Comment by potato3732842
4 hours ago
Based on your opinion of local permitting I have a strong suspicion you've never applied for any sort of local permit for something where issuance of the permit requires any real consideration.
Petty homeowner renovation stuff is basically a weird tax in disguise. They don't care, they were never gonna tell you no. They just want your money and want you to make work for whatever trade is being made work for in the process.
Go for a variance and then see how you feel about it. Better yet, go try and create any sort of occupied structure or commercial use where one doesn't already exist.
Local permitting is riddled with bike shedding, people trying to avoid responsibility, people trying to advance their pet interests at other people's cost and probably more stuff I'm forgetting. At least with state level stuff you can be all "I've paid my engineer big bucks, here's there work output, here's why it's GTG, and if it is in fact GTG they typically rubber stamp it. But little guys can't afford to play in that arena unfortunately.
The HN bias towards state regulation of, well, everything comes from the epistemic invincibility felt by people who have never seriously failed.
Understanding that we should let markets, prices, and individual choices guide policy comes out of personal experience of having been 100% certain of something and having been wrong. Once that happens to you a few dozen times, you start to appreciate that your feeling of being certain does not necessarily correspond to your having discovered a predictive theory of reality.
You must understand that much of HN is literally too young to have had a chance to interact in any way with building regulations. It's not literally every user of course, but it's obvious that HN is biased towards the brashness of youth.
Isn't the purpose of many regulations to stop people who are wrong from harming themselves and others? That is, the experience of being wrong also teaches respect for rules one doesn't understand.
That is claimed, but often the real purpose is to stop people who otherwise could do something from taking that work away from whatever group created the regulation.
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You’re possibly right that HN is young, but in that case you’re missing how the circumstances of their youth and young adulthood have made them wary of deregulation in the macro sense.