Five years ago, two Marlin Steel employees stood three feet shorter than cartons holding our files to respond to government regulations. The stack would be much higher today.
From Drew Greenblatt’s latest column in Inc. magazine on the regulatory burden on small business:
Even if the two (or is it three?) squabbling camps in the nation’s capital stop manufacturing a crisis every quarter or two and somehow overcome their mutual distrust to chart a path forward, one drag on American business that seems unyielding and impervious to whoever is in charge is numbing regulation.
When it comes to regulatory hurdles, it hasn’t seemed to matter who’s occupying the White House or Congress. The bureaucracy answers to itself. Its appetite is unlimited. There’s always a new form to be navigated, a line on a form daring to be understood, a government file cabinet hungering for paper, a hoop to be traversed, an ambiguity to be concocted. Typically, the rationale for all the documentation is barely evident. It too often feels like a competition--not against your actual competitors in business--but against the referees. And the rules are continually changing. You may be smart enough to run a business, but you can’t grasp the need for the paperwork. It’s a bureaucracy thing--you wouldn’t understand. Talk about "streamlining" recurs from time to time, but the system seems to regard the goal as an imposition, and it never sticks for too long. Read more ...
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