Barriers to Business – How cities can pave a path to entrepreneurship
I think there is a fundamental misalignment of incentives between the government and its citizens. Governments as an abstract entity might have an interest in thriving entrepreneurship and economic growth, but the individual bureaucrats they employ do not. And its those Bureaucrats that design and apply processes.<p>As a result, most western countries now have an ever growing apparatus of bureaucrats who are not accountable to the citizenship and who's sole reason for being is the facilitation of process. In order to increase their relevance and hence influence and paygrade, it is in their best interest to increase the amount of process and the role that process plays in everyday decision making.<p>What worries me is that I don't see any remedy to this. Germany, a particularly bad offender when it comes to process and red tape has been attempting "Bürokratieabbau" - bureaucracy reduction since 1997. As a result we now have a commission for bureaucracy reduction which manages several operating bodies for bureaucracy reduction, all with their own processes and guidelines.<p>I'm honestly worried that this might grow to a point of collapse.