Regulations vs Employment

[Crazed Rabbit]

It's not that simple. Pipes can deliver only so much water at normal pressure. If you'ew opening a restaurant, you will be using much more water than a household or even a grocery store. It would be quite bad if 10 new businesses open in a neighbourhood and 25,000 people don't have enough water pressure to take a shower. There are a few ways to deal with that - have the taxpayers pay for it, have all 10 business pay for it equally, allow 9 businesses to open and charge 200,000 on the tenth or do nothing and have people throw a fit.

Charging 20,000 for each new business seems the most rational and fair solution.

I bet an industrial pump would've cost less than that. I am skeptical that it's for water pressure reasons anyway.

More examples of regulations:
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/...t-regulations/

Could your favorite apps soon be banned in your city?

Can’t find a taxi? Uber allows you to hail a black car from a smartphone. The app uses GPS to display the location of drivers’ cars and how many minutes it will take them to pick you up. The driver calls when he arrives, and your phone pays automatically.
Uber has expanded from its base in San Francisco to other cities: New York, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, and DC. But sometimes, city governments are less than welcoming.
"They’re operating illegally, and we plan to take steps against them," D.C. Taxi Commissioner Ron Linton warned at a meeting earlier this month.
“What they’re trying to do is be both a taxi and a limousine,” Linton has said. “Under the way the law is written, it just can’t be done.”
This month, Linton conducted a sting operation. Using Uber's app to hail a car, Linton took it for a ride, and arranged for inspectors to greet it at the destination. The inspectors fined the driver $1,650 for various violations and impounded the car.
...
Roomorama ensures security by verifying the identities of the people using the site and allowing renters to rate places they've stayed at.
But there's one catch: Last May, New York State made it illegal for anyone to rent out an apartment for a time period of less than a month. Doing so could land you a fine of $800.
Supporters of the ban call such rental arrangements "illegal hotels" and say the Internet has compounded the problem.
"The Internet has made it easier than ever to advertise illegal hotels," New York state senator Liz Krueger said in testimony to the NYC Committee on Housing and Buildings.
Krueger has also introduced a bill that would raise the fine to a maximum of $25,000.
"This proliferation of illegal hotel operations has ... disrupted the lives of countless permanent residents ... and ruined many tourists' visits in New York," Krueger explained.
Roomorama.com CEO and founder Jia En Teo says that the ban goes too far.
“By slapping a law like this on, it is not allowing markets to run themselves efficiently. Having more options available for consumers is always a good thing,” she said.
Hotel industry groups -- which publicly support the ban -- are the real reason for the law, Teo said.
"It is the hotel lobby that has been pushing for these laws, so as to stifle the competition."

And more:
http://www.startribune.com/business/138904589.html

Death may not be proud, but it sure can be expensive.

Verlin Stoll doesn't think it has to be, and that has earned the baby-faced 27-year-old funeral home operator the enmity of Minnesota's biggest funeral home trade group.

Why, things are getting so nasty that the executive director of the Minnesota Funeral Directors Association recently labeled Stoll an "entrepreneurial dynamo."

It wasn't intended as a compliment.
...
Stoll's low-cost approach and low overhead -- he and his wife are the only employees -- helped Crescent Tide turn a profit within its first year. Now, he'd like to open another facility in St. Louis Park. To do so, he's leading a challenge to a Minnesota law that requires every funeral home to have a specially equipped embalming room.

Sounds logical enough, but here's the thing: Minnesota law does not require funeral directors to perform body preparation or embalming in those rooms. Most owners of multiple funeral homes transport bodies to a central location for those activities. Some even outsource their embalming services to licensed third-party firms -- also perfectly legal.

And then there's the fact that, in the Twin Cities, more than half of all bodies are cremated rather than buried. Funeral homes are not required to have a crematorium on their premises, and most don't. They transport the body to another facility for that service.

Stoll already has an embalming room in his St. Paul funeral home, which he estimates cost almost $30,000 to lease and furnish. Requiring him to build another one that he has no intention of using will either delay his expansion or force him to raise prices.

And more:
http://www.tennessean.com/article/20...lle-regulation

The car service operators say the new regulations — which, among other things, require sedan and limo services to charge a $45 minimum fare, ban them from using leased or old vehicles and require that they dispatch only from a fixed place of business for prearranged appointments — are anti-competitive and unconstitutional.

Budget services charging as little as $20 or $25 a ride claim larger limo companies pushed the new regulations to push them out of business, while proponents say the ordinance passed by Metro Council in 2010 is needed to protect the public and eliminate “rogue” taxis.

U.S. District Judge Kevin H. Sharp denied a motion to dismiss the case Thursday, two days after the Metro Council indefinitely deferred a bill that would have overturned the disputed regulations and negated the lawsuit. The final outcome of the lawsuit could influence a broader national fight against regulations, common in many cities, that impose minimum fares or restrict the number of for-hire vehicles that can legally operate.

“Government has no business interfering with private business and enterprise,” said Syed Ali Bokhari, owner of Metro Livery Inc. and a plaintiff in the lawsuit. “What I did was I offered taxi prices and put people in luxury sedans. (Metro) didn’t leave any room for me to survive and operate my business.”
...
“They have sufficiently done so by alleging that the new rules stemming from the Ordinance serve no legitimate public health or safety purpose,” Sharp continued, “and by alleging that the Ordinance was enacted not to protect any such purpose, but rather to protect limousine companies and taxicab companies from competition.”

http://www.tennessean.com/article/20...lle-regulation

And these are but a few snowflakes plucked from a blizzard, in terms of the pervasive intrusion of useless regulations into our lives.

CR

[Lemur]

This is the cover story of the Economist I got today.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Food trucks:

A recent report on street vending for the Institute of Justice emphasizes that many anti-truck politicians don’t even bother with Monning’s pretext. An existing provision of the San Francisco municipal code, for example, states that any business may comment on an application for a new vending license and directs the city to “consider” whether the proposed operation is located within 300 feet of a business that sells the same type of food or merchandise. It would be as if Slate were allowed to complain that it should be illegal to launch a new website to compete with our offerings, and that government should take our complaint seriously.
San Francisco’s rule affects only the same kind of food, so if you’re selling pizza I can try to offer tacos. Across the bay in Oakland, a “vehicular food vendor” is enjoined from locating within 200 feet of any restaurant or deli. Chicago’s rule is like Oakland’s, while in Atlanta there’s a 1,500-foot exclusion zone in which a vendor cannot offer a similar product. These are just the most blatant forms of protectionism. San Jose’s law requiring a mobile vendor to stay at one location (or within 500 feet of that location) for no more than 15 minutes within any two hour period seems clearly designed to make truck-based businesses impractical.
...
But a basic rule of thumb seems to suggest itself: The fact that business owners would prefer not to face competition is not a valid regulatory purpose. A food truck is a kitchen and a vehicle and should need to follow the rules that generally apply to both things. But there’s no need for extra regulatory burdens over and above those. If you’re allowed to have a restaurant two blocks away from a school, there’s no reason to ban a food truck. If you’re allowed to park a van in a space somewhere, there’s no reason to ban parking a van that also happens to sell food.
Most of all, the fact that an existing business owner objects to the practices of a new business is a terrible reason to block a truck from operating. Space is scarce and rents are high in the centers of major American cities. If new competition can bring prices down, we’ll all be better off in the long run. Meanwhile purveyors of traditional restaurants will be challenged to deploy their unique assets—tables, chairs, a roof, walls—in ways that provide meaningful value to customers. Municipal authorities need to learn to welcome the explosion of innovation happening around them and stop trying to choke it off.

Greek Edition:

“An online store is more complicated than a regular store basically because of the way payments are carried out,” explained Fotis Antonopoulos, one of the co-founders of www.oliveshop.com, which sells olive oil-based products such as cosmetics, mostly to foreign markets.

“Most stores begin operating after receiving only the approval regarding their brand name, as the bureaucracy involved takes such a long time to complete that it is simply impossible to keep up with the operational costs, such as paying rent on obligatory headquarters, without making any sales,” said Antonopoulos.

Antonopoulos and his partners spent hours collecting papers from tax offices, the Athens Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the municipal service where the company is based, the health inspector’s office, the fire department and banks. At the health department, they were told that all the shareholders of the company would have to provide chest X-rays, and, in the most surreal demand of all, stool samples.

Once they climbed the crazy mountain of Greek bureaucracy and reached the summit, they faced the quagmire of the bank, where the issue of how to confirm the credit card details of customers ended in the bank demanding that the entire website be in Greek only, including the names of the products.

“They completely ignored us, however much we explained that our products are aimed at foreign markets and everything has to be written in English as well,” said Antonopoulos.

Eventually, Antonopoulos and his associates decided to use foreign banking systems like PayPal, and cut the Greek bank, with which they had been negotiating for three months, from the middle. “It’s their loss, not ours. We eventually solved the problem in just one day,” explained Antonopoulos.

Antonopoulos describes the massive difference between the treatment he and his partners received from the Greek authorities and the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA), whose approval Oliveshop.com needed in order to export its products to the USA.

“I contacted the FDA and they sent us an e-mail with directions immediately. I filled in an online form and was done in five minutes. We received the approval 24 hours after making our application.”

Gee, no wonder Greece is in such bad economic shape. They make American regulations look efficient.

EDIT: The Lacey Act and Gibson Guitars: Or, where the US Government knows what infringes on Foreign Country's Laws Better than those Foreign Countries.

CR

[Crazed Rabbit]

Double posting because this example deserves it's own post:
McNab v. United States

It all began with a supposed anonymous fax to the National Marine Fishery Service (NMFS) on February 3, 1999. The mystery fax alleged that Honduran businessman David McNab had a shipment of “undersized (3 & 4oz) lobster tails” scheduled to arrive in Bayou La Batre, Alabama on February 5, 1999. The fax also said that the lobster should be packed in cardboard boxes, but was in fact packed in clear plastic bags.
Based on this strange, anonymous message, NMFS agents waited for McNab’s ship and captured it on arrival. With no explanation, the federal government held the entire ship for several weeks and then off-loaded and transported McNab’s 70,000 pounds of Caribbean spiny lobster to a government freezer in Florida. There the lobster tails languished for six months while NMFS agents searched Honduran regulations for some reason to keep the lobster meat and prosecute the importers and distributors.
After numerous phone calls, letters, and trips to Honduras, the NMFS focused on three provisions. The first details the processing and packaging of fish harvested in Honduran waters. This 1993 regulation, promulgated pursuant to a 1973 statute, included the mention of packaging in cardboard boxes. The second regulation prohibits harvesting any lobsters with tails shorter than 5.5 inches. This must have surprised the NMFS agents, since the market price lists published by NMFS include prices for two and three ounce Caribbean spiny lobsters from Honduras. A government expert acknowledged at trial that these little lobsters would all have tails shorter than 5.5 inches. The third Honduran provision prohibits destroying or harvesting “eggs, or the offspring of fish, chelonians or other aquatic species for profit.”
Six months after sending them to the cooler, NMFS agents finally began to inspect the locked-up lobster tails. Only about three percent of the lobster tails turned out to be less than 5.5 inches long. Just seven percent showed any evidence of having been egg-bearing lobsters. These small amounts belie the suggestion that McNab or his employees were intentionally harvesting young or egg-bearing lobsters. Nevertheless, prosecutors included these regulations as predicates for alleged violations of the Lacey Act.
...
Government prosecutors, not satisfied even with 35 tons of lobster, filed criminal charges against McNab. The also charged three American businesspeople who frequently purchased and distributed lobster tails from McNab. All charges against McNab and most charges against the others were predicated on the three Honduran regulations, applied through the Lacey Act. No charges were ever brought against the defendants in Honduras. The alleged Lacey Act violations served primarily to trigger more serious charges. If importing the lobster in bags instead of boxes was illegal, prosecutors reasoned, then planning to import it was criminal conspiracy, the actual importation was smuggling, and payments became felony money laundering.
At the District Court’s foreign law hearing, McNab presented copious evidence showing that the Honduran regulations at issue were invalid. The size restriction had never been signed by the President of Honduras, an absolute requirement for such a regulation under Honduran law. The Attorney General of Honduras supplied an opinion, confirming other testimony, that because the size restriction was not signed it could never have had the force of law.
McNab presented other witnesses, including a former Honduran Minister of Justice, who testified that the egg harvesting regulation was never intended to apply to animals that happened to bear eggs when caught. The prohibition against harvesting or destroying eggs for profit was meant to do just that, to prevent the harvesting of eggs themselves (turtle eggs in particular).
Government prosecutors somehow convinced the court to ignore McNab’s extensive evidence and instead accept the testimony of a single, mid-level Honduran bureaucrat, Liliana Paz. For reasons that remain unexplained, the “Secretary-General” of the Honduran Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock – an official whose primary duty is to be “an instrument of communication” and who has no expertise or authority to render legal opinions – boldly testified that all the regulations were valid and had the force of law.
Despite the obvious lack of criminal intent on the part of the defendants, as well as concerns about the validity of the Honduran regulations, all four businesspeople were convicted on a general verdict. In August 2001, McNab and two businessmen were each sentenced to eight years in prison. The fourth defendant, a businesswoman from New Jersey who resold seafood to restaurants like Red Lobster, was sentenced to two years in prison.
The government trumpeted the convictions in press releases that labeled McNab “the ringleader of a smuggling operation.” The reports mislead the public by suggesting that McNab was intentionally harvesting undersized and egg-bearing lobsters, never mentioning that these were a tiny portion of his catch. The government fails to note that the only reason for declaring the entire shipment illegal was that it was packed in bags, not boxes. In effect, the defendants were convicted of smuggling because they packed lobster in clear plastic bags instead of opaque cardboard boxes.
...
Several months after the end of the criminal trial, the Honduran Court formally held that the size limit was void and declared that it had never had the force of law.
McNab’s attorneys also discovered that the law authorizing the packaging regulations was repealed in 1995. Under Honduran law, a regulation is automatically repealed when the authorizing statute is repealed. Even the prosecution’s witness from the Honduran Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock admitted this in an affidavit. It also became clear that the egg-harvesting provision had been repealed in a way that, under Honduran law, operated retroactively.
McNab additionally filed a motion before the Honduran National Human Rights Commissioner challenging Ms. Paz’s testimony about Honduran law. The National Human Rights Commissioner, Dr. Leo Valladares, is an internationally respected constitutional lawyer and human rights advocate. His office in Honduras is charged with addressing complaints that government officials’ actions constitute “legal error.” Dr. Valladares issued a report, which the Minister of Agriculture signed, stating that Ms. Paz’s testimony constituted “an error of law.” The scholarly report found that the packaging regulation was repealed in 1995, the size restriction had “never had the force of law,” and that the egg-bearing provision had been retroactively repealed.
The government of Honduras, through its embassy, directed all of this information to the U.S. State Department, asking that they forward it directly to the Department of Justice. The Attorney General of Honduras also filed an amicus curiae brief with the 11th Circuit, providing this information and explaining that McNab and the other businesspeople had not violated any Honduran law. All of this was ignored by the Court of Appeals when they concluded that “finality” was, apparently, more important than justice.

Good God.

CR