[andrewjl]

"Trickle down economics" did not cause that, a massive regulatory complex that protects incumbent monopolies did. An extensive rollback of regulatory complexity or a small business safe harbor exemption from everything but the critical health & safety pieces along with a Henry George land tax would solve our impasse. These are, sadly, not very popular policies.

The most durable way to build middle class wealth is entrepreneurship. And not the SV kind. Family-owned business have something very few publicly traded ones do... long time horizons. We've destroyed the ability for the middle class to do that outside a select coterie of sectors.

[hannasanarion]

There are a lot of reasons small businesses are dead, and regulation is not one of them. The US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses.

Small businesses are rare because the government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities, ignoring companies that use anticompetitive practices like labor violations and price fixing that lock competitors out of the market.

Small businesses are also rare because of zoning codes and infrastructure policies that promote the use of cars. It used to be that commercial spaces and housing were evenly mixed, now businesses often need to be a mile or more away from anywhere people live, thus needing to be able to support very large customer bases, and the locations need enough land to fit empty parking lots big enough to support double or triple the actual capacity of the building itself, creating enormous artificial up-front capital costs for business ownership.

[nickpp]

> US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses

Try cutting hair in Florida if you think so.

[andrewjl]

> and regulation is not one of them.

> Small businesses are also rare because of zoning codes and infrastructure policies that promote the use of cars

Zoning codes and infrastructure policies are a form of regulation.

> government has abdicated its antitrust responsibilities

I agree with this part. A minimal regulatory regime along with a strong antitrust regime is pretty much ideal IMO.

> The US regulatory structure is extremely friendly to small businesses.

You can also see the quantity of regulations on this tracker. [1] I don't think you can describe this amount of regulatory complexity as "friendly" to small businesses.

[1] https://www.quantgov.org/federal-us-tracker

[hannasanarion]

Quantity of regulations is not the same as regulatory burden, and it's not like every single businness in the whole country needs to keep track of every single one.

In the food service industry, the most common type of small business, there are only 2400 federal regulations, and most of them concern common sense things, like "wipe tables after customers use them" and "cook chicken to 180°" and "don't let rats live under the oven". Take every type of food served in the US, every appliance, tool, utensil, or technique used by any commercial kitchen, and 2400 seems like a laughably small number of regulations.

[andrewjl]

> it's not like every single businness [sic] in the whole country needs to keep track of every single one.

That's an incorrect understanding of how laws and regulations work. Ignorantia juris non excusat.

> 2400 seems like a laughably small number of regulations.

I'd love to hear a food service operator's perspective. It may differ from yours.

[hannasanarion]

Please explain to me why a restaraunteur needs to know about the proper temperature for casting steam locomotive crank arms, or how many people need to be in a coal plant's fire response station. Under what circumstances will a food truck operator need to know those?

I worked in the restaurant business, I know how thoelse regulations work. Not every one applies to every business. We didn't serve eggs, so we didn't need to Cara about all of the special rules for cooking eggs to temperature, maintaining separate tools and workstations, refrigerator temperatures, etc just for eggs. 5he same is true of all the other thousands of ingredients and food items we did not serve.

[andrewjl]

The regulatory corpus is not provided in a single indexed volume neatly arranged by category, it's haphazardly organized, subject to the whims of bureaucrats when interpreted, endlessly cross-referenced, and even inconsistent in places.

One might have one agency in charge of one thing and another one in charge of another, with no rhyme or reason to it. There is no way to find out all the regulations that apply to your specific business unless you 1) consult a very expensive lawyer or 2) read an authoritative, current reference specific to your field of endeavor. 2) is usually not an option if you're doing something uncommon or brand new.

In the end one's best bet as a business owner is consulting an experienced lawyer for everything that you do. They're usually pricy and charge down to the minute. Everything you don't check, is a potential compliance risk. Today some classes of severe violations, for example improperly withholding employee taxes, can even result in the corporate veil being pierced where you as the business owner now become personally liable for your business. And I'm not even getting into things like tech that have no legal certainty whatsoever.

All these legal and compliance costs are deadweight on the economy, they could have been used to invest in better equipment or to pay employees more, instead they are spent on lawyers. Some laws & regs are no doubt necessary, but anything beyond that is a net loss for everyone. The balance always seems to only land one way these days.