by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-19 01:41:20+00:00
> Given the primary reason why it's hard to start a business is access to capital, I'm not really sure what "lowering barriers" (which barriers exactly? how?) and "regulatory overhead" (which ones specifically?) will meaningfully do to improve the outcomes of black people.

Suppose you want to start a restaurant. You already have a kitchen at home, so can you put a sign out front and start serving customers without having to pay a ton for commercial real estate (i.e. capital)? Nope, zoning violation. But surely if you rent a commercial shop for your restaurant then you can then live there instead of having to maintain two separate pieces of property and a car to commute between them? Nope, sorry, the commercial unit isn't zoned for residential. Also, you'll have to outbid Starbucks and McDonalds for the site because there is only a small area of land zoned for commercial use and it's already full with nowhere empty zoned to add more.

Now that you've put yourself in debt for real estate you're not allowed to live at and opened a business with ~4% net margins, your customers expect to pay with credit cards and the law allows that racket to take ~3% of your total revenue.

To make this work at all you're going to have to do enough volume that you'll end up hiring people. Congrats, you now get to do Business Taxes. This isn't the thing where you file a 1040 which is just copying some numbers from a sheet you got from your employer, it's the thing where you have to calculate those numbers for other people and also keep track of every dollar you spend on every chair, kilowatt hour and jar of tomato sauce so the government can take half your earnings instead of the three quarters or more you lose if you're bad at math or forget to deduct something big. But don't be bad at math the other way either or then you go to jail.

Now that you're almost making enough money to be able to eat at your own restaurant, the power to your stove goes out and shuts down your whole operation. You track it down to a defective splice put in by the licensed electrician who wired the place before you bought it. You're not allowed to fix this because you're not licensed as an electrician. You're also not able to get licensed because it's both prohibitively expensive for someone who only does occasional electrical work and requires you to do a multi-year apprenticeship even if you could pass every test to get the license. So you either have to wait a week for someone with a license to have time for you even though the actual fix is only going to take five minutes, or pay through the nose for emergency service, or break the law and do it yourself.

I could go on. The reason "access to capital" is such a problem is that the regulations make everything so expensive, and most of the regulations are a result of regulators being captured by the incumbents.

> And this is before we even talk about the well documented facts of biases, outright racism, and uneven application of laws.

Racial discrimination has been illegal for quite some time. When these things are so well documented you can sue the perpetrators in those cases. That doesn't necessitate casting aspersions in cases where there isn't any evidence of that, just because the economic disparity tends to create an outcome disparity even when the entity isn't doing anything racist.

> One way you could do this is to have government programs to provide startup capital to certain groups. You know, like we already had, but are attempted to being erased under the "anti-DEI" crusaders.

Why is this "certain groups" instead of providing the same access to everyone trying to start a business?

> In reality a lot of the anti-DEI rhetoric is based on disinformation, misinformation, and honestly just good old fashioned racism.

"My opponents are lying racists" would be the ad hominem fallacy even if it was true.