[LorenPechtel]

Not just government agencies. Everybody wants their finger in the pie to justify their job. And every politician wants to do things their voters like.

I'm thinking of a reasonably recent article I saw that was talking about helping people navigate the 30+ assistance programs they might be eligible for. There's your problem right there--there should not be 30+ programs doing approximately the same thing! That's an awful lot of duplication of effort.

Or look at what happens with business licenses. Two things I see:

1) They want their $ from entities that shouldn't really be "businesses" in the first place. Around here an awful lot of licensed professionals have to have a "business" license--never mind that the nature of their work means they're inside some other entity that actually is reasonable to license. And that means a sales tax registration which has an annual minimum that such people almost certainly will never reach. (Sales tax includes use tax--but it's their office that actually engages in such transactions.)

2) Businesses that perform their work on-site have to have business licenses for every license area of the metropolitan area they work in. Hey, guys, get together and define the superset of the rules of your area and allow someone to get a license that covers the whole area based on that superset.

The Republicans are "right" in that we have far too many regulations. But they are very wrong in wanting to take an axe to them--most of the rules are individually sensible (and when they produce nonsense it's often situations where it's not worthwhile to special case), there is a horrible problem of duplication of effort and fingers in the pie. It's not chopping that's needed, it's organization.