Bureacracy.

So, my darling, hard-working, clever, beautiful, excellent wife received a bonus from work for being so fantastic. This seems quite sensible. She wishes to have a hot tub in the enclosed back yard of the house that we own, which seems very sensible. I am therefore going about the prospect of contacting people in order to build a fence, a little roof over the hot tub, and to connect our breaker box to the hot tub. This is not a large project, it involves a hot tub, a breaker and a cable, and wood. A construction company should be able to do the whole thing in a day with perhaps $1000 of materials.
A nice person from a local construction company came by to look at the project. Immediately he was talking about how a hot tub near the house meant that the windows would need to be replaced as they weren't tempered. Apparently water near a window that is an exterior window on a house in Portland might conceivably not be safe. So, it might mean that we would have to replace multiple windows in our house to have a hot tub not in our house. This is clearly stupid, but still will probably happen. The reason that it will happen is based on fear. The inspector's motivation is to not make a mistake. The only way an inspector can make a mistake is by not requiring something, and the only way they generate the income for their position is by requiring things. An inspector loses his job because he didn't require a permit, or was lenient with that permit, and then someone gets sued. Therefore the motivation is to require as many things as possible, and enforce these requirements stringently regardless of the idiocy involved.
Last year we decided that we wanted to grow the grass on our curbside to look like a meadow, rather than a lawn. Nobody but us uses that piece of land, we mowed the lawn by the house to walk across and use, it isn't as if the land is abandoned. We got a violation warning, all lawn areas cannot have vegetation above 14 inches. This despite the legality of five foot rose bushes, thirty foot laurel hedges. Once I mowed the lawn there was a re-inspection that said we had failed. Since I knew this was nonsense I complained. It turned out that the further inspection failure was achieved by the inspector pearing through my fence into an entirely private area and seeing some brambles. My neighbors had no idea and no complaint when I talked to them. The area was not a lawn, but the inspector had made a decision about how I should have my house and I had the only choice of paying for it to be changed or to do it myself.
The point of inspections are for honesty (so you know what you are buying) and for basic safety (to make sure your house won't catch on fire or fall down). I feel almost certain already that if I try to have this project done according to the letter of the law, that letter of the law will hugely increase the cost of the project, the time involved on the project, and astronomically raise my frustration. At this point this means that the most likely thing to happen will be a delay while we look at doing this legally and then we will pay someone to do it as competently, safely, and more cheaply by finding someone who won't apply for permits. The reason I know that this will be easily possible is that the very guy who was telling me about the probable issue with the glass in my windows being near a hot tub, when I said that I wasn't going to spend thousands of dollars on windows I didn't want, said he knew several excellent people who could do things without a permit.
So, the fear of making a mistake in a job designed for safety has lead to strong motivation to completely ignore the people in charge of safety, easy access to getting this work done, and a strong reduction in price for this work. This is exactly the result of the war on drugs too, drugs are more powerful, less regulated and cheaper for being illegal rather than sensibly regulated.
I think this bureacracy is a symptom of what is happening to the USA. When I first came here I was struck by the huge difference between England and the USA in terms of how sensible things were. If you wanted something in the USA, you went to the particular service or program and got it. Things were clean, they worked, you could get what you wanted done by-and-large. Returning to England, things were dirty, broken, and there were signs everywhere explaining ridiculous laws that no-one wanted. Travelling through the United States recently I was struck by how run-down the public places are, and how many rules there are for everything.
You can tell how far down a famous creek and the state of paddles by simply measuring the amount of useless bureacracy in any system. Bureacracy is like friction, a certain amount of it is inevitable, but the more of it there is, the harder it is to do anything. The basic point of the USA is to be a place where people can do what they want.