Regulations

One of the reasons that small business is not expanding is because of excessive regulations. The federal government alone has over 160,000 pages of regulations. How this came about can be understood by looking at a small town city council meeting where a committee is set up to develop building codes. There are three or four people sitting in a room discussing codes and one says do we need 2 by 4’s or 2 by 6’s and they all agree to go with the larger just to be safe. They are not structural engineers they are local politicians. Add to this hundreds of other codes and using the same reasoning they increase the cost of doing business. No one can be sure if buildings are any safer but the cost has increased. No one in the room will be building anything but they are determining the cost to those who will be building. Expand this concept to counties, states and the federal governments and you can see how regulations can get out of hand.
I offer this example from personal experience. I owned a small ice cream store and an alley ran along one side of the store. The alley was one block long and at the other end was a 24 plex. In between were 4 single family homes. The owner of the 24 plex wanted to concrete the alley for his renters and had to get the rest of us to go along with it. He couldn’t persuade the home owners to go along because of the cost so he agreed to pay for the whole alley himself. He got an estimate for the job and told the city he would do it alone and they said that he could not without the city inspecting the work. The city then doubled the cost of the project. He said he would hire the inspectors on his own and they said that was not allowed. Here is just one example where the cost was doubled because of codes. He would have built the same concrete alley but with the government being involved the cost doubled.