How Tech Can Build
This is an interesting commentary on Andreesen’s piece, but it doesn’t really change or contradict anything.<p>At the end of the day, the US is a litigious society covered in Byzantine regulation that most people aren’t even aware of. This covers the most basic things: would you like to build a townhouse for your family with just one parking space? Illegal in the vast majority of the United States, where 2+ parking spaces per home are required by law. Want to build an apartment building in San Francisco to capitalize on the incredible demand for housing? You’ll spend at least 6 years getting a building permit, and what you’re actually allowed to build will be mostly the result of ugly haggling with special interest groups along the way. These are just a few examples I happen to be familiar with.<p>We’ve chosen for things to be like this by the way we allow our government at every level to be captured by lobbyists, special interests, and partisanship. Realistically, to change things, we need reform that fixes the way the government itself operates, and while there are many ideas that sound good, everything has unexpected side effects. That is a very, very hard problem, to solve.