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Yesterday, I came home exhausted. I have been working late nearly every night for weeks, at a time of year when most of my business is not even open yet (the business is seasonal). I realized to my immense depression that I have been spending all my time on regulatory compliance. I have not been pitching new clients or bidding on new prospects or making investments or improving our customer service processes -- though I have ideas for all of these. I have been 100% dedicated through 14 hour days to just trying to keep up with and adapt to changing government rules.Break rules, changing minimum wages, heat stress plans, mandatory sexual harassment training, OSHA reporting, EEO reporting, Census reporting, and most recently changing rules on salaried workers that Obama just waived his wand and imposed -- this is what has been consuming me. I have been trying to roll out a new safety program to the field and can't do it because I keep having to train for one of these new requirements (one learns there is only a limited number of things one can simultaneously roll out to front-line staff).At some point regulation will accrete so fast that it will be impossible to keep up. I am going to call that the Regulation Singularity, and for businesses my size, we are fast approaching it.Prominent libertarian think tanks often rank state business climate by their tax regimes. I am all for low, sensibly-structured taxes. But for most of my time, taxes are irrelevant. We are shutting down businesses left and right in California and it has zero to do with taxes.
“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”- Alexis de Tocqueville
