I am inundated with orders, almost all my offers are being accepted. What is happening is that the prices have doubled in the last six months and I have been hesitant to rise my prices. I also noticed that the demands and rejects by the regulating bureaucracies are becoming impossible to comply with, they find once and again new issues and no project ever ends and the clients never receive a final, definitive approval. I am being asked to answer questions about ptojects that I thought had finished three years ago - and I cannot ask for more money for them and I am seen as the responsible for them as I am signing the drawing. Some engineers refuse to continue working on long-finished projects, and the owners are forced to find a new engineer and pay him additional.
The reason to this new perfeccionism is the apparition of new profession: journalists, lawyers and NGOs ("Good governance" and so on) that are making a living by combatting the "capital and power corruption". These "justicieros" find cases where some obscure regulation - specially in the environmental area - was not fully enforced, meaning to the ignorant that a corrupt functionary did not protect the health and security of the people or of the environment, presumably for some dark personal reason.
These persecutors demand the enforcement of all regulations in an incorruptible, absolute, totalitarian manner. The smallest "friendliness" toward the businessman presumes corruption. Businessman can mean a young entrepreneur opening a felafel stand in the street. No one, not even large corporations, are able to operate legally. We are cought in an impossible vicious circle of regulatory terror. I too need to increase my prices to reflect this new business environment.
4 comments:
Actually, you are completely correct in these observations. This illness has spread rapidly around the civilized world, and appears in many forms; mostly we know it as political correctness, but as illustrated by you, it can adopt different incarnations, just like syphilis (the 'great mimic').
Its distinguishing characteristic is everywhere and always that it pretends to further the welfare of the general population, but in fact only furthers the career of bureaucrats, and even actually detracts from the viability of society.
As such it can only be afforded by wealthy and secure societies, or societies which don't care if they go extinct. If you look round the Western World, you see plenty of people who believe they live in the former, but actually live in the latter.
Anon.
Israel more than others.
Israel more than others.
I think the UK leads the pack, followed by the typical North American university.
Your leadership still represents you, and your aspirations.
This is now unusual in the West.
Anon.
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