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One of the most dangerous illusions in leadership is confusing effort with progress.
Throughout my career as an entrepreneur and founder of multiple businesses, the phrase “stacking paper” echoed through our offices. It wasn’t just a saying it was part of our culture, part of our internal language. If someone asked, “Are you stacking paper?” everyone knew exactly what it meant. It was a warning disguised as a question.
Picture this.
James stays up all night before a major presentation, not preparing strategy or refining ideas, but meticulously stacking loose-leaf paper sheet after sheet, perfectly aligned, not a corner out of place. Each page placed with surgical precision, one on top of the other. By morning, the column reaches twelve feet high, touching the ceiling. Exhausted by the “all nighter” that was just completed, you walk into the meeting and James proudly says, “Look at how hard I worked to create this. Look how great it is”.
What is your first reaction upon seeing a perfectly stacked column of paper? What would you think? What would you say? Probably something like: Why? Why would you do something extremely well that never needed to be done in the first place?
That, my friends, is stacking paper. And it happens in South Carolina government every day.
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Stacking paper is when we get really good at accomplishing something that never needed to be completed in the first place. It’s perfecting inefficiency. It’s polishing policy. It’s building systems to manage the consequences of other broken systems. It’s assigning twenty people to organize a filing cabinet instead of asking why we still need the filing cabinet at all.
And nowhere in South Carolina is this more expensive, more dangerous, or more normalized than in our state government.
We live in a time when “productivity” is celebrated, but effectiveness is forgotten. Politicians hold press conferences about new programs. Bureaucracies brag about implementation. Agencies regulate their regulations. All of this looks like action. It creates paperwork, job titles and meetings – but does it create value?
In business, you don’t survive very long doing this. If you waste your capital building inefficiencies, you go out of business. The market holds you accountable. But government operates in a system where failure is often rewarded with more funding instead of reform. When programs don’t work, we don’t remove them – we expand them.
And the cost doesn’t come from some abstract “state budget.” It comes from you and me. It comes from hard working families.
We’ve normalized the idea that government inefficiency is just the cost of democracy. It is not. It is the cost of low expectations.
A good example of this stacking-paper mentality can be found in South Carolina’s occupational licensing laws.
Today, it takes more training hours in South Carolina to become a licensed cosmetologist than it does to become an EMT, a police officer, or even an airline pilot. We require 1,500 hours of schooling for someone who simply wants to shampoo, blow-dry, or style hair even if they never touch chemicals or scissors.
Under current law, a stylist technically cannot do hair and makeup for a wedding unless they are operating out of a licensed brick-and-mortar salon. This is because South Carolina is one of only 13 states that still requires a license for hair braiding, one of the lowest-risk services imaginable.
Even beauty school lobbyists have admitted that many people are now doing these services illegally – the result? More regulation, more enforcement, more compliance, more cost.
Seriously, what problem are we really trying to solve here? That’s stacking paper. Instead of fixing an outdated system, we just add another layer of pressure and punishment on top of it.
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This isn’t isolated. According to the Mercatus Center, the South Carolina Code of Regulations contains more than 83,000 regulatory restrictions. Many were written for problems that no longer exist. Many overlap. Many contradicts. Entire departments exist not to solve problems, but to manage the consequences of other departments.
That’s not leadership, that’s laziness.
So, who writes these laws and helps create the regulations? Simply, it is those who have been professionally trained to do so. Today, roughly 32% of the South Carolina General Assembly and our current governor have legal backgrounds, while less than two-tenths of one percent of South Carolinians are practicing attorneys.
This is not a criticism of lawyers. We need attorneys. We benefit from their training, their discipline and their role in protecting justice and rights.
But when our state legislature is dominated and subjugated by any single profession – whether lawyers, bankers, educators, or engineers – decision making naturally begins to reflect the mindset and instincts of that profession. Not due to bad intentions, but because different training produces different instincts.
Legal training focuses heavily on risk mitigation, compliance, and regulation. Those are important, but if they become the dominant lens of governance, policy starts to tilt toward managing liability instead of unlocking opportunity, growth, and innovation.
Healthy leadership should reflect the diversity of the people it serves, and not just in background or ideology, but in professional experience: builders, job creators, tradesmen, healthcare workers, educators, entrepreneurs and yes, attorneys, all bringing their perspectives to the table.
A business owner asks: Is this sustainable?
A job creator asks: Does this create growth or dependency?
A builder asks: Does this scale?
A steward asks: Is this worth the actual cost?
These questions matter.
Because here’s the truth. You can’t regulate your way into prosperity. You can’t tax your way into efficiency. You can’t sue your way to growth. And you can’t legislate your way around bad design – yet that’s exactly what we keep trying to do.
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When government runs out of ideas, the default solution is almost always the same: raise more money: New tax. New fee. New bond. Expanded budget.
Because we convince ourselves the problem isn’t how resources are being used, it’s that we don’t have enough. What if that isn’t true? What if the real issue is not a lack of resources… but a lack of resourcefulness?
South Carolina families learn resourcefulness when times get tough – they cut back, they rethink priorities, they adapt and make hard choices. When is it Columbia’s turn to do the same? What if instead of asking, “Which taxes can we raise?” we started asking, “Which regulations, programs, and agencies can we finally remove?”
Every strong organization eventually learns a simple truth: growth doesn’t come from constantly adding more. It comes from eliminating what doesn’t work.
Until government stops stacking paper, until it stops building layers of law on top of laws that manage symptoms instead of solving root causes, nothing changes. The costs get higher, the systems more complex, and families feel it in their cost of living, year after year.
So here is what we must do. In next year’s elections, citizens must expect more than motion. We must vote for more than speeches. We must support those who create, not those who only regulate.
It’s time to raise the standard from:
“They did something” to “They solved something.”
“They passed a bill” to “They prevented a problem.”
“They are working on that program” to “They are leading towards our vision.”
Leadership isn’t always about how many things you start. Often, it’s about how many unnecessary things you finally stop. So let us start by stopping.
Until we stop rewarding elected officials for how much they add, instead of how much they remove, we’ll keep getting exactly what we’ve paid for: a government that stays busy while the real problems stay unsolved.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Johnnie Garmon is the author of Failure Disrupted “Clear Milestones for Entrepreneur & Business Leader Success” and a candidate for SC House District 115 that represents Kiawah Island, Seabrook Island, Folly Beach, and parts of Johns & James Island SC. For more information visit www.TogetherWithGarmon.com
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3 comments
How does “you cannot sue your way to growth” have anything to do with this article? It’s fascinating that everyone is so upset about lawyers writing the laws but we see when inefficient and incompetent people get in charge what happens.
It’s happening now. Hard to believe because this blog doesn’t actually have any grit at all and would never in 1 million years question the powers that be.
This is a pretty good article. But like everything at this blog, it has an agenda. Whatever you paid Will for this platform is silly. There’s other ways to get your message out.
1,500 words to say how smart he is, how dumb everyone else is, and offer no ideas for the District besides less regulated hair braiding and a confusing reference to suing? He sounds like a Democrat but its hard to tell these days.
I hope he wins so he can come to Panama and “see the canal” with House leadership. I can tell this one is in the liquor and ladies caucus.
And Joshua Kenrick, stop drunk commenting and insulting Will, take it from this lady of the night, the bully pulpit is all his, and no on reads the comments except the ego maniacs that write opeds and pay to have them published.
Haha. Not drunk commenting, but that might not be a terrible idea. The rest of your point, though, is well taken.