenses, changing the registration of your car, getting proof of (the absence) of your criminal record.
For many of these services, they have delegated or assigned authority from whatever government agency is responsible while for some they merely operate as a service center.
I wish more of this could be done online, but it’s certainly nice I don’t have to go to 15 different places to do all of that.
A "people's office" is the top recommendation in the report:
1. Create a true one-stop shop for starting a business, with step-by-step guides and well-organized information that cover city and state requirements.
2. Simplify the process to obtain building permits by combining steps and paperwork, creating more guides for complying with agency rules, and lowering fees.
These seem like excellent recommendations.
I'm not so sure about the other recommendations:
> 3. Eliminate “clean hands” requirements to ensure those working to lift themselves out of poverty are not immediately disqualified.
Maybe. Not being able to start a business because of a few parking tickets on your personal vehicle is obviously harmful. But there's also potential for abuse. Some sort of dollar limit does seem reasonable.
> Remove unfair barriers that burden specific
types of work, such as home-based businesses
and food trucks, with unnecessary restrictions.
1. What barriers? "Must prove you have a refuse management plan" may sound like needless red tape, but see my top-level post.
2. home-based businesses sound like no big deal when you're on SFH >= half acre lots, but these rules exist in dense cities for a good reason. The type of business and type of residential dwelling are important considerations. Running a business out of a studio apartment using the hallway as a waiting room can be enormously disruptive to hundreds of people.
> Work with the state to eliminate state-level bar-
riers to work, such as criminal history checks,
that often target vulnerable residents.
There's a political catch-22 here. Everyone that works in those departments and agencies that will be axed will fight tooth and nail to make sure it's not their department.
It's a bit like the housing crisis. We need more homes, ok well who votes on those homes? The people that already owns homes and are interested in the value of those homes going up.
There is an excellent book a Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital, that discusses these issues. He has a chapter on the number of steps it takes to open a business in Hati and Singapore (if memory serves me correctly). Hati requires thousands of steps and if done correctly 17 years to open a business legally. Singapore take a few steps and less that a week to open a business legally. This has broder implications to property rights and if countries prosper.
These points of friction are so frustratingly stupid. Successful businesses are rare and delicate things. Every small fee is going to be some genius deciding to stay at their desk job and just take a salary rather than creating a couple of million dollars of value for their community.
And the reasons for all this regulation are fundamentally weak. Regulators tend towards taking no risks. Small businesses are the part of society that are most useful when they experiment and ... take big risks. If the risk is removed, in 20 years there will be a lot less reward than would otherwise have been the case.
But to be realistic about the costs - these regulations were probably put in place because of things like like food poisoning or people getting crushed to death in warehouses. There would be real downsides to removing them. But the crux of the issue is (as can be seen in Asia) it is possible to get economic miracles and build up entire new industries propelling people into a future they did not see coming through steady investment in new industries. People are way underestimating the damage that locking in the status-quo does during this era of miracles. Triggering big economic improvements is worth a lot more than a futile exercise in causing no harm. It is impossible to do no harm, and so these regulations will fail to really achieve their goals while setting communities up for less success in the medium term.
Capitalists routinely wipe the floor with people who don't take enough risk. Risk is necessary to get the best outcomes. Where will the risk taking happen if people try to regulate it out of existence?
This is a strawman argument. The point of regulation is not to prevent all harm, it is to prevent the worst harms. I see no evidence that allowing the possibility of the worst outcomes is necessary to achieve the best outcomes.
For every foodborne illness prevented or permanent disability from an on the job accident avoided, the community saves a couple million dollars.
If you want less friction, then fund the regulators. We slash city budgets and then wonder why health departments rely on fees and inspectors take weeks.
> Every small fee is going to be some genius deciding to stay at their desk job and just take a salary rather than creating a couple of million dollars of value for their community.
I feel you are being dogmatic here rather than evidence based. The markets for restaurants in a given neighbourhood is rather static - and roughly zero-sum in terms of earnings, but _not_ in terms of quality. If you encourage some "fragile genius" who can't follow instructions for fire safety, food hygiene, payroll accounting or plumbing to open a restaurant, you will a vibrant mix of more unsafe restaurants, unhygienic food, unpaid employees and clogged sewers, all of which are a burden on the rest of society.
That isn't really what these regulations would do though; if that is the goal then an inspection program would achieve them more effectively and with better outcomes.
All pre-start paperwork does is filter out people who are diligent at paperwork, because they have to do a lot more to get to the starting line.
> Capitalists routinely wipe the floor with people who don't take enough risk. Risk is necessary to get the best outcomes. Where will the risk taking happen if people try to regulate it out of existence?
This is a straw man argument.
Good entrepreneurship is taking a risk on a new cuisine that is underserved in your city, which no one is regulating.
Bad entrepreneurship is taking a risk on inadequate food safety and fire suppression equipment, which municipalities are indeed trying to regulate out of existence.
In SF, the first half is also regulated since your business can be stalled on the grounds that there are already too many there. For instance, having two ice cream stores on the same block.
Agree with this push a hundred percent. I’d love to see numbers for Canada too, my suspicion is that it’s even worse. Starting a business here feels a lot like trying to cross the border in the game Papers Please.
My buddy opened a small guitar pedal shop from his attic, and was promptly told by the city he was circumventing zoning regulations, and was eventually forced to find a spot in the “industrial” sector, even though he was a tiny operation.
If politicians want to actually support small businesses and entrepreneurship, IMO auditing current bylaws and processes is the way to go.
Canada is regulated to death. My city is complaining about being forced to approve building permits in 2 months. Local government officials are using permits and regulations to limit the housing supply in a city with a housing affordability and homelessness crisis. The bureaucrats in charge all own homes…
They don't, as you are probably aware.
They create barriers to entry for existing businesses that have the cash to issue bribes (or 'lobby' as some may euphemistically call it).
This is one of the major reasons for the stagnation of all empires.
Several years ago a hostel owner in Costa Rica was telling me about trying to get things done through the small city government for his business.
After failing to get permits/licenses/whatever it was, someone told him he needed to give the city administrator some cash on the side for things to go through. Boom! Instant success!
At the time of our talking, he'd accepted that paying bribes to the government (not what the locals called it) was just a regular part of doing business.
It was astonishing that it was required, openly acknowledged/accepted by the locals, and pervasive through other government branches.
> Right to Start fights to expand entrepreneurial opportunity for all. We drive civic change through: grassroots organizing and mobilizing, policy advocacy and engagement, and lifting the voices of entrepreneurs through media and storytelling. Our campaign is based in two affiliated nonprofits: Right to Start is a 501(c)3 and Right to Start Fund is a 501(c)4.
The idea that entrepreneurs are marginalized in America might just be the funniest motivation for a non-profit I’ve ever seen.
I was trying to think of a job that’s held up on a higher pedestal to make a follow-on joke (“yeah next we need a non-profit to glorify ___”) but even cops, soldiers, and movie stars have less of a halo on them than entrepreneurs.
I think small businesses owners often treat their workers badly and are overall a reactionary force in American politics.
But sympathy makes a bit of sense when you think about it economically. The businesses that do make it in have more market share and are selected to be those that are politically connected. The regulations serve to keep other businesses out, and we should try to help people that aren't as connected start businesses as well.
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This obviously introduced many issues. The (~6 very large) bins were always full by 3 days after pickup and then overfilled all over the back of the complex for the rest of the week. Rodent and especially ant/fruit fly issues exploded. The smell was atrocious. The bins were directly behind our kitchen door, and we didn't have AC, so our kitchen door had to stay closed. The kitchen door was key to the airflow that would naturally cool the apartment, so the entire apartment was miserable.
Worst of all, the neighbor did not take any of the bins to the curb each week, was unresponsive, and our landlord was predictably unhelpful. For many weeks I patched the issue by hauling this guy's business trash to the curb every single morning (which is a lot more work, and much more unpleasant, than it perhaps sounds like).
Before that experience, I would probably see rules like "food trucks must file a form proving they have a legal place to dump their refuse" and consider it to be absurd red tape.
The problem with this is that if you're doing it enough to make a living off of (i.e. not a side gig) it makes you a massive target for enforcers looking to issue fines. And there's always the Karen who'd rather narc on you than politely ask you not to do something that you didn't even know was pissing them off.
Seems like a separate issue of your neighbor not being very considerate and dumping (illegally?).
Refuse externalities are a systemic issue for food trucks. They were the #1 reason for complaints about food trucks in my city. There are news articles about beach towns banning food trucks and an article about Portland considering a ban in certain areas because of trash issues. This case was egregious but the problem is not uncommon.
> The thing is, red tape shouldn’t be there to enforce compliance. He could have done that even if he’d paid the fees, which maybe he did?
He went on to dump in city trash cans (illegally), was fined, then arranged for a dumpster. He claims, and I believe this is true, that he didn't know either residential or city trash was off-limits. (I believe it is true because getting away with illegal dumping when done intentionally is super easy... you only get caught when you do it in broad daylight in front of a cop because you don't know it's not allowed.)
Given that issues with trash from food trucks are predictable and known, simply asking for proof that the food truck owner has access to a dumpster or other waste management option seems pretty reasonable. If the food truck owner has a proper waste management plan then describing it should take a few minutes max ("I am paying XYZ to use the dumpster located behind 123 Main St."). If they don't have a plan then this is a net positive for them because they'd almost certainly otherwise end up with either fines or a revoked license.
Even assuming a 1/200 success rate at reducing illegal dumping, requiring a waste management plan would cost 20 hours (amortized over hundreds of people) and save 40 hours (amortized over 1 person). The actual savings are probably much higher because 1/200 is unrealistically low -- I'm willing to bet most illegal dumping of food truck waste is not intentionally illegal.
Why is it incumbent on the rest of society to subsidize food truck owners at the tune of 2x time?
Thats like.. The only purpose of red tape?
"Our neighbors have a lot of trash" is not a complaint that a city inspector is going to take seriously, and in any case our city was very landlord-friendly/human-hostile. In most cities waiting for the leas to be up and then moving out is always easier...
We resolved this by threatening the neighbor to go to the office that permitted his food truck.
If food truck regulations didn't exist, we would have been SOL until the lease was up.
> Or refuse to haul the trash entirely.
This was an impractical option.
On an 85 degree day, our apartment would stay below 75 (and below 70 until late afternoon close to the end of the workday) if we kept the large front windows open, the kitchen door open, and some well-placed fans. It would heat up to 85 very quickly if you closed off the airflow. Working in 85 degree heat is highly unpleasant.
To say nothing of the rats and fruit flies/ants, which were impossible to keep out of the apartment even when we kept the doors and windows closed.
I've spent 2 years trying to get permission to have electricians put wire back into conduit that is already there in a building I own.
Saturday thieves broke into my outdoor containers (because I can't get an occupancy permit) and stole over $20,000 worth of stuff. I can't install security lighting and security systems without power to run them!
This stuff is really getting to me and I feel like I'm in an Ayn Rand book.
Well, no. After he stopped using our residential bins, he started dumping in city trash cans, was fined, and then ultimately paid for use of a dumpster.
> so adding that rule wouldn't have helped
He wasn't aware that either of his illegal dumping methods were illegal, and changed his behavior when he was informed (in the second case by a fine). So a form probably would have, in fact, prevented the situation from happening.
> and then everyone in Boston would have a 93rd step in the process.
I probably spent 40 hours on this issue. Much of that time highly unpleasant (cleaning out rodent traps, taking out cheap trash bags that would break and make a mess, spraying down gross trash bins and the back sidewalk, etc)
A one page online form that takes 5 minutes to fill out, for every food truck in the city, consumes perhaps 20 hours of time on the high end. So this one event I experienced already pays a net 20 hour profit to society.
I'm not the only one who has had issues with food truck trash disposal -- it's actually a fairly common issue for cities and one of the primary sources of complaints my city received about food trucks. A quick google search shows that other cities have similar issues and some even ban food trucks because of trash issues.
I'm sorry about your building code issues, that sounds very annoying and unfair, but only Ayn Rand could complain about filling out forms when a business is literally trashing someone's home ;-)
As a result, most western countries now have an ever growing apparatus of bureaucrats who are not accountable to the citizenship and who's sole reason for being is the facilitation of process. In order to increase their relevance and hence influence and paygrade, it is in their best interest to increase the amount of process and the role that process plays in everyday decision making.
What worries me is that I don't see any remedy to this. Germany, a particularly bad offender when it comes to process and red tape has been attempting "Bürokratieabbau" - bureaucracy reduction since 1997. As a result we now have a commission for bureaucracy reduction which manages several operating bodies for bureaucracy reduction, all with their own processes and guidelines.
I'm honestly worried that this might grow to a point of collapse.
It used to be easy to do things. But then business owners would do things that would make citizens say, "they shouldn't be able to do that." So rules/laws were made to prevent people from doing it.
You can go on a mission to reduce redtape, but the results will probably be temporary. Contrary to the way some people think, these regulations aren't put into place willy-nilly, they are the natural outcome of people cheating the system and causing others harm.
It's not just governments either. Anyone who has worked at a startup and a huge mega corp sees the difference in how easy it is to deploy something. Startups have no guards in place, while megacorps need sign-offs from various departments, etc.
I think the steelman of the GP is that the red tape was not accurately predicted. Most citizens can probably agree "all else equal, we don't want a pub in the middle of a residential district open till 4am with drunkards wandering the streets". But did they also properly opening a local business should be so hard that each business effectively has a local moat, raising prices and reducing restaurant selection?
Also, the opinion that unresponsive bureaucracy needs to exist seems defeatist on the side of government regulation. Why can't we design better permitting processes that both ensure crazy pubs don't open in the middle of a suburb, and yet also make opening most normal businesses a 1-day affair?
By "citizens", I assume you mean other business owners trying to keep new entrants out of the sector, or putting themselves in place to approve those that do.
There is an interesting "parable" [1] from the 70's that goes over this and lays it out for what it is, which is basically always a form of regulatory capture.
[1] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/the-p...
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The regulatory bureaucracy is a lagging, indirect response to bad behavior by previous individuals and businesses. It’s never going to absolutely prevent bad behavior just as speed limits do not actually prevent speeding, but it is a legal tool or cudgel to inhibit the behavior and punish it in retrospect. And that in turn is both to reduce the cost of government from dealing with responses to bad behavior and ensure the politicians get reelected.
And reduce the number of food poisoning incidents to some degree, of course.
I have already talked with one US President, and with another, and with the third - Presidents come and go, but the policy does not change. Do you know why? Because the power of the bureaucracy is very strong. The person gets elected, he comes with some ideas, and then people come to him with briefcases, well dressed and in dark suits, like mine, but not with a red tie, but with black or dark blue, and they begin to explain what he should do - and everything changes at once. This happens from one administration to the next.
For example, let's say that to do some specific work the law says a degree is required. Normally, a degree is something that a university gives to its successful students so it shouldn't be that big of a bureaucracy to hire someone for that job, right?
firts, they start by simply taking the xerox copy of the diploma. Then someone starts hiring people without a diploma and forges a fake xerox copy and gets caught? To solve this, bureaucrats introduce a requirement for diploma registrations so they can check against fakes.
Congratulation, now you have an office visit step where you go show your original diploma.
Unfortunately, some people start showing fake diplomas. Once the bureaucrats catch on, they introduce a protocol with the universities to start checking the diplomas. Unfortunately, some universities say they can't accommodate that, others say they can do it moving forward but can't to for those who graduated more than 5 years ago. Also, some people studied abroad, others have their institutions merged or seized to exits.
Congratulation, now you have multiple ways to accomplish the same thing. You will need to fill the correct form.
Why is the government in the business of requiring degrees for financial transactions? Maybe that's valid for a doctor, but it's certainly not valid for a hair dresser.
I will say that the worst burocracy is created when private companies meddle with the government affairs.
Even if it doesn't mean they want to make more work (like how most developers wouldn't maliciously add bugs to create more work), it does mean the incentive to make less work without a way to preserve oneself is extremely low.
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What people call "The Government", in this case, is the Municipal Corporation of Boston.
This corporation profits from a monopoly control over many aspects of people's lives and special legal privileges within its geographical boundaries.
Like any other human organization it's true "purpose" and "motivation" is the collective desires of the people that run and make up that organization. Which is, mostly, going to be:
Financing the life styles and political ambitions of the people running it. That is how it works once you strip away all the flowery language and idealism.
People get involved in city government because it benefits them. It may be a stepping stone in a career in bigger government. Maybe they are looking for stable income, cheap benefits, and solid pension. Or cushy job they can't get fired from. Or its social status; they enjoy having power over people's lives, they enjoy having their opinions matter and being perceived as a person of importance.
Lots of different motivations. The corporation's motivations are their motivations. Its purpose is their purpose.
> As a result we now have a commission for bureaucracy reduction which manages several operating bodies for bureaucracy reduction, all with their own processes and guidelines.
The first order of business for any bureaucracy is to ensure its own survival.
Nobody wants to eliminate their own well being. Everybody wants security in their job. And everybody wants more money and a promotion, for the most part.
With large very stable organizations like government corporations anybody that wants to make more money (ie: get a promotion) will usually have to wait for the guy above them to retire or quit, which can take years. Sometimes education can open doors, but mostly it's going to be people leaving the organization that have been there longer then you have. Things like seniority ensure there is very little opportunity for growth.
The main opportunity for growth for a government bureaucrat is laterally... Meaning new agencies or bureaucracies need to be created that they can move into and have seniority there.
So once a bureaucracy has secured its own survival the second order of business is to grow new bureaucracies.
Which is exactly the pattern we see in all governments.
You listed many reasons, and built a long argument on the implications of these reasons. Perhaps this was an oversight but it’s worth mentioning that civic engagement for its own sake is a fairly natural instinct and is arguably more important than any of the other aforementioned factors.
This makes the constituency for strong regulation not only all diners, but all existing restaurants, with the constituency against strong regulation being whomever happens to be currently trying to open a new restaurant in the area.
Balance of power goes to obstruction.
See also Mancur Olsen's classic "The Logic of Collective Action" (both a short paper which captures the essence, and a book which dives into greater detail and more examples).
For example, when it comes to taxation the outcome is that certain kinds transactions are incentivized, leading to no tax, while no individual bureaucrat or politician or resident would seem to agree about the ability of not paying any tax, the aggregate tax revenue services collaborate with a tax filer and support that ability
The problem is entrepreneurial support organizations (typically organized as a "non-profit") that the government awards economic development grants to, who are then supposed to support the entrepreneurs. These are often incubators, accelerators and/or venture support/investment organizations. Universities sometimes fill this role as well.
These organizations take a MASSIVE cut of the funding to cover their "overhead" before any money goes to the entrepreneurs. The amount of the allotted government funding that goes to entrepreneurs to actually grow their business is tiny after the various "non profit" organizations get their hands on it.
I've seen state funded business plan pitch competitions that cost far in excess of $2M to put on their annual pitch event, with teams of 5+ employees "working" full-time on them. I've seen a party planner get paid $195k to put on a one-time demo day for 300 people. I've seen consultants get hired for $15k to put on a one-day sales workshop for founders. A successful founder paid $170k to give a speech at a demo day. Universities charging 53% overhead rates to run government funded programs. Program directors paid $200k+ to work on an accelerator that runs for 3 months of the year. I could go on and on.
All of this was government funded in the name of "economic development." How many of us on HN could start a brand new business if we got even a fraction of this funding instead of wasting it on pomp and circumstance that masquerades as economic development?
I guess the bureaucrats could/should realize this is a waste and put a stop to it, so perhaps it is back to being their fault. But these "non profit" orgs whose mission is to "support entrepreneurs" have no qualms about pulling up to the trough of government fundings and sucking it dry before it goes to actual entrepreneurs...
(Source: I've seen this spending first-hand since I work at once of these places, which is why I'm posting this under a newly created alt account. Trying to do my tiny part to stop it, but it's systemic and hard to change.)
There is a logic: elected officials want to be seen as supporting new business growth but of course can't literally invest taxpayer money in seed rounds. It's not reasonable or sane, of course, but that's why it happens...
Anyways, I think that sort of thing is mostly in the past by now? I don't see it happening much around here anymore. Perhaps there's a new grift.
This is exactly same in corporations - they are also full of bureocrats.
I can spend 5 grand on AWS rltomorriw and noone will raise an eyebrow
but we arent allowed to get a rmmmtablet to test the application qewe are developing actually works as intended
People couldn't get the permits required to do the work to fix the problems that needed fixing, or it was just easier to just go start over in a place that let you raise your goats or whatever in peace without needing to fill out 92 forms for each one.
I'd reframe this movement not as 'business vs government' but 'everyone vs inefficiency.'
You need to have an inspection by the water board to size the grease trap because some asshole dumped his cooking waste down the drain and created a fat berg that clogged the sewer. You need fire inspections because assholes block emergency egress, disable smoke alarms, etc. We have health permitting and inspection because people will do things like not fix freezers or leave a tray of raw chicken in 90 degree heat on a tray perched in the grease trap.
Entrepeneurs are great, but many will cut corners to make it work. I’d rather not get poisoned to advance their dream.
A restaurant is one thing, but anybody who has ever hired somebody in the trades to do work on their house knows that the default is not pulling permits at all. If you hire an electrician to add a switch to the light in your closet he's not even going to bother. In many contexts the permitting process is so slow and stupid and inefficient that almost everybody ignores it.
You can't keep upping the ante forever and expect people to go along with it. In the end you might just make things worse.
We are about to have a natural experiment take place related to this. In several states they have amended their health codes to take away the power of inspectors to actually do anything when they find such code violations other than tell the restaurant that they should fix it.
Their county/city health departments can only act now when there is verified report that someone was actually seriously sickened due to the restaurant's actions.
You could have a process that approves things optimistically and have inspections coming later. You could have some form of certification program that let's you say "It's not my first rodeo. I know what I am doing, please let me do it and I take full responsibility for any shit that might happen if I deviate from the best practices."
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Having controls does not mean that they must be inefficient. In fact, bureaucracy and inefficiencies are the enemies of the end goal because they tend to devalue the work of government agencies (or whoever enforce those controls). And then you end up with a libertarian outlet like Institute for Justice telling you that you need half a century to open a donut store.
Making the process inefficient raises the floor of the minimum viable business. And, more importantly, it raises the floor for who can start one so that you don't get people closing up shop and being bankrupt when something bad happens.
The institutions designing these processes are chock f-ing full of people of questionable intentions. You hear "affordable prices" they hear "trashy clientele". You hear "thin margins" and they hear "can't afford to be taxed more than they currently are". You hear "small family owned business" and they hear "people who have no other assets we can threaten to lien in the case of a dispute". And just to be clear, these people aren't evil (well their actions are, but they're done with good intentions). It's just that the regulatory agencies they work for are set up in such a way that the 2nd and 3rd order "nice to push for but not technically within the scope of what we do here" opinions of all the people involved seep through. At its root this is a diversity problem. There aren't enough Ron Swansons and people who've been f-ed by government bureaucracies working for government bureaucracies so you get bureaucracies doing things that are completely and totally tone deaf.
Edit: And before anyone puts any more words in my mouth, they have no intention of making the process onerous and exclusionary. They have just settled into that equilibrium over the centuries because that is the local maximum their crude "did our last round of changes do what we wanted or not" hill climbing algorithm has found.
The people implementing these regulations don't have the time, resources, or expertise to create holistically efficient systems. Instead they can have meetings, write rules, have more meetings, vote on the rules, and then add another step to a process that assumes you go to an office and fill out a form because that's how it was done the first time someone had to come up with the permitting process.
If I approach a rule maker and say "you're trying to over regulate!" then I'm challenging their raison d'etre without demonstrating understanding of their limited toolset. If, on the other hand, I say, "let me reduce your costs, save you time, and help you collect money faster" then (I believe) I'm going to have a better time. It's for that reason that I feel the "everyone vs inefficiency" argument is more likely to succeed.
This is such a weird take. You get taxed on profits. If you don’t turn a profit you pay zero tax.
Oh, and payroll is not profit.
- Which steps are unnecessary? Unless you have the view that the bureaucracy is just designed to be hellish, you need to figure out what each step is trying to achieve, and what would be lost if it were removed.
- Can steps/agencies be merged? If there are nine government agencies involved, you could simplify the procedure by moving the responsibilities to fewer agencies. But there are limits... at the extreme, if you made just one government agency responsible for restaurants, you'd make opening a restaurant easier, but - congratulations! - you've effectively just created a new government agency for restaurants. Now you've added to the bureaucracy!
The services they offer range from registering your apartment (doubles as voter registration), getting IDs, passport, and driver licenses, changing the registration of your car, getting proof of (the absence) of your criminal record. For many of these services, they have delegated or assigned authority from whatever government agency is responsible while for some they merely operate as a service center.
I wish more of this could be done online, but it’s certainly nice I don’t have to go to 15 different places to do all of that.
1. Create a true one-stop shop for starting a business, with step-by-step guides and well-organized information that cover city and state requirements.
2. Simplify the process to obtain building permits by combining steps and paperwork, creating more guides for complying with agency rules, and lowering fees.
These seem like excellent recommendations.
I'm not so sure about the other recommendations:
> 3. Eliminate “clean hands” requirements to ensure those working to lift themselves out of poverty are not immediately disqualified.
Maybe. Not being able to start a business because of a few parking tickets on your personal vehicle is obviously harmful. But there's also potential for abuse. Some sort of dollar limit does seem reasonable.
> Remove unfair barriers that burden specific types of work, such as home-based businesses and food trucks, with unnecessary restrictions.
1. What barriers? "Must prove you have a refuse management plan" may sound like needless red tape, but see my top-level post.
2. home-based businesses sound like no big deal when you're on SFH >= half acre lots, but these rules exist in dense cities for a good reason. The type of business and type of residential dwelling are important considerations. Running a business out of a studio apartment using the hallway as a waiting room can be enormously disruptive to hundreds of people.
> Work with the state to eliminate state-level bar- riers to work, such as criminal history checks, that often target vulnerable residents.
Again, largely in favor but the details matter.
How many times have you had to do more than one of those things in the same visit?
It's a bit like the housing crisis. We need more homes, ok well who votes on those homes? The people that already owns homes and are interested in the value of those homes going up.
And the reasons for all this regulation are fundamentally weak. Regulators tend towards taking no risks. Small businesses are the part of society that are most useful when they experiment and ... take big risks. If the risk is removed, in 20 years there will be a lot less reward than would otherwise have been the case.
But to be realistic about the costs - these regulations were probably put in place because of things like like food poisoning or people getting crushed to death in warehouses. There would be real downsides to removing them. But the crux of the issue is (as can be seen in Asia) it is possible to get economic miracles and build up entire new industries propelling people into a future they did not see coming through steady investment in new industries. People are way underestimating the damage that locking in the status-quo does during this era of miracles. Triggering big economic improvements is worth a lot more than a futile exercise in causing no harm. It is impossible to do no harm, and so these regulations will fail to really achieve their goals while setting communities up for less success in the medium term.
Capitalists routinely wipe the floor with people who don't take enough risk. Risk is necessary to get the best outcomes. Where will the risk taking happen if people try to regulate it out of existence?
For every foodborne illness prevented or permanent disability from an on the job accident avoided, the community saves a couple million dollars.
If you want less friction, then fund the regulators. We slash city budgets and then wonder why health departments rely on fees and inspectors take weeks.
I feel you are being dogmatic here rather than evidence based. The markets for restaurants in a given neighbourhood is rather static - and roughly zero-sum in terms of earnings, but _not_ in terms of quality. If you encourage some "fragile genius" who can't follow instructions for fire safety, food hygiene, payroll accounting or plumbing to open a restaurant, you will a vibrant mix of more unsafe restaurants, unhygienic food, unpaid employees and clogged sewers, all of which are a burden on the rest of society.
All pre-start paperwork does is filter out people who are diligent at paperwork, because they have to do a lot more to get to the starting line.
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This is a straw man argument.
Good entrepreneurship is taking a risk on a new cuisine that is underserved in your city, which no one is regulating.
Bad entrepreneurship is taking a risk on inadequate food safety and fire suppression equipment, which municipalities are indeed trying to regulate out of existence.
My buddy opened a small guitar pedal shop from his attic, and was promptly told by the city he was circumventing zoning regulations, and was eventually forced to find a spot in the “industrial” sector, even though he was a tiny operation.
If politicians want to actually support small businesses and entrepreneurship, IMO auditing current bylaws and processes is the way to go.
Edit: words
This is one of the major reasons for the stagnation of all empires.
After failing to get permits/licenses/whatever it was, someone told him he needed to give the city administrator some cash on the side for things to go through. Boom! Instant success!
At the time of our talking, he'd accepted that paying bribes to the government (not what the locals called it) was just a regular part of doing business.
It was astonishing that it was required, openly acknowledged/accepted by the locals, and pervasive through other government branches.
I still have some faith in possible change at the municipal level, at least in smaller ones.
> Right to Start fights to expand entrepreneurial opportunity for all. We drive civic change through: grassroots organizing and mobilizing, policy advocacy and engagement, and lifting the voices of entrepreneurs through media and storytelling. Our campaign is based in two affiliated nonprofits: Right to Start is a 501(c)3 and Right to Start Fund is a 501(c)4.
I was trying to think of a job that’s held up on a higher pedestal to make a follow-on joke (“yeah next we need a non-profit to glorify ___”) but even cops, soldiers, and movie stars have less of a halo on them than entrepreneurs.
But sympathy makes a bit of sense when you think about it economically. The businesses that do make it in have more market share and are selected to be those that are politically connected. The regulations serve to keep other businesses out, and we should try to help people that aren't as connected start businesses as well.