At The Wall Street Journal, Anne
Jolis speaks to a tenacious British businessman battling against
arbitrary government regulation: Iron Maiden singer and “serial
entrepreneur” Bruce Dickinson, who recently opened the airline
maintenance firm Cardiff Aviation Ltd. Here’s a snippet from her
superb profile of the man who went “from heavy metal to heavy
industry”:

“Clearly aviation is a highly regulated industry, and it does
take time for the wheels to grind,” Mr. Dickinson says carefully.
At first glance, he almost blends in with the dark-suited bankers
milling through the courtyard of the Royal Exchange. Look closer
and you’ll spot the rocker, his navy suit in pinwale corduroy, the
hair a good two fingers longer than City standard.

While governments like to tout their courtship of skilled
manufacturing jobs, in practice “civil servants, on some level, are
almost institutionally prejudiced against entrepreneurial activity
and risk,” Mr. Dickinson goes on. “Of course nobody wants to return
to the dark ages, no one wants to return to fundamentally unsafe
work practices.” But he warns that overregulation and the
burgeoning “health and safety thing” add up to “an industry that is
eating itself, that has been created and is creating an entire
industry which will eventually consume manufacturing and
retailing.”

The result is that Cardiff Aviation, for instance, currently has
“five million dollars worth of heavy engineering machinery—we have
enough stuff in our hangar to build an airliner, let alone maintain
it,” says Mr. Dickinson. But the company is still waiting on its
certifications for heavy-duty work, and in the meantime, “we can’t
afford to have people sitting around doing nothing.”

Read the whole thing
here.