Comment Re:Falling to near zero?? (Score 5, Informative) 274
People who bitch about government regulation behing high barriers to entry are usually just whiny bitches who couldn't succeed in the first place.
This is not true in my experience. Often times people have been making a perfectly viable living doing a certain thing, and then excessive regulation pushes them out of the market so the big players can take over. Larger players are the ones with the lobbyists to help define the red tape, and the money/lawyers to spend on navigating it.
Go try to harvest oysters or clams in a Florida harvesting area. The startup capital is a bucket and some mud-boots. The regulatory hoops you much jump through to get that shellfish harvesting certificate are insane. The direct costs paid to the State are only a couple hundred dollars, but you have the cost of inspections (for the "washing facility", aka a sink), the cost of training, the cost of the government mandated tags that denote the area, condition, and purpose of the shellfish (different requirements for raw, on the half-shell oysters vs the ones for cooking vs ones for freezing vs ones for personal consumption), then the cost of yearly assessments. These costs can easily add up to dozens of thousands of dollars, and are considerably higher than the startup costs.
With all due respect, people that say things like that don't seem to have any experience doing something that is regulated, and therefore talk out of their ass.