They say it would be funny if it weren't sad. If you had to deal with curiosities of market regulations, you wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. Entrepreneur and poet Dalia Teišerskytė delivered to LFMI's conference on business deregulation a presentation which both moved and amused many conference participants. The presentation follows.

Dear colleauges, government should be neither good nor bad. It should only abide by public opinion and seek through its programmes to balance the interests of different layers of society. The extent to which entrepreneur interests are safeguarded determines the quality of the business climate. Business people may not be the most important group but they certainly contribute the lion's share to government funding.

As a small-scale entrepreneur-practitioner (such account for about 90 percent of the business community), I feel that governmental impediments to business activity are too many in number. I believe that the employer and the employee are two mentally healthy individuals responsible for their actions and should have a right to match their interests without any outside interference. We know pretty well what happens if a third party interferes in a husband and wife's relationships. A limited liability company is of limited liability because it wants to avoid others poking their noses where unnecessary. Lithuania's bureaucratic system stifles entrepreneurship and private initiative. It is the biggest constraint to our work. In Lithuania there are more than half a hundred inspecting authorities, there are about twenty institutions with penal powers, and there is one million dependants. All of them need to be fed, shoed and dressed. And some in a particularly nice and copious manner.

At the same time entrepreneurs must comply with thirteen thousand laws and supporting acts and regulations, including very dumb, drastic, contradictory and humiliating ones. Two such laws saw the light of day quite recently. One of them allows Lithuanians to breed worms. The other is especially interesting for me as a cosmetics vendor as it allows functionaries to inspect napkins and dipers for ethyl alcohol.

Let me give you a few more examples from my own experience. It annoys me that an electrician must be paid 300 litas for a half-an-hour job. Every firm, you know, even the tiniest one, must keep at least half an electrician. This costs 315 litas plus social security and other taxes. I pay my electrician all this money at the end of a month for having him screw in a bulb one afternoon. It also frustrates me that I have to pay my employees certain statutory wages on a given day and necessarily twice a month.

I don't like to pay corporate income tax and value added tax in advance. In general I don't like to credit the state without receiving any interest in return. I don't like it because when I am credited by the state or a bank, I pay very high interest plus very heavy fines in case of I fail to discharge my liabilities.

Even when a firm is being liquidated or suspended, it must keep at least half a director and half an accountant. These two cannot even be merged into one. And another interesting thing. When, for example, I bring from France a two-thousand-dollar apparatus for sterilising instruments, a lady from the Hygiene Service shows up to tell me that the apparatus should have a cord like those of old Soviet irons. Otherwise, no one will allow me to certify that apparatus, which, amon other things, kills even the AIDS virus. And when I explain to that lady that our sissors have platinum points and that this very sterilising apparatus serves to preserve them, she suggests that, to be on the safe side, I should soak them in a three-percent soda solution. Because that's what the instructions say.

If this is not stupid enough, let me cite a few requirements prescribed in the recently adopted rules of maintaining beauty salons and haidresser shops. They say that hair must be collected in a centralised manner and burnt afterwards. Why and how? God knows. The requirements also state that the height of the premises must be at least 1.8 meters. Otherwise you will have to crawl on all fours. Also I like the rule that a hairdresser's shop must keep an enamelled dish for bloodstained instruments. And how about the requirement that the balance of warmth and air on the premises should correspond to the amount of warmth and gas emitted by the client and the employee. So such are laws that surround us and if we fail to follow them we will either go bust or get a bad name.

Now in earnest, the state, which was the only employer for 50 years, is reluctant to forego this function. It doesn't want to delegate these rights to the real employer and to lose the opportunity to make easy money.

Coercively collected money is squandered with total impunity on satisfying official whims. There is hardly any better business than that of bureaucracts, who are conceded the right to decide, to prohibit, to pry, to convict, to humiliate and to scorn without assuming any responsibility for their actions.

Therefore, dear sirs and madams, I've quit business and am going into government!