A lefty tries to start a business in DC: Hilarity ensues

I love when progressive dudes in designer glasses actually have to deal with the government in order to do something and are blown away by the stupidity, waste, and burden of it all. It is as if they have only read journal articles about the theory of regulators and never encountered them in the wild.

Entrepreneurship—even on the smallest and most banal scale—turns out to be a time-consuming pain in the you-know-what. My personal inconveniences aren’t a big deal, but in the aggregate, the difficulty of launching a business is a problem and it may be a more important one as time goes on....

Red tape, long lines, inconvenient office hours, and other logistical hassles probably won’t stop tomorrow’s super-genius from launching the next great billion-dollar company. But it’s a large and needless deterrent to the formation of the humble workaday firms that for many people are a path to autonomy and prosperity.

Mr. Yglesias thinks that the solution might be more efficiency, such as putting all sorts of government forms on the web. This is where he misses the point: Most governments -- not all, but the vast majority -- regard the preservation of jobs in the bureaucracy as a far more important value than efficiency.

Read the whole thing.

CWCID: Glenn Reynolds.