[ImPostingOnHN]

"upkeep and maintenance" is largely composed of people costs – the people doing the upkeep and maintenance.

indeed, that's the case for many businesses, even with little-to-no regulation, so it's hard to agree with your opinion there.

e.g. most of the cost of hiring a plumber is a "cost of people" – buying torch fuel and fittings is a much smaller fraction of it.

[vablings]

I guess I should separate what I mean by this. If you need plumbing work usually you have to pull permits from the city, depending on where you live that could be a small portion of the cost or a large majority of the cost. I am not advocating for the removal of say skilled operators and technicians. I am against overwhelming bureaucracy with paper documents lengthy processing times and fringe regulations.

The biggest issues people usually have with any construction work is dealing with the city/county because they throw up the most roadblocks and you do not have the freedom to choose, in the case that there is no free market available the regulation must be good, cheap and efficient, a bit off topic but alas

[ImPostingOnHN]

> If you need plumbing work usually you have to pull permits from the city

Most work you'd hire a plumber for does not require any sort of permit. Fix a leak? Replace a toilet? Install a water hammer arrestor? Unclog a toilet? Hydrojet a sewer line? etc. None of those have ever required a single permit for me. A recent $450 quote to install another shutoff valve was about 95% labor, 5% parts, 0% bureaucracy.

In fact, I would be surprised if there was a single location in the US where permits constituted "a large majority of the costs" of plumbing work done in that location. I honestly don't know what you're talking about there. Maybe you could share such a location?

Indeed, the cost of most construction work is not dominated by any sort of bureaucracy or government-mandated paperwork, but by materials and people doing the work. If I bought a new house for $1M, regulation did not constitute $500,000 of it.

> The biggest issues people usually have with any construction work is dealing with the city/county because they throw up the most roadblocks and you do not have the freedom to choose

This is simply not the case. Maybe you're talking about the issues you personally have. The biggest issue people usually have with construction is the cost, and the biggest part of the cost is the labor and materials, because you live in a high-COL country. The current inflation and tariffs we're seeing don't help. I guess if we want to bring costs down by cutting regulation, the overwhelming tariffs (aka very expensive regulations) would be a good first target, and that would help address inflation, too – bonus cost savings!

> I am against overwhelming bureaucracy

So is everyone else, but is hiring a plumber expensive because of "overwhelming bureaucracy"? No, it's because it costs money to pay the people who do the work.