I know a fair amount of business owners - people that started small businesses and are reasonably successful. And they always gripe about regulation.

I voted for Hillary, after being appalled at Trump's ridiculous tariff platform that would tank the economy, as well as all the other appalling behavior. I don't think Hillary would have been bad for business to any significant degree.

That said, it is really uncanny how some well-intentioned rules that are supposed to protect employees from exploitation by large employers end up impacting small businesses and their employees in unpredictable, harmful and restrictive ways.

I think it has to do with the practical necessity of the rules being "one-size-fits-all" just due to the sheer size of the economy. That's the root of the problem with the rules and regulations.

For example, in my state, the minimum salary for someone who by definition is not tracking their hours, and is understood to work some overtime that is not at time and one-half, just doubled, from approx. 23K per year to 47K per year (approx. $450 per week to $910 per week, again I'm rounding).

My understanding is the intent of the rule is to prevent a McDonald's, say, from hiring a manager on a 23K salary who would be expected to routinely work 50-60 hours a week if they were short staffed, with no overtime. That's practically slavery, and I can understand why some appointed bureaucrat would see it as their mission to prevent that. So far, so good.

The problem is that the rule is written within a paradigm that does not take into account how business is evolving in new ways that permit a tremendous amount of schedule flexibility, with no practical way to track hours.

A small business may have leveraged technology such that employees can work from anywhere, and have entirely flexible hours, because they are able to work in short bursts of information-exchanging from their phones and other devices.

So it becomes burdensome to the point of outright impracticality to track hours, because there are no punch cards, and creative thinking is sometimes all that is needed with an occasional email.

There may well not be any overtime, even, but there's no way to know that either. The only standard of whether the situation is fair, might be how happy the employee is with the arrangement, and the flexibility it affords to be with their families and travel, etc.

With the McDonalds, there's a requirement to be on-site to manage; in the small business, you can accumulate work items and choose when to rapidly clear them in short bursts of moving info around, and it's just not realistic realistic or productively efficient to clock in remotely for 45 seconds when an action item comes in.

But that small business may be trying to expand, and not yet be able to pay $47K. The logical thing to do might be to agree on $36K with a bonus contingent on increased sales, etc.

This already involves a leap of faith, a risk, because it's a small business. But that can't be done under the new restrictive rules. It's asinine, frankly.