{"id":18876,"date":"2013-02-03T11:40:13","date_gmt":"2013-02-03T16:40:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=18876"},"modified":"2013-02-03T11:41:10","modified_gmt":"2013-02-03T16:41:10","slug":"bureaucracy-and-the-would-be-small-business-owner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/02\/03\/bureaucracy-and-the-would-be-small-business-owner\/","title":{"rendered":"Bureaucracy and the would-be small business owner"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It took me less than a day to start my own business &mdash; and it was all done online. We have it good: Canada is at the top of the league table for ease of starting a new business. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.slate.com\/articles\/business\/small_business\/2013\/02\/starting_my_small_business_cities_make_it_incredibly_hard_to_get_a_business.single.html\" target=\"_blank\">Americans don&#8217;t have it as easy as we do<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Last week, having read my own writing about how it\u2019s cheaper to buy a house than rent one in most markets, I decided to take my own advice. My wife and I bought a new place, and instead of selling our old condo, we\u2019re going to rent it out. And thus I became a small-business man.<\/p>\n<p>Or, rather, I\u2019m becoming one. Entrepreneurship \u2014 even on the smallest and most banal scale \u2014 turns out to be a time-consuming pain in the you-know-what. My personal inconveniences aren\u2019t a big deal, but in the aggregate, the difficulty of launching a business is a problem and it may be a more important one as time goes on.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>The striking thing about all this isn\u2019t so much that it was annoying \u2014 which it was \u2014 but that it had basically nothing to do with what the main purpose of landlord regulation should be \u2014 making sure I\u2019m not luring tenants into some kind of unsafe situation. The part where the unit gets inspected to see if it\u2019s up to code is a separate step. I was instructed to await a scheduling call that ought to take place sometime in the next 10 business days.<\/p>\n<p>Not that I expect your pity. I don\u2019t even pity myself. Going through the process, I mostly felt lucky to be a fluent-English-speaking college graduate with a flexible work schedule. But the presence of a stray pamphlet offering translation into Spanish, Chinese, or Amharic seemed like it would be only marginally useful to an immigrant entrepreneur. A person who needs to be at her day job from 9 to 5 would have a huge problem even getting to these offices while they\u2019re open.<\/p>\n<p>The bureaucratic hassles of entrepreneurship turn out to vary pretty substantially from place to place. The World Bank has a fairly crude measure of how easy it is to start a business in different countries and ranks the United States 13th. North of the border in Canada (ranked third), there\u2019s typically just one \u201cprocedure\u201d \u2014 a paperwork filing, basically \u2014 needed to launch a business. In America, it takes more like six.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It took me less than a day to start my own business &mdash; and it was all done online. We have it good: Canada is at the top of the league table for ease of starting a new business. Americans don&#8217;t have it as easy as we do: Last week, having read my own writing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,831,6,13],"tags":[426,661],"class_list":["post-18876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bureaucracy","category-business","category-cancon","category-usa","tag-housing","tag-regulation"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4Us","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18876"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18878,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18876\/revisions\/18878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}