A very smart article by Tom Smith over in San Diego, pointing out how Government scrambles to assert to itself an inordinate share of private success but breezily overlooks all the failures it’s caused:

It’s difficult to even explain how pervasive, expensive, frustrating and sometimes just plain insuperable the regulatory and taxation burden of the state is. It’s not what did our venture in, but it helped. It’s worse in other countries, where we seem to be headed.

My engineers were in Italy. Italian counsel advised me that it was simply impossible, impractical, should not even be attempted to pay them in Italy. Even trying to do so would stir up a nest of officials and my guys would end up with pennies on the Euro. Just set up accounts in Switzerland and pay them that way, which he said was technically legal to do. So that’s what we did. It’s no wonder innovations by startups in Europe lag so far behind the US.

And California? — don’t even think about hiring an employee in California. Read through what’s involved in that and you will think it is some kind of joke until you realize it isn’t. A whole ecosystem of plaintiffs’ law firms exists just to sue employers who run afoul the complicated morrass (sic) of employment law requirements. And if you survive to be a public company, they will sue you every time your stock price dips.

Some states, such as Texas, are better, but the reason they are better is not what they provide; it’s just that they stay more out of the way.

Every day here in the UK too one sees new examples of crass, clunky, officious, insensitive state meddling. Perhaps above all the police, a phenomenon that seem to have lost all sense of pragmatic light touch and instead pompously and clumsily crash down on anything they feel like.

Meanwhile the ghastly London Olympics law labyrinth and the incentivising of repulsive sneaky ‘community wardens’ is almost enough to make me want to avoid watching any of it even in TV out of sheer embarrassment.

The good news is that for a few fleeting moments it’s not raining. Much.