Yeah but they forgot to break it down. For other cities they lump in one-time-per-building costs into what is required to open a business, making the report misleading and dishonest at best. It'd be like including the cost of installing a fire door 100 years ago in the budget for every business that ever rents the building.
> In Minneapolis, for example, many brick-and-mortar business owners must pay a fee associated with the impact their business will have on the sewer system; in the case of a restaurant, this fee reaches $8,275—bringing the total cost of legal permission to start a restaurant in Minneapolis to $13,973.
I've yet to see a libertarian or libertarian-inspired article that did not heavily rely on dishonesty and this IJ report is no different.
It seems to me that if you’re reporting on “this is what it costs to open a business in this place”, that including the costs it takes to open a business in that place is fair game.
Omitting costs that might or might not outlast your business seems at least as likely to be misleading or dishonest as including them.
All they needed to do to be honest (if that was their goal, questionable) was separate out costs associated with the business from costs associated with the building. They could still argue that the costs are too high for starting a restaurant on a bare concrete pad.
One of the things I'm starting to notice from cases like this, is that it seems like the current state of things is:
- State & local government is a preemptively over-regulated system, putting up tons of obstacles before you can get something accomplished. Examples: flurry of permits, NIMBYism, etc
- Federal government is a retroactively under-regulated system, where the actual regulation occurs after some/much of the damage has already been done. Examples: regulation of antitrust/anti-competitive practices that come sometimes years after the acts began.
In the 1st case, accomplishing beneficial things is too slow. In the 2nd case, preventing bad things is too slow.
I would say both are over-regulated, but maybe not as overregulated as Europe.
An interesting thing to note is that European countries tend to make rules to outlaw risky behavior in the first place, but have limited fines in case the risk materializes, whereas the United States tends to allow more risk taking, but imposes exorbitant fines if something goes wrong.
This is by design. Most of the laws are supposed to be state/local in the US and the federal government is only supposed to help coordinate/defend them.
That depends on what you think of as a step, and what you think of as fees.
Is it one step if the single form for opening a restaurant is 200 pages?
Is it zero fees if the fine for violating a health inspection is $10,000?
The forms demonstrate that the new restaurateur has safe plans in place for traffic, seating, fire risk, equipment, food storage (dry, refrigerated and frozen), sanitation, and know the requirements for employment and training. If there's alcohol, there's licensing and training requirements. Are the kitchen floors both non-slip and impervious to water, with a proper drain? Are there arrangements for waste disposal, especially for used oils?
I'm not even in the food business; I'm sure an expert can tell you much more.
Bot farms starting businesses sins bad, but what bad thing would they actually do?
The "worst" thing I can think of is the virtual assistant from Accelerando that forms the ideal form of operation for any mundane transaction its user is performing.
> The goal should be to reduce friction by an order of magnitude. Shoot for a goal of 10 steps and $500 in fees.
So without knowing what the steps are and the fees cover, you're just opposed? If it was 10 steps and $500 would you be pitching 1 step and $50?
Fact is, if you cannot figure out how to fill out forms indicating you know enough to avoid it, I don't trust you not to poison people, clog the sewers with fat or barricade the emergency exits.
The high numbers here are eye-opening, but the article doesn't shed any light on the process.
I'm left with the feeling that opening a restaurant is hard, but there is nothing to chew on in terms of improving the situation as a citizen or interested party.
Many of the counted steps are required state wide, and not in the ambit of the municipality.
State licensing processes for various Barbers, and so on.
This is the state legislature's doing.
Others are standard nationwide, and not going away:
Setting up a corporation, or LLC for example.
Or filing for a "doing business as" d/b/a name.
I am unsympathetic to counting these as a step.
I cannot get worked up about building permits.
Here is why:
This is a national regime, and most states operate under the "International Building Code", and similar Electrical and other codes, and the requirements there, for commercial structures are often based on factual risks and deaths from lack of proper construction.
That means every building needs to be up to code when renovated in various categories: electrical, plumbing, heating/ventilation, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, fire code compliance, structurally, and more recently for energy code (typically insulation and heating/cooling related). These are essential for safety and health, and for economic well being in the long run. Yes these take capital. That can be 5 to 10 permits and inspections there, and those requirements are not going away, nationwide.
There can be other municipal department participation for curb cuts, street access, sidewalk access and so on. Deal with it.
Zoning is a municipal level, and that requires City Council and Planning Board participation, and not in control of the administrators operating the regulations. This is political level of regulation, and requires political effort to modify, typicall not in the ambit of administrators.
Other "steps" in which all fees and taxes to a municipality need to be up to date are simply good practice.
- No action if you are overdue on your real estate taxes, or have outstanding orders for compliance with health or building codes.
That is mere enforcement of existing municipal regulations. Get up to date on all of your obligations.
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.
In Costa Rica it seems like for every permit or license requirement, there’s a semi-official way to sidestep the red tape if you’re willing or able to pay someone off, for not much money either. For example, the requirement for non-residents to leave the country every 3 months was easily avoided by me and my neighbors because there was an established process of giving your passport over to a particular person who would then get it officially stamped by customs and border patrol to make it look like you dutifully left and returned to the country. All it cost was about $30 USD.
It seems like the problem here is government over-regulation, so unless businesses operating on the chain were exempt from normal laws, why would blockchain help?
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.'
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.
Licensing fees, requirements for X or Y be implemented, etc, etc, that kind of stuff. At the small business level that's the stuff that's really onerous. If it were just taxes on profits far fewer people would be complaining. It's all the shit that kicks you when you're down that really hurts.
This is nonresponsive to the point being made. The costs under discussion are imposed mostly by the government, they are not a thing that merely exists like the weather. Reasonable people can disagree on the amount of bureaucracy required to just sell things.
Every time some politician gets on a high horse about "we're gonna make errybody who's doing X also do Y" that's a cost.
A bike rack out front. A change in the ratio of hand washing stations per employee. It's all "cheap", and most of it's good stuff that's easy to justify. But it adds up in a big way. And you let this stuff run for awhile and this is how that "authentic" taco stand or used book store you loved gets pushed out of business.
It's obvious you've never worked or had a business.
In California, an LLC pays $800/year taxes even on zero profit; you must pay for a business license tax, and you pay "property taxes" on the equipment and fixtures in your facility. (See: https://www.sccassessor.org/index.php/property-information/b... )
You also must pay for certain professional licenses, and pay for certain inspections. Just one example, I have to pay about $150/year for a "water backflow valve" inspection, even though our computer consulting office has no equipment that connects to the water supply.
Let me guess, white collar business, fairly large gross margin, no process equipment or physical inputs/outputs except from the office printer. Was I close?
None of that carries over to the blue collar world.
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.
+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.
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."
All laws cater to the exceptions because if a behavior was the cultural norm there wouldn’t be a law against it.
Your solution has the same level of bureaucracy but delays it and even adds, essentially, an addition licensure so it’s not really the bureaucracy but the timing.
> All laws cater to the exceptions because if a behavior was the cultural norm there wouldn’t be a law against it.
I agree to a point (history is filled with cases of laws that were created precisely to curb perfectly "normal" behavior which was not favored by the elites) but anyway it does not follow that just because a law exists we need to implement ubiquitous policing.
E.g, we put traffic lights in busy streets as a way to coordinate people and traffic, not as a way see to chase those who deviate from the "rules".
> even adds, essentially, an addition licensure
The idea of a certification would be as an alternative, not a substitute.
And the rest of us don't really care about your restaurant going up or not, most of them fail anyway, we want to know that the food inspector didn't go "nah, you've done this before, A."
And how does this contradict what I am advocating?
I'm not saying that there won't be an inspection. What I am saying is that there are plenty of steps in the process that could be done with less gate-keeping.
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.
Are permits typically required for something like adding a switch to a light in your closet? Genuinely curious, since I have not heard that from contractors, although I have heard permitting concerns for other projects involving electricity and/or plumbing.
It's going to be up to your local building codes -- the AHJ (Authority Having Jurisdiction), in National Electric Code parlance -- but the answer is, "almost certainly." Pretty much any time you're running new wires you should get a permit. Adding a switch? Permit. A couple new recessed lights? Permit.
Reality: almost nobody does this.
This is a pretty good list of situations where you will/won't need a permit. In most cases you can replace an existing outlet/fixture without a permit, but anything new will require one:
It's one of those things that seems like overreach but when nearly every single 3-way switch in your house is wired incorrectly, it starts to make sense. We had a little outbuilding with a pool pump, some gazebo lights, a fan, etc. wired with a 100ft run of 240v 3-wire 14ga romex buried maybe 6" deep and not on a GFCI breaker.
Codes/permits aren't aimed to stop the median person from doing their own work, they're to stop the 10th percentile dummy creating an unsafe environment for anyone who comes into contact with their work product.
Everything is awesome until it ain’t. It’s structured into your insurance.
The risks vary. If you replace an old electrical socket, the risk is pretty low. But when someone gets electrocuted due to some dumb-dumb improperly running electricity to the pool, it’s probably not gonna be your house anymore.
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.
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"
The Restaurant manager may have intended to streamline a process by leaving the tray of chicken out for 4 hours instead of in the walk in. I don’t care - the customers will get sick from contamination.
The movie theatre manager may block an emergency egress because gangs of teenagers are letting their friends in for free and he doesn’t have the budget to station an employee there. I don’t care - dying in a fire or stampede isn’t for me.
Brakes are what allows cars to go fast. I’d rather have some assurance that there’s a baseline level of competence than to try to figure out whether some asshole will disregard my safety or be unqualified to make the decisions they are making.
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).
> 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.
I have often wondered if any place would do something like this… although I hoped it wouldn’t happen.
Also, do you know if this is somehow in response to Covid restrictions? Or just a general “let’s see what happens, we haven’t heard of anyone getting really poisoned by food lately” attitude?
I didn't save a link when it was mentioned in a few news stories sometime last year (or maybe early this year?).
And yes, it was in response to COVID restrictions. Most red states have passed laws limiting the power of state and local health authorities. I think the majority of them are just aimed at infectious disease prevention measures. I think the ones that also removed the ability to preemptively close a restaurant until it fixes a major health code violation that hasn't yet hospitalized anyone did so due to hasty and sloppy drafting rather than intent.
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.
> 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.
> The regulations serve to keep other businesses out, and we should try to help people that aren't as connected start businesses as well.
If we're talking about pure regulatory capture, fine. But the only concrete examples I ever hear about ones like "small businesses can't afford to pay for health insurance" w/r/t the ACA.
To put my cards on the table, though, I'm not pro-regulation for regulation's sake. I'm more of a "skip the middlemen and just do it through the State, and no one needs to 'regulate' anyone - I can just regulate them myself w/ my vote (and my dollar, if it's a state-owned-enterprise)" guy. But if my quality of life is 100% controlled by disconnected, self-interested private owners who don't care what I have to say, I need the government to come in and at least give me a freedom or two to leverage against them...please.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.
Opening an above the table business in Boston has been onerous since 1630. The micormangerial jerks you need to get permission from happen to have moved their office from the church to the cube farm over the centuries.
Whatever happened to “Hey, I have some apples, would you like to buy them?” “Yes, thank you!” That’s as complicated as it should be to open a business in this country.
Well… The farmer used sewage water to grow the apples. Then the processing factory hollowed out the apples to make juice. The sales company filled the hole with lead. The restaurant bought the cheap lead apples and then painted them red because red apples get eaten faster.
Then someone died and the outraged public demanded regulation.
That is against the law, you shouldn’t have to prove you aren’t selling poison apples to start a business. Let investigators arrest/fine those breaking the law.
But me, as a consumer, want you to have to prove to someone that you're not selling me poisonous apples. That it gets investigated and people are punished or fined doesn't make me any less dead.
I love eating non-poisoned apples. If you want to try your system where apples are a gamble (buyer beware! it’s your responsibility to test your apples for poison before consuming them!), then please try that social experiment somewhere far away from me. I’ve got enough shit to deal with.
Then how about someone else starting a company that tests apples. Demand for “clean” apples would result in demand for independent testing companies to certify that the apples are good. Without the seal, consumers would choose competitors that have tested their apples. The testing company has an incentive to be accurate because if one of their certified apple producers gets people sick, then that certification becomes useless and thus causing the company to lose all their business.
This isn’t that hard.
And besides, what’s the incentive for a government agency to care about apple safety? Tons of examples over the years when regulators approved dubious things (a long list of pharmaceuticals that turned out to be deadly for instance.) Rather than being shut down, those regulators get even bigger budgets. And the myth that the bureaucracy is accountable to the people needs to stop. Ever been to the DMV? Despite being universally hated for inefficiency, that place is still inefficient. How is the DMV accountable to anyone?
> Then how about someone else starting a company that tests apples. Demand for “clean” apples would result in demand for independent testing companies to certify that the apples are good. Without the seal, consumers would choose competitors that have tested their apples. The testing company has an incentive to be accurate because if one of their certified apple producers gets people sick, then that certification becomes useless and thus causing the company to lose all their business.
1. Unless these independent companies are themselves regulated, they can just exist to give rubber-stamp approval to companies that pay them for this. There are plenty of examples of this: Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, those "Hacker Safe" badges you used to see online. Just google one of these, "$certification_company extortion", to understand the business model.
2. Consumers, really, really don't care. Richer consumers will buy the clean apples and poorer consumers will take a risk on the gamble apples. Again, just look at the actual market -- there are tons products stratified along the lines of regular version vs safe/ethical version.
3. The certification company has many more levers to pull than less or more accuracy. Just do a thought experiment where you're an evil CEO of one of these companies - what moves would you pull, and then look at the market... they do them. Example: Name yourself something that sounds like a govt agency to trick consumers.
What your saying makes sense if you are trying to prove a counter-factual about safety in a world of un-FDA-regulated apples. But there are also plenty of un-FDA-regulated products on the market right now that you can use to test your theory.
My favorite one right now is delta-8 THC. The companies that sell it are fly-by-night sketchy companies that often are multiple brands by the same people. All of their websites are littered with badges about how safe and certified they are.
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edit, Here's my own funny example I found while adding to my comment:
Podcasts are advertising this one online THC company "Diet Smoke". I clicked a delta-9 product (https://www.dietsmoke.com/product/diet-smoke-extra-mango-gum...). Click "Lab Tests", then open the linked PDF. You'll notice that the lab test is for a completely different product, since the test shows delta-8, not delta-9. According to your theory, this should degrade consumer confidence and harm the business, so I should not be hearing ads every week for this company, and I shouldn't be hearing the podcast hosts talking about taking their products. When I click on their Instagram I should see a consumer revolt instead of guys going "sheeesh this got me faded".
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And, the main point you're missing is that the government has the freedom to actually execute on regulations decided on by the public. You need an actual enforcement mechanism, e.g. "I'm visiting your business unannounced, spot-checking it, and if you store your apples in a vat of poison then we're shutting you down." The private equivalents can't do that.
> And besides, what’s the incentive for a government agency to care about apple safety? Tons of examples over the years when regulators approved dubious things (a long list of pharmaceuticals that turned out to be deadly for instance.) Rather than being shut down, those regulators get even bigger budgets. And the myth that the bur...
This comment cracks me up. Outside of North America (or perhaps Western countries in general) this is how most of the world consumes apples. Somehow said social experiment has been fine for us :)
The amount of mass poisonings you are advocating for is not acceptable in a decentralized society - catching people like this takes an enormous amount of effort and deaths.
Gotta be honest I’m pretty lax about government regulation in general but I think in the case of food safety I’m gonna say it’s worth it to make people prove upfront what they’re selling is safe rather than waiting for someone to be hurt and then going after them.
How could a grocery store buyer even avoid evil apples inc? Individually demand to see their factory and process?
Death and injury from poison apples are a small price to pay to ensure that restaurant entrepreneurs have a chance to move fast, take risks, and innovate in the business of ... apple selling.
Probably someone showed up with a hundred thousand tonnes of apples coated with toxic pesticide, several people died, and now you need to prove you're not a poison apple vendor.
People expect to be protected from the unscrupulous which means councils, governments, police, IRS etc. all need to know who is doing what, then there is the ability to do background checks, tax status checks and in regulated areas perhaps hygiene checks, site safety checks, certain permits.
Otherwise the simple model only works when you know and trust the vendor enough to take the risk that what they sell you is not quite what you wanted.
I bet someone could make a solid SaaS business around streamlining this. Hard part would be recurring revenue, but I would bet there's a compliance play for long term revenue.
I'm not sure there's coverage for all the specific work of opening restaurants, but Stripe Atlas [0] is one offering that exists for this purpose. There's also LegalZoom [1].
Maybe, but it's not always possible or straightforward. It's probably a much lower bar to streamline it like this. Fixing the system is often an uphill battle. Maybe existing restaurants will fight against it, cities need the revenue from it, it's a complex mix of federal, state and city laws, etc.
I'd be surprised if there is no company running such a business, probably a more traditional one, not an SaaS one. At least in China I know there are companies that run business taking care of registration (and other chores) of new companies. It may take months if you don't use their service, but maybe merely a couple of weeks if you do.
As always Bureaucracy sucks. As long as bureaucrats earn these money in name of forms etc. will anyone dare to challenge the system? In my country, the system is so atrocious. For small things like Bank statement they require people to go to lawyers for notary etc..
And, due to such bureaucracy corruption also increased because there is a risk that if we don't feed malfeasant officer they might become hindrance.
Bureaucracy is terrible but the only other mainstream option is based on trust and people have a habit of abusing it.
What alternatives? Someone visits the restaurant and says, "yeah that all looks OK"? Then they take a bribe and the system breaks again.
At least a paper trail provides some history and ability to audit certain things, blacklist owners who posioned their customers, make sure they are paying their fees to pay for the inspections etc.
Food poisoning usually does not have much relation with opening a business. Most government regulations are just for illusion of safety, and gate keeping.
There's this saying, "safety regulations are written in blood". The vast majority of regulations are written reactively, after something went wrong. (US regulations forcing minimum lot, yard, house sizes are notable exceptions).
Especially for something as a restaurant, where 1) people eat, so hygiene and etc. is important; 2) people will work; 3) people will visit, so you needs lots of insurance, health, fire etc. checks and OKs.
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.
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.
Not super frequently but it happens. The classic one is when moving apartments (register apartment, update ID card, update car registration, potentially get a new local parking permit). I also got the timing for my ID card and passport synced so I can do them in one visit.
In the last year I moved twice and will likely move once more in the next 12 months (temporary places, looking to buy something) so I’m a bit more appreciative right now.
The trouble with Germany is the need to do too much in person, and thus too much needs to be done on a local level.
The UK isn't a great example for much, but for instance:
* Passport application - controlled centrally. Has been done by post for years. Now available online.
* Update car registration - controlled centrally. Has been done by post for years. Now available online.
* Register to vote (closest thing the UK has to the anmeldung) - controlled locally. Done by posting or emailing a form to your local council.
I can imagine registering you apartment when you move in, updating your drivers license, changing the registration on your vehicle all at the same time. We do that here in the US all under the local hellhole called the DMV.
1 - Yes. Houston, TX has 4 DMVs for 4-6M residents.
2- I could not. Moving back from NY hurt. Had to do everything in person.
After getting accustomed to NY DMVs where you set up an appointment, and you are served immediately when you get there, Texas (or at least Houston) is painful.
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.
I'm amazed at how many underground food businesses there are in my area. People advertise all kind of meals on Facebook, they only take cash app, and you can have it delivered or go pick it up (at someone's house, of course). They only make food on certain days, some do meals while other do desserts...
These businesses are underground because the regulatory burden of being over the table makes them either impossible to start because of upfront costs vs future profit or impossible to to keep viable because of recurring costs.
Nobody "wants" to run an under the table business and have their income be subject to the whims of enforcement but the other option is just so bad it's the lesser evil.
I run a microbakery on the side (https://www.instagram.com/stoneleigh.microbakery/) and my local government knows nothing about this operation. That said, I only sell to friends and neighbors bc if somehow my bread gets spoiled (highly unlikely, unless its focaccia and they leave it out for 2 days), I can resolve it directly with them and not have to deal w the health department.
Reminds me of the book The Mystery of Capital by Hernando de Soto which was a look at how in many countries capitalism only exists for the rich while the poor, without social connections and bribe money, don't have access to things like enforceable contracts, official property that could be used as collateral for loans, etc. One eye opening bit was when he had grad students in various countries try to register a new business without paying any bribes and he measured how many steps, days, forms, etc it took.
I'd also say that while this is a major problem and ought to be fixed, streamlining the process from the perspective of the people applying is probably going to require both political will and spending more on city administration.
It seems tautological that lowering the entry barrier would encourage more variety and lower cost.
Why limit the possibilities to just the US? Why not look at street food in Thailand or Singapore? Isn't it unlikely that the current status quo is the ideal balance between safety and exploration?
I'm not sure how familiar you are with street food in Thailand, but food poisoning is so common that there are hundreds of "how to avoid food poisoning in Thailand" guides.
I don't agree that it's tautological. One-time paperwork fees are a small price compared to retail leases and build-out costs in a major city. You're probably looking to spend in the area of $500k to get started. An annual lease might be in the area of $50k for a small restaurant.
For your first year paperwork is probably 5% of your total costs. Passing that on to the consumer is maybe a few cents per dollar.
For anyone getting walking voluntarily into a bureaucratic labyrinth like this, I highly encourage documenting the whole sequence so you don't get lost in the middle of it. With something distasteful like this value-destroying sequence of waits and applications and meetings, it's reasonable to try to hold it at arm's length and minimize the time you voluntarily commit, but these things will eat you alive if you let them go that way.
Maybe I'm jaded but 5k (or even the 22k in the article for SF) doesn't seem that bad to me. In 2016, I did a kitchen remodel in my CA townhome and the permit costs, which included a city inspector coming over for 20 minutes cost 3.5k. For context, I paid the licensed contractor 10k for labor. If taxes are low, expect fees I guess.
Yep. I especially found the article's complaint that a starting business might not have that much money saved weird... If a business cannot afford 5k to register, how will it stay afloat?
You don't need to be permitted to install an app on your laptop or phone (despite big tech's wishes), neither should you need it to install a new kitchen in your house. In a reasonable world, if the contractor is licensed (as you state), that should be all you need for insurance and selling the house. If the work isn't safe, you go after the contractor, maybe with a lawyer. Government shouldn't intervene in each individual job.
92 jobs for each step, 22 jobs for each form, 17 jobs for each office visit, $5,554 into the government coffers. Each step can be sold by some politician as some kind of a win for their campaign. Each of these people will fight hard to hold onto their position. Is this productive work? Maybe a very small minority of it, when you take into account how much it holds entrepreneurship back.
I expect this kind of thing will be red meat to some people, and we can all agree that pointless bureaucracy is bad – particularly where stifling competition is the goal.
IMO the effort of any campaign versus bureaucracy is best spent on reducing the friction of governance, particularly for small entrepreneurs: digitalising processes, publishing clear guides, harmonising rules, establishing guaranteed response times, adding exemptions for small businesses etc.
Too often there's a reflexive "bonfire of the red tape" view – in contrast, I'd say it's actually pretty good that restaurant businesses have to e.g. demonstrate that they meet hygiene standards, produce a fire safety plan etc. and we probably don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
For all its faults, look to the UK for a relatively balanced approach to regulation of this sort.
Okay, so what are those 92 steps, 22 form in 17 office visits? The article lack any substance and it is pure activist piece, unfortunately.
There's this story about the extremely heavy and complicated French labor laws. The story goes, businesspeople complain that the law is more than a hundred pages long booklet and as a response the French legislators print the booklet in smaller font, thus successfully taking the laws under 100 pages.
It's supposed to show the ridiculousness of the bureaucracy but IMHO it's pretty fair to solve the problem by using smaller font if the complaint is about the number of pages.
Maybe we can have more intelligent discussion if we actually know the context and the content. I suspect that some of those steps, fees and forms are reasonable and some are outdated and only exist because the law was made pre-internet, pre-smartphone era.
I skimmed the linked document and I didn't see the actual steps, did I miss those? Can you give me a page?
There are again tables about number of steps etc. I find that ridiculous.
It would be funny if the regulators respond by combining the steps though. Instead of 1. book sanitary checks 2. pay sanitary check fees, maybe it can be solved in one quick step of 1. booking sanitary checks and pay check fees
There is a sort of state by state summary at the end, about all the forms they had to fill in. Boston's is on 98. They're not counted specifically, but general steps.
It seems counter intutive but adding another agency (the "start a business" agency) might help. That group will get fed up with the process and since they're doing it repeatably they can see the issuses and perhaps force a fix. Most people go through this process once and there is little incentive to fix.
(I had to go to the historical commision to get new windows a 2 month process.. it was a pain, but now I'm done I've never revisited)
I had to wade through 5 pages of fluff to get to the executive summary.
Then I noticed there are 138 more pages. Finally they actually just list the barriers by state - and each state is 1-2 pages (basically repeated over and over for each of the states) - much more useful.
Included among the heinous barries to freedom to live the american dream are things like "Hand washing regulations" and "Paying Tax".
I would eat at restaurants way less if hand-washing was left up to a restaurant’s discretion. I can’t be alone in this. And I wouldn’t be alone once we saw the rise in salads containing ass-to-hand-to-food-transmitted noroviruses.
But let’s say restaurant-goers power through the higher rate of stomach bugs, because the food is so worth it. There are a lot of jobs that are harder to do when you’re at home shitting[0] or, with some probability, dead.
So, you have to pay the price somewhere: the business pays (fee or lower demand), the government pays (eat the cost or deal with angry citizens or angry businesses), or the consumer pays (health or foregoing restaurants) etc.
But, ofc these folx rarely discuss many of the relevant trade-offs. Unless you were born yesterday, it’s obvious what they’re up to.
[0]: An assumption on my part. As a coder I’d be fine :)
Don't you think that "opening restaurants takes 92 steps" is just as bad as argument? How do we know if those 92 are too many or too few? It takes 120 steps to setup ReactJS development environment, why would anyone be able to start a restaurant with only 92 steps?
That's really not semantic argumentation at all when the core argument is literally about the number of steps.
Yes, I see that the actual argument is about the complexity of the process but the person who argues that doesn't provide any information for us to judge if those steps are necessary or on. The used stats and numbers don't mean anything. What's the right number of steps for opening a restaurant?
I think that 'it takes 92 steps' in this case is just an analogy for 'the procedure is too complex' and that focussing on the number of steps and the 'correct' number of steps is reading the wrong thing into what's been said.
Basically it's an opinion - from a person that's completed the process - that the process is too complex and involves unnecessary (in their opinion) bureaucracy. That's the gist of the message and that's the intended takeaway. Debating as to whether or not there's a 'correct' number of steps is kinda adjacent to the point being made.
> but IMHO it's pretty fair to solve the problem by using smaller font if the complaint is about the number of pages
How could that possibly be fair, when it clearly violates the intent of the request? If anything that move just shows the maliciousness of the regulators.
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[ 0.19 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] thread> In Minneapolis, for example, many brick-and-mortar business owners must pay a fee associated with the impact their business will have on the sewer system; in the case of a restaurant, this fee reaches $8,275—bringing the total cost of legal permission to start a restaurant in Minneapolis to $13,973.
I've yet to see a libertarian or libertarian-inspired article that did not heavily rely on dishonesty and this IJ report is no different.
Omitting costs that might or might not outlast your business seems at least as likely to be misleading or dishonest as including them.
- State & local government is a preemptively over-regulated system, putting up tons of obstacles before you can get something accomplished. Examples: flurry of permits, NIMBYism, etc
- Federal government is a retroactively under-regulated system, where the actual regulation occurs after some/much of the damage has already been done. Examples: regulation of antitrust/anti-competitive practices that come sometimes years after the acts began.
In the 1st case, accomplishing beneficial things is too slow. In the 2nd case, preventing bad things is too slow.
An interesting thing to note is that European countries tend to make rules to outlaw risky behavior in the first place, but have limited fines in case the risk materializes, whereas the United States tends to allow more risk taking, but imposes exorbitant fines if something goes wrong.
Both systems have their advantages.
The goal should be to reduce friction by an order of magnitude. Shoot for a goal of 10 steps and $500 in fees.
Is it one step if the single form for opening a restaurant is 200 pages?
Is it zero fees if the fine for violating a health inspection is $10,000?
The forms demonstrate that the new restaurateur has safe plans in place for traffic, seating, fire risk, equipment, food storage (dry, refrigerated and frozen), sanitation, and know the requirements for employment and training. If there's alcohol, there's licensing and training requirements. Are the kitchen floors both non-slip and impervious to water, with a proper drain? Are there arrangements for waste disposal, especially for used oils?
I'm not even in the food business; I'm sure an expert can tell you much more.
I’m wondering how different the world would have been if we had enforced a $0.01 cost for email…
The "worst" thing I can think of is the virtual assistant from Accelerando that forms the ideal form of operation for any mundane transaction its user is performing.
So without knowing what the steps are and the fees cover, you're just opposed? If it was 10 steps and $500 would you be pitching 1 step and $50?
Fact is, if you cannot figure out how to fill out forms indicating you know enough to avoid it, I don't trust you not to poison people, clog the sewers with fat or barricade the emergency exits.
I'm left with the feeling that opening a restaurant is hard, but there is nothing to chew on in terms of improving the situation as a citizen or interested party.
This is the state legislature's doing.
Others are standard nationwide, and not going away:
Setting up a corporation, or LLC for example. Or filing for a "doing business as" d/b/a name.
I am unsympathetic to counting these as a step.
I cannot get worked up about building permits. Here is why:
This is a national regime, and most states operate under the "International Building Code", and similar Electrical and other codes, and the requirements there, for commercial structures are often based on factual risks and deaths from lack of proper construction.
That means every building needs to be up to code when renovated in various categories: electrical, plumbing, heating/ventilation, smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, fire code compliance, structurally, and more recently for energy code (typically insulation and heating/cooling related). These are essential for safety and health, and for economic well being in the long run. Yes these take capital. That can be 5 to 10 permits and inspections there, and those requirements are not going away, nationwide.
There can be other municipal department participation for curb cuts, street access, sidewalk access and so on. Deal with it.
Zoning is a municipal level, and that requires City Council and Planning Board participation, and not in control of the administrators operating the regulations. This is political level of regulation, and requires political effort to modify, typicall not in the ambit of administrators.
Other "steps" in which all fees and taxes to a municipality need to be up to date are simply good practice.
- No action if you are overdue on your real estate taxes, or have outstanding orders for compliance with health or building codes.
That is mere enforcement of existing municipal regulations. Get up to date on all of your obligations.
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.
I still have some faith in possible change at the municipal level, at least in smaller ones.
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'd reframe this movement not as 'business vs government' but 'everyone vs inefficiency.'
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.
In the same category: “I can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage”
A bike rack out front. A change in the ratio of hand washing stations per employee. It's all "cheap", and most of it's good stuff that's easy to justify. But it adds up in a big way. And you let this stuff run for awhile and this is how that "authentic" taco stand or used book store you loved gets pushed out of business.
In California, an LLC pays $800/year taxes even on zero profit; you must pay for a business license tax, and you pay "property taxes" on the equipment and fixtures in your facility. (See: https://www.sccassessor.org/index.php/property-information/b... )
You also must pay for certain professional licenses, and pay for certain inspections. Just one example, I have to pay about $150/year for a "water backflow valve" inspection, even though our computer consulting office has no equipment that connects to the water supply.
But you’re right, running a business in the US sounds _terrible_. Condolences. My assumptions were based on institutions not being hostile.
None of that carries over to the blue collar world.
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.
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.
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."
Your solution has the same level of bureaucracy but delays it and even adds, essentially, an addition licensure so it’s not really the bureaucracy but the timing.
I agree to a point (history is filled with cases of laws that were created precisely to curb perfectly "normal" behavior which was not favored by the elites) but anyway it does not follow that just because a law exists we need to implement ubiquitous policing.
E.g, we put traffic lights in busy streets as a way to coordinate people and traffic, not as a way see to chase those who deviate from the "rules".
> even adds, essentially, an addition licensure
The idea of a certification would be as an alternative, not a substitute.
I'm not saying that there won't be an inspection. What I am saying is that there are plenty of steps in the process that could be done with less gate-keeping.
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.
Reality: almost nobody does this.
This is a pretty good list of situations where you will/won't need a permit. In most cases you can replace an existing outlet/fixture without a permit, but anything new will require one:
https://www.lightingtutor.com/electrical-work-done-without-a...
Codes/permits aren't aimed to stop the median person from doing their own work, they're to stop the 10th percentile dummy creating an unsafe environment for anyone who comes into contact with their work product.
The risks vary. If you replace an old electrical socket, the risk is pretty low. But when someone gets electrocuted due to some dumb-dumb improperly running electricity to the pool, it’s probably not gonna be your house anymore.
The Restaurant manager may have intended to streamline a process by leaving the tray of chicken out for 4 hours instead of in the walk in. I don’t care - the customers will get sick from contamination.
The movie theatre manager may block an emergency egress because gangs of teenagers are letting their friends in for free and he doesn’t have the budget to station an employee there. I don’t care - dying in a fire or stampede isn’t for me.
Brakes are what allows cars to go fast. I’d rather have some assurance that there’s a baseline level of competence than to try to figure out whether some asshole will disregard my safety or be unqualified to make the decisions they are making.
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.
I have often wondered if any place would do something like this… although I hoped it wouldn’t happen.
Also, do you know if this is somehow in response to Covid restrictions? Or just a general “let’s see what happens, we haven’t heard of anyone getting really poisoned by food lately” attitude?
And yes, it was in response to COVID restrictions. Most red states have passed laws limiting the power of state and local health authorities. I think the majority of them are just aimed at infectious disease prevention measures. I think the ones that also removed the ability to preemptively close a restaurant until it fixes a major health code violation that hasn't yet hospitalized anyone did so due to hasty and sloppy drafting rather than intent.
> 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.
If we're talking about pure regulatory capture, fine. But the only concrete examples I ever hear about ones like "small businesses can't afford to pay for health insurance" w/r/t the ACA.
To put my cards on the table, though, I'm not pro-regulation for regulation's sake. I'm more of a "skip the middlemen and just do it through the State, and no one needs to 'regulate' anyone - I can just regulate them myself w/ my vote (and my dollar, if it's a state-owned-enterprise)" guy. But if my quality of life is 100% controlled by disconnected, self-interested private owners who don't care what I have to say, I need the government to come in and at least give me a freedom or two to leverage against them...please.
I don't think so, dude.
Opening an above the table business in Boston has been onerous since 1630. The micormangerial jerks you need to get permission from happen to have moved their office from the church to the cube farm over the centuries.
And perhaps Indiana should have more regulation for software businesses that do have safety implications.
In the classic case, at least 3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25
- Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation
Then someone died and the outraged public demanded regulation.
This isn’t that hard.
And besides, what’s the incentive for a government agency to care about apple safety? Tons of examples over the years when regulators approved dubious things (a long list of pharmaceuticals that turned out to be deadly for instance.) Rather than being shut down, those regulators get even bigger budgets. And the myth that the bureaucracy is accountable to the people needs to stop. Ever been to the DMV? Despite being universally hated for inefficiency, that place is still inefficient. How is the DMV accountable to anyone?
1. Unless these independent companies are themselves regulated, they can just exist to give rubber-stamp approval to companies that pay them for this. There are plenty of examples of this: Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, those "Hacker Safe" badges you used to see online. Just google one of these, "$certification_company extortion", to understand the business model.
2. Consumers, really, really don't care. Richer consumers will buy the clean apples and poorer consumers will take a risk on the gamble apples. Again, just look at the actual market -- there are tons products stratified along the lines of regular version vs safe/ethical version.
3. The certification company has many more levers to pull than less or more accuracy. Just do a thought experiment where you're an evil CEO of one of these companies - what moves would you pull, and then look at the market... they do them. Example: Name yourself something that sounds like a govt agency to trick consumers.
What your saying makes sense if you are trying to prove a counter-factual about safety in a world of un-FDA-regulated apples. But there are also plenty of un-FDA-regulated products on the market right now that you can use to test your theory.
My favorite one right now is delta-8 THC. The companies that sell it are fly-by-night sketchy companies that often are multiple brands by the same people. All of their websites are littered with badges about how safe and certified they are.
So with your predictions in mind, please read about this journalist's attempt to track the chain of authenticity on their Delta-8, in practice: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/08/10519251/what-is-de...
tl;dr: your idea is currently failing.
--- edit, Here's my own funny example I found while adding to my comment: Podcasts are advertising this one online THC company "Diet Smoke". I clicked a delta-9 product (https://www.dietsmoke.com/product/diet-smoke-extra-mango-gum...). Click "Lab Tests", then open the linked PDF. You'll notice that the lab test is for a completely different product, since the test shows delta-8, not delta-9. According to your theory, this should degrade consumer confidence and harm the business, so I should not be hearing ads every week for this company, and I shouldn't be hearing the podcast hosts talking about taking their products. When I click on their Instagram I should see a consumer revolt instead of guys going "sheeesh this got me faded". ---
And, the main point you're missing is that the government has the freedom to actually execute on regulations decided on by the public. You need an actual enforcement mechanism, e.g. "I'm visiting your business unannounced, spot-checking it, and if you store your apples in a vat of poison then we're shutting you down." The private equivalents can't do that.
> And besides, what’s the incentive for a government agency to care about apple safety? Tons of examples over the years when regulators approved dubious things (a long list of pharmaceuticals that turned out to be deadly for instance.) Rather than being shut down, those regulators get even bigger budgets. And the myth that the bur...
How could a grocery store buyer even avoid evil apples inc? Individually demand to see their factory and process?
Otherwise the simple model only works when you know and trust the vendor enough to take the risk that what they sell you is not quite what you wanted.
[0] https://stripe.com/atlas [1] https://www.legalzoom.com/
And, due to such bureaucracy corruption also increased because there is a risk that if we don't feed malfeasant officer they might become hindrance.
What alternatives? Someone visits the restaurant and says, "yeah that all looks OK"? Then they take a bribe and the system breaks again.
At least a paper trail provides some history and ability to audit certain things, blacklist owners who posioned their customers, make sure they are paying their fees to pay for the inspections etc.
There's this saying, "safety regulations are written in blood". The vast majority of regulations are written reactively, after something went wrong. (US regulations forcing minimum lot, yard, house sizes are notable exceptions).
Especially for something as a restaurant, where 1) people eat, so hygiene and etc. is important; 2) people will work; 3) people will visit, so you needs lots of insurance, health, fire etc. checks and OKs.
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.
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.
- 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.
How many times have you had to do more than one of those things in the same visit?
In the last year I moved twice and will likely move once more in the next 12 months (temporary places, looking to buy something) so I’m a bit more appreciative right now.
The UK isn't a great example for much, but for instance: * Passport application - controlled centrally. Has been done by post for years. Now available online. * Update car registration - controlled centrally. Has been done by post for years. Now available online. * Register to vote (closest thing the UK has to the anmeldung) - controlled locally. Done by posting or emailing a form to your local council.
1) Is your local DMV really as bad as you claim?
2) Can you not do all that over the internet/mail?
2- I could not. Moving back from NY hurt. Had to do everything in person.
After getting accustomed to NY DMVs where you set up an appointment, and you are served immediately when you get there, Texas (or at least Houston) is painful.
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.
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.
Nobody "wants" to run an under the table business and have their income be subject to the whims of enforcement but the other option is just so bad it's the lesser evil.
Cash in hand no tax. Plenty of people want to earn that, and plenty of people want to pay no sales tax.
I guess to frame it a different way, is there a major city in the US that doesn't have the bureaucracy, and also has a better restaurant scene?
Why limit the possibilities to just the US? Why not look at street food in Thailand or Singapore? Isn't it unlikely that the current status quo is the ideal balance between safety and exploration?
I don't agree that it's tautological. One-time paperwork fees are a small price compared to retail leases and build-out costs in a major city. You're probably looking to spend in the area of $500k to get started. An annual lease might be in the area of $50k for a small restaurant.
For your first year paperwork is probably 5% of your total costs. Passing that on to the consumer is maybe a few cents per dollar.
IMO the effort of any campaign versus bureaucracy is best spent on reducing the friction of governance, particularly for small entrepreneurs: digitalising processes, publishing clear guides, harmonising rules, establishing guaranteed response times, adding exemptions for small businesses etc.
Too often there's a reflexive "bonfire of the red tape" view – in contrast, I'd say it's actually pretty good that restaurant businesses have to e.g. demonstrate that they meet hygiene standards, produce a fire safety plan etc. and we probably don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
For all its faults, look to the UK for a relatively balanced approach to regulation of this sort.
There's this story about the extremely heavy and complicated French labor laws. The story goes, businesspeople complain that the law is more than a hundred pages long booklet and as a response the French legislators print the booklet in smaller font, thus successfully taking the laws under 100 pages.
It's supposed to show the ridiculousness of the bureaucracy but IMHO it's pretty fair to solve the problem by using smaller font if the complaint is about the number of pages.
Maybe we can have more intelligent discussion if we actually know the context and the content. I suspect that some of those steps, fees and forms are reasonable and some are outdated and only exist because the law was made pre-internet, pre-smartphone era.
https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Barriers-to-Busine...
There are again tables about number of steps etc. I find that ridiculous.
It would be funny if the regulators respond by combining the steps though. Instead of 1. book sanitary checks 2. pay sanitary check fees, maybe it can be solved in one quick step of 1. booking sanitary checks and pay check fees
It seems counter intutive but adding another agency (the "start a business" agency) might help. That group will get fed up with the process and since they're doing it repeatably they can see the issuses and perhaps force a fix. Most people go through this process once and there is little incentive to fix. (I had to go to the historical commision to get new windows a 2 month process.. it was a pain, but now I'm done I've never revisited)
Then I noticed there are 138 more pages. Finally they actually just list the barriers by state - and each state is 1-2 pages (basically repeated over and over for each of the states) - much more useful.
Included among the heinous barries to freedom to live the american dream are things like "Hand washing regulations" and "Paying Tax".
But let’s say restaurant-goers power through the higher rate of stomach bugs, because the food is so worth it. There are a lot of jobs that are harder to do when you’re at home shitting[0] or, with some probability, dead.
So, you have to pay the price somewhere: the business pays (fee or lower demand), the government pays (eat the cost or deal with angry citizens or angry businesses), or the consumer pays (health or foregoing restaurants) etc.
But, ofc these folx rarely discuss many of the relevant trade-offs. Unless you were born yesterday, it’s obvious what they’re up to.
[0]: An assumption on my part. As a coder I’d be fine :)
The complaint is obviously not about the number of pages. Printing the booklet in a smaller font is trolling.
'Why did they complain about the number of pages then' argumentation is also trolling.
Semantic argumentation is great for making yourself look clever on the internet but achieves little else.
That's really not semantic argumentation at all when the core argument is literally about the number of steps.
Yes, I see that the actual argument is about the complexity of the process but the person who argues that doesn't provide any information for us to judge if those steps are necessary or on. The used stats and numbers don't mean anything. What's the right number of steps for opening a restaurant?
Basically it's an opinion - from a person that's completed the process - that the process is too complex and involves unnecessary (in their opinion) bureaucracy. That's the gist of the message and that's the intended takeaway. Debating as to whether or not there's a 'correct' number of steps is kinda adjacent to the point being made.
How could that possibly be fair, when it clearly violates the intent of the request? If anything that move just shows the maliciousness of the regulators.