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Comment by mywittyname | Hacker News Reader

Bureaucracy is a natural outcome of maturing processes.

It used to be easy to do things. But then business owners would do things that would make citizens say, "they shouldn't be able to do that." So rules/laws were made to prevent people from doing it.

You can go on a mission to reduce redtape, but the results will probably be temporary. Contrary to the way some people think, these regulations aren't put into place willy-nilly, they are the natural outcome of people cheating the system and causing others harm.

It's not just governments either. Anyone who has worked at a startup and a huge mega corp sees the difference in how easy it is to deploy something. Startups have no guards in place, while megacorps need sign-offs from various departments, etc.

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They're also the result of businesses creating regulatory moats. All this red tape to open a restaurant is great if you have a restaurant and don't want competitors spinning up left and right.

Right, the rules were put in place to reduce bad behavior. The question is, did the government accurately predict the cost of the rules / red tape itself?

I think the steelman of the GP is that the red tape was not accurately predicted. Most citizens can probably agree "all else equal, we don't want a pub in the middle of a residential district open till 4am with drunkards wandering the streets". But did they also properly opening a local business should be so hard that each business effectively has a local moat, raising prices and reducing restaurant selection?

Also, the opinion that unresponsive bureaucracy needs to exist seems defeatist on the side of government regulation. Why can't we design better permitting processes that both ensure crazy pubs don't open in the middle of a suburb, and yet also make opening most normal businesses a 1-day affair?

> did the government accurately predict the cost of the rules / red tape itself?

Depending on the level of government involved: probably.

Economic analysis of laws/regulations are common requirements for governmental activity. As are after-the-fact analysis and comparisons to ensure a law/regulation is achieving its goal. It's part of the red-tape-for-red-tape system.

Can you offer examples at different levels of government where red tape accurately predicted the cost of the red tape? Not hypotheticals, but actual rules.

An adjacent question is when governments predict the cost of a particular program. I always say when that occurs their prediction is actually a floor and the program is going to actually cost prediction+.

A good example is upcoming regulation in California for emissions from small commercial vessels. California new oh well that this will simply put many charter fishing boats out of business because Engine upgrades don't exist for mini boats or vastly exceed their revenues

Fire escapes.

We know how much extra it costs to add a stairwell to a building design which will survive a fire for the period of time defined by building regulations.

> But then business owners would do things that would make citizens say, "they shouldn't be able to do that." So rules/laws were made to prevent people from doing it.

By "citizens", I assume you mean other business owners trying to keep new entrants out of the sector, or putting themselves in place to approve those that do.

There is an interesting "parable" [1] from the 70's that goes over this and lays it out for what it is, which is basically always a form of regulatory capture.

[1] https://www.nationalaffairs.com/public_interest/detail/the-p...

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