Friday, August 5, 2011

Helping entrepreneurs stay in business...

Over and over again, day in and day out, I hear people complain about how hard it is to open and run a small business. With all the fees, crazy overblown regulations, stupid over the top rules and the Government trying to make everything perfectly safe for us dummies, it's almost impossible now to open and run a successful business.
One of the things I constantly hear is how California especially, is a anti-Business state. What the hell? California is an anti-business state? How insane is that?
Where do you think the majority of people have their employment? They work in the small business world, that's where.
The last thing in the world we should be doing right now is limiting intelligent entrepreneurs from pursuing their ideas for a business, which creates jobs for hard working Americans to have a chance at the good life.

A couple of examples now........

25 years ago a person with some great recipes from their Grandma, could find a good location downtown, grab up some tables, chairs, utensils, a stove, a sink, a fridge and whatever else they needed to make the food, then hire a cook, two waitresses, put sign on the front wall, flip the open sign around and boom, they were in business. Not only in business, but gave at least three other people the chance to make a decent living.

Now 25 years ago, that scenario worked perfectly, the business started making money, three people had good jobs and the patrons enjoyed Grandma's fantastic grub. Now lets stop right here to make something perfectly clear. No one got sick, no one died from food poisoning. Everyone working there were just normal people who knew to wash their hands etc etc.

OK, here's where it all started going to hell in a hand basket. So, some government bureaucrat prick took it upon themselves to try and help out all us idiot patrons. Instead of continuing to allow us to take responsibility for ourselves, to make our own choices of where and what to eat, this bureau-crap decided to treat all of us like children with no mind and make damn sure everything in the restaurant was perfectly clean and safe. A place where nothing untoward would ever happen to harm anyone.

So out goes the stove first thing. Oh no........you can't use a regular stove like we do in our homes. Hell no......Now the owners were required to purchase a $10,000 dollar super duper stove with super grease traps with a special hood to catch the toxic smoke coming off Grandma's food. Oh and completely redesigned and installed drain systems in the floor for.....some stupid idea or the other.

So guess what folks? These driven, intelligent, creative people with a great product and idea for a new business can't afford all that crap and have to shut their doors, kicking three other innocent people out onto the employment lines in the process, depriving everyone from enjoying Grandma's great food.
In this day and age when jobs are everything, how incredibly stupid and short sighted is that????

Right as I'm writing my latest tirade, a customer walked in telling me about him trying to move his construction business to a new location. To do this, because of all the excessive, stupid and unneeded regulations, the cost went from something he might handle to completely out of bounds. The new idiocy in that world now is the dreaded "Erosion Control". To do any construction nowadays, all the sudden when building anything, you can't let one little stone or piece of dirt leave the construction area, so...................
Now you'll need, of course ....Those straw Wattles, which are those round straw tubes you see around construction sites. What are they for, you ask? To make sure none of the disturbed dirt gets off the site.....

Huh? Since when is dirt a bad thing?

Wait, we're not done yet. Then you need to completely surround the entire construction site with a Silk Filtering Fence. What? What's that for? Just in case it rains, any dirt (here we go again with that devil stuff) that might wash away is filtered with this Silk Fence before poisoning the surrounding properties.

Not done yet.

Now you'll of course need a super engineered, filtered drainage system to again filter any of that dreaded dirt from getting into the water system.
Now, here's the cool part, None of this has anything to do with his business at all. All this expensive crap is just temporary installations just for the construction process. So, he told me when everything is done, all he can do with all that expensive crap is throw it away. You see, it's worth nothing now that it's used.


It's clear that right now the main problem in America is the lack of good jobs, so lets talk about how the Government could step in and help that process along.
The first thing that comes to mind would be to step back.....I don't know....how about to 25 years ago and take a hard look at how businesses worked then.
They did just fine without all those idiot regulations, thank you.
So.....my grand idea would be for the Government to get rid of all the new regulations put in place in the last 25 years. Just throw those pieces of shit in the garbage, where they belong. Go back to what worked all throughout time, which is nothing but common sense and logic.
I'm telling you right now. We were fine back then and we'll be fine now without overregulation.



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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

While I hate to be a fly in the ointment, let me poke just a couple of holes in your reasoning.

25 to30 years ago we didn't have the really virulent bugs we have today. People rarely died from ingesting food - Maybe threw up once or had the trots for a few hours. No big deal!

Today, thanks to you (generic you) getting antibiotics every time you had a cold virus, we have some incredibly nasty super bugs that either kill you or cost $500,000 to cure. Personally, I'm glad we have strict food service safety.

Marin County, a few years ago, had water diversion damage to 5 lower middle class homes secondary to diversion by construction of a mac mansion on the hill above them. It took them several years in the courts to resolve!

So, damm right I want some well thought out regulations - Like that nuclear power down the road with its spent fuel rods in pools of water!

Paul said...

I have to respond to the fly in the ointment on this one.
First of all, I was strictly talking about "Small Businesses". Even mentioning power plants in the response is clearly Apples and Oranges.

I have to be perfectly clear here. I think all the Tin Hats and extreme right wing idiots are just that.

Saying that, I do agree with the basic premise some of them bring up about the government having grown through the years far, far too large and intrusive into our private lives.

The problem with having them make unlimited rules for us is it takes away our freedom to make our own choices in life.

Years ago, as I mentioned, people had the right to make bad choices also. They were completely responsible for their own actions. If they chose to eat in some crappy, dirty restaurant and got sick, it was their own responsibility, not anyone else's.

Plus, when other folks saw people getting sick there, they stopped coming and the place had to close.

What should determine the success or failure of businesses is consumer based choices, not some government knucklehead, thinking he knows what's best for us.

In my piece I used the terms "common sense and logic" on purpose. Regular people have that attribute and would be responsible enough to use them if given the chance but in our present "Let the Government tell us what to do" idiocy, we're quickly losing those skills, which is plain stupid and irresponsible in the extreme.

Oh and Marin County can live with a little dirt just as anyone can. I have no idea what high falootin nonsense "water diversion damage" is but would bet it's just more politicaly correct bullshit, which is another concept that needs to be dumped in the garbage along with the used cat litter.