Comment by talldatethrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by talldatethrow | Hacker News Reader

I operated a small online only car and motorcycle dealership in California in 2008.

My friend owned a 4000 sq ft warehouse that was licensed for automotive repair, but all he did was run a NASCAR team out of it, prepping the car there for races.

Being 2008, he fell on hard times and wanted me to move into his place instead of a popular strip mall location I was in (that had a 20 year old conditional use permit in place for car sales I rented under).

The city would NOT let me operate an online car dealer from his warehouse. They wouldn't sign off for it for the DMV. They said car repair was one thing, but if I wanted to sell cars from there, even online, I needed a conditional use permit process to approve it. It was several thousand dollars, and they could not provide any insight to tell us if it would be approved.

So I didn't move. My friend lost the place. And it sat empty for EIGHT YEARS. Because my local city government wasn't sure they should allow me to sell cars from a place... A place that technically was allowed to have it's entire storage yard full of broken down cars in various states of disrepair if it wanted to.

Great decision on the cities part...

A large percentage of city sales tax income comes from car dealerships. In addition, the big dealers themselves are often extremely active politically at the local and state level. This often means that small competitors are squeezed out by city planners who are accepting huge campaign contributions from various dealers.

California has a really big corruption problem at the local level.

It's ridiculous. I'm curious what the way out of this clown show will be - governments aren't typically known for being good at cutting back bureaucracy and red tape.

As I mentioned in another comment, make the bureaucracy a bit more prescriptive and easier to, for lack of a better word, unit test.

You don't want no-regulation in dense urban environments. But the rules are unclear, the permitting system opaque, the outcomes kind of subjective and open to too many outside interference, and the agents of the bureaucracy mostly disinterested in getting things at any sort of reasonable speed.

Like, it is probably easier for me to open a taco shop in Japan then it is in the USA, and Japan is THE land of red-tape and bureaucratic prescriptivism.

Completely off-topic, but I wonder one of the reasons why government/bureaucracy jobs in Japan tend to attract more engaged workers is the relative difficulty of bureaucracy in Japan. Imagine this: most legal documents have all the words still written in some mixture of Church Latin and French. Including giant explanatory paragraphs. Navigating this document without the aid of a trained worker (who most likely has a college degree in Church Latin and Legal French) is nigh impossible even for educated individuals and so they guide you step by step through every box and field.

Why should these sorts of licenses exist in the first place? I can understand having a separate license for storing/doing dangerous stuff - example: if a business deals with pesticides and other types of toxins, propane cans, explosives etc.. and these licenses can be issued conditional to building codes, special equipment or arrangements being made etc.

But why should a license be needed to open a repair shop, dealership, a factory, a nursery etc?

> But why should a license be needed to open a repair shop, dealership, a factory, a nursery etc?

Govt wants to wet its beak. Some of these business categories have an entire government agency dedicated to the regulation of that industry.

I see that. But a govt "for the people and by the people" will need to operate under the principle that citizens BY DEFAULT have the right to do what they want provided they don't break any laws other than in specific EXCEPTIONS where citizens may carry out tasks which requires greater supervision by the government because of extreme danger that activity may pose to others.

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