Can anyone, yes anyone, name a common nationwide local gov't "unnecessary burden"?

[jberryhill]

8. Dunno, but I'll tell you a story

A growing and vibrant Hispanic community in my area has breathed new life into a couple of strip shopping centers that were on the skids for a long time.

I dropped into a panaderia to give my very rusty Spanish a workout and see what was on the menu that maybe I'd never had.

In the course of making my order (for what turned out to be a sandwich to die for), I got the "We don't get too many Anglos in here" vibe, and I was as much of a curiosity as I was curious about what was for lunch. I always enjoy that sense of mutual curiosity - you got stuff, I got money, let's figure this out.

So, as I'm eating my sandwich, the lady running the place comes over with a letter in her hand, and she wanted me to try to explain to her what the letter said, since she couldn't read it.

It was a letter from the landlord advising that while the shopping center was generally responsible for exterior lighting, she was responsible for her illuminated sign on the outside. The signs there are all those rectangular box affairs with translucent plexiglass which are lighted by several fluorescent tubes running crosswise. Apparently, one of the tubes in her sign was burned out, and the landlord wanted her to put in a new tube.

So, I asked her to sit down while I tried to figure out, with my awesome sub-100 word vocabulary, how to tell her that she needed to change one of the lights in her sign.

But after I left, I was really struck by these folks that go on about "how hard it is to start a business" because of all of this "burdensome regulation", when it seems to me that there are folks who are pretty challenged in a lot of ways, but starting a business doesn't seem to be one of them. She certainly had her license and health department certificate duly on display, and you might think that's a lot tougher than trying to read a letter that says, "you need to change a light bulb".

I figure a lot of these "burdensome regulation" types are people who maybe didn't have a knack for running a business in the first place.