A front page story in today's Wall Street Journal, "Can Italy Find Its Way?" opens with the following:
Bernardo Caprotti was a 45-year-old entrepreneur when he agreed to buy a suburban plot of land for a new supermarket.
Building permits recently came through. He's now 88. His Milan-based retail chain, Esselunga SpA, had grappled since 1971 with local bureaucrats who raised shifting concerns about traffic volumes, architectural suitability and proximity to a medieval monastery.
Now read the paragraph below. It's not about Italy, but the good old USA right here and now.
It takes 40 permits to open restaurants in big cities today...how many small people can afford the time for lawyers or for the money involved and the waiting time to get all those permits, which used to be 4 in number? 85,000 pages of new regulations under the Obama administration in the Federal Register...if you want jobs and growth and young people hired, if you want productivity growth that comes from investment spending, then you want proper fiscal policy, which we have not used at all...you want monetary policy in moderation, and then you want deregulatory policy whereby you make it rational for people to start businesses and get out there and hussle.”
http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/cris-sheridan/broken-lever-monetary-policy
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