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Comment by leblancfg | Hacker News Reader

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.

Edit: words

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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.

In SF, you usually pay facilitators to get stuff done. Nominally, these are people "familiar with the process". In practice, it's a bribery mechanism.

For sure, I guess I’m jaded enough that I felt it was so obvious as to not point out out.

I still have some faith in possible change at the municipal level, at least in smaller ones.

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