Tag: matt yglesias

Matt Yglesias gets mugged by the DC small-business bureaucracy.

The temptation to snark, here, could be overwhelming.  The temptation to snark here, in fact, is almost overwhelming.  Matt Yglesias, on the personal roadblocks placed on him starting a new business in (Democratic party-dominated) DC:

In the District of Columbia, I need to get a simple Basic Business License to rent out a single dwelling. After puzzling over the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs website for a bit, it became clear that step No. 1 was actually to file form FR-500 with the Office of Tax and Revenue, which you can do online. Then it was time to hustle down to the DCRA (which closes at 4:30 p.m.) to file the paperwork. Once there, I learned that filing the FR-500 online wasn’t good enough—I needed a hard copy. Fortunately, the Office and Tax and Revenue was right across the street, so I went there and refiled. Then it was back to the DCRA to stand in line to get a number, wait for the number to be called, do some more paperwork, wait in another line for the cashier, fork over $100 in fees, then get a slip from the cashier to finalize the paperwork.

But then it turned out I needed to go to a third office, the Rental Accommodations Division of the Department of Housing and Community Development. It closes at 3:30 in the afternoon and required a 15-minute walk through a sketchy neighborhood. So the next morning I went down to that Rental Accommodations office to file a paper claiming exemption from D.C.’s rent control law.

The striking thing about all this isn’t so much that it was annoying—which it was—but that it had basically nothing to do with what the main purpose of landlord regulation should be—making sure I’m not luring tenants into some kind of unsafe situation.

Continue reading Matt Yglesias gets mugged by the DC small-business bureaucracy.

…Well, *this* was nastier than I intended it to be.

I’d change it, except that I think that it’s also true.

I think that Jonathan Last is misunderstanding Matthew Yglesias’ interests, here (the short version: the latter seems to think that American cities only had one newspaper apiece in the old days, and the former is mocking the latter in response).  The Yglesias ‘brand’ has always been ‘precocious youngster;’ which is easy enough to do when you’re a kid blogging from Harvard, but considerably harder when you’re a thirtysomething, fairly doctrinaire liberal who has had all the interesting bits burned away after spending several years in Establishment Left ‘journalist’ knocking-shops*. So, there’s not exactly a reason to avoid being sloppy: the occasional dumb mistake is perfect for simulating that fresh-faced look, no?

Now, I’m not saying that Yglesias deliberately got it wrong about how many American cities had multiple newspapers in the Good Old Days; I’m merely saying that he’s got no real pressing economic reason to do the necessary research.

Moe Lane

*Look it up.