{"id":34093,"date":"2013-02-06T05:00:16","date_gmt":"2013-02-06T11:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=34093"},"modified":"2013-02-04T07:04:26","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T13:04:26","slug":"my-sympathy-is-shall-we-say-proportional","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=34093","title":{"rendered":"My Sympathy Is, Shall We Say, Tempered"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Yglesias, a deeply logic-challenged person<\/a> with a grievously warped sense of moral order<\/a>, is nothing if not a reliable toady of the Obama Administration, or for that matter any other Democrat for whom he shills.<\/p>\n

And so it’s truly crocodile tears I cry for him as he relates the difficulties involved in starting a small business<\/a> in the City That Big Progressive Bureaucracy built, Washington DC:<\/p>\n

My wife and I bought a new place, and instead of selling our old condo, we\u2019re going to rent it out. And thus I became a small-business man.<\/p>\n

Or, rather, I\u2019m becoming one. Entrepreneurship\u2014even on the smallest and most banal scale\u2014turns out to be a time-consuming pain in the you-know-what. My personal inconveniences aren\u2019t 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why yes, Matt. It just may be.<\/p>\n

He relates in painstaking detail the rigamarole it takes to set up a “business” whose only product is an overpriced condo:<\/p>\n

In the District of Columbia, I need to get a simple Basic Business License to rent out a single dwelling. After puzzling over the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs website for a bit, it became clear that step No. 1 was actually to file form FR-500 with the Office of Tax and Revenue, which you can do online. Then it was time to hustle down to the DCRA (which closes at 4:30 p.m.) to file the paperwork. Once there, I learned that filing the FR-500 online wasn\u2019t good enough\u2014I needed a hard copy. Fortunately, the Office and Tax and Revenue was right across the street, so I went there and refiled. Then it was back to the DCRA to stand in line to get a number, wait for the number to be called…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It goes on from there.<\/p>\n

Yglesias does make one good observation…:<\/p>\n

Not that I expect your pity. I don\u2019t even pity myself. Going through the process, I mostly felt lucky to be a fluent-English-speaking college graduate with a flexible work schedule. But the presence of a stray pamphlet offering translation into Spanish, Chinese, or Amharic seemed like it would be only marginally useful to an immigrant entrepreneur. A person who needs to be at her day job from 9 to 5 would have a huge problem even getting to these offices while they\u2019re open.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep. \u00a0Very, very true.<\/p>\n

Yglesias asked for this kid of government – and I don’t mean in the figurative, “you voted for\u00a0Barack Rex<\/em>,\u00a0take your medicine, Ivy-League hamster!” sense of the term. \u00a0I mean literally; one of his articles was \u00a0entitled “Regulation Breeds Innovation<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

It does indeed. \u00a0Black markets and off-the-books sublets are, in fact, a form of innovation.<\/p>\n

Side note: \u00a0He didn’t build that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Yglesias, a deeply logic-challenged person with a grievously warped sense of moral order, is nothing if not a reliable toady of the Obama Administration, or for that matter any other Democrat for whom he shills. And so it’s truly crocodile tears I cry for him as he relates the difficulties involved in starting a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy-and-the-market","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34093"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34093\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34097,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34093\/revisions\/34097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}