"In fact, Mr. Dyson, Britain's most famous manufacturer, doesn't actually manufacture anything in Britain. He hasn't done so for 10 years, since he was refused local permission to expand his Wiltshire factory"<p>That's it right there. He wasn't allowed to expand his factory. Presumably it was on land he already owned, right? It was an existing factory. He had to get <i>permission</i> to grow the economy by expanding, and that <i>permission</i> was denied.<p>That's the core of it.<p>So long as you need government permission to do anything, and that permission comes from someone who has no incentive to give it, and plenty of incentives to deny it (e.g.: covering their butt) this trend will continue.<p>The british (and US) culture is "you have to get permission before you do anything", and that's a form of regulation that is really harmful to growth. That gives a lot of power to people who can be petty... but it also creates a lot of make work jobs that are politically very valuable (because , you see, donate to the right campaigns and your permission comes very easy. Donate to the wrong person and you have trouble doing anything.)<p>The correct form of regulation is after the fact- if you do something wrong, violate someone's human or property rights, then you are punished.<p>Its not like the permit based system is doing any review (that's the excuse but they rarely are funded well enough to really do this).<p>I remember a friend who lived in central california who wanted to build a house. He was in an earthquake area and as a geologist he mapped out the fault lines and knew the relationship to his property of the nearest fault and thus the specific danger. He had a house designed that would withstand an earthquake on that fault and wanted to build it. He wasn't allowed to do that-- because his design was not the off the shelf slab house design. Liquifation makes slab houses very poor in an earthquake, but that is what the kid in the permit office was able to approve. He was literally forced to build a house that was unsafe to live in, because he couldn't get permits to build a safe one. They had no interest in doing an engineering review (that costs money) or in seeing the work of the engineers he'd hired. It was total joke. His alternative was simply to sell the land and move to another state.... instead he built his house (it was his dream house after all) only on a foundation that he knows will not survive the earthquake.