Not politically minded but…
As should be obvious at this point, I am a small business person. I own small businesses, I cater to them, and prefer to patronize them. I also find myself increasingly motivated to speak out against the way small business is being treated. This is a difficult thing for me to do, largely because I am not strongly politically motivated or inclined. Politics is a conversation I would prefer to skip altogether. Unfortunately, politics as usual has become a severe detriment to the quality of life of the small business owner.
As I see it, we have two problems. The smaller of the two is the assumption that ‘owning a business’ translates to ‘being “rich”’. It doesn’t. Most small business owners are struggling to make ends meet even harder than the typical union laborer. Sure in good months the income is better, but in the lean months, well, Top Ramen is sometimes all the budget will allow, and even that can be tight. I have been there. As a business owner, I know that possibility is always right around the corner if I screw up. There is no bailout money for me. By the numbers, for small businesses, failure is far more likely than success, and those failures have huge personal costs.
But that is not the bigger problem.
The real problem is that this country used to be run by the entrepreneurs. Somewhere along the way, we lost track and we turned the reigns over to the worst possible groups of people to run this country. We gave all the power to the lawyers and the penny pinching accountants. Neither of these groups are suited leading a country built on the shoulders of the small business. The problems they are causing are as broad in spectrum as they are narrow in focus.
In short, we as a country have lost our way. We have made it attractive to follow. True entrepreneurs have become the exception, and more importantly, the costs of doing business have become increasingly problematic.
What do I mean by this? well, the issues cross a broad number of spectrums, but let’s examine a few of the more egregious areas.
Wall Street (The Accountants)
Wall Street has become a major focus of the nation over the last year courtesy of the Occupy movements, but really, the wall street problem extends far beyond the targets, and the proposed ‘solutions’ of the occupy protesters amount to little more than welfare. They are not wrong about wall street being the problem, but they are wrong about the solutions.
The core problem here is the inordinate amount of power that wall street wields over publicly traded companies. The power they have over the flow of money is such that companies are no longer making good decisions about the ‘long term’ if there is a risk of ‘short term’ negativity on wall street. That short term impact prevents many companies from being able to secure or manage the money required to make good long term decisions. Only the rare company is willing to thumb their nose at wall street and make sound long term decisions. In most of those instances, they are companies that are already cash rich and can make those long term investments, or take those losses because they are not beholden to wall streets good graces to secure the financing to make them happen.
Look no further than the impressions people have of companies based upon words like ‘market cap’ and ‘stock price’, or ‘earnings per share’.
There are other examples, but really it all boils down to this. Once a company has grown to a point where it goes public, every decision it makes is now at the mercy of the wall street analysts. They like to use the words ‘investors’. Investor implies an investment into a company for the betterment of the company, and long term financial gains. Wall Street is not about investment, it is the equivalent of ‘flipping’. It is about short term profit, to hell with anyone that gets hurt in the process. There is no more destructive force in business than watching companies try to please wall street in the short term. Still have doubts, dig into the causes behind the DotCom bubble or even the banking crisis that we are still trying to recover from.
Washington (The Lawyers)
Then there is the other group, the lawyers. The lawyers have become a self perpetuating disease in this country. They are systematically destroying everything that this country was built on. Between the nanny state, lobbyist funded special interest lawmaking, patent abuse, copyright abuse and general mismanagement of of lawyer dominated government it is a marvel that anything gets done. This hasn’t even touched on the other gorilla in the room, which is tax law.
The nanny state really does not need much discussion, I think it is self evident. The government has intruded itself into more and more of our lives, and yet everytime some group of people gets upset over choices others are making, they go charging the government with ‘fixing it’. Abortion? really? I am free to believe that the tooth fairy is not only real, but the supreme deity but I am obligated to honor the religious right’s beliefs of when ‘life’ begins? don’t get me wrong, I disapprove of abortion, but it is not my place to judge another over the choice. It is no more my right to judge you for your religion or lack thereof. The government we have elected has no business involving themselves in the debate either. It is generally accepted that the parents of children have the right to make life or death decisions regarding minors in their care, yet when it comes to the unborn child, those rights are abrogated.
How many billions of dollars have been spent by the government on this nanny state issue alone? I do not want to think about it.
But this leads right into the next part of the lawyer problem; the special interests. The last several years have established that there is no power greater than that of the special interests in the US. Why are gas alternatives so slow to become viable? because we have had massive investment dollars by the special interests lobbyist to prevent them or slow them down, or to subsidize the worst alternatives. All the while we have lobbyists throwing money at other lawyers and politicians to prevent other alternatives because they aren’t ‘green’ enough. This is not about single industries either. Look at copyright law. Who is funding legislation like the DMCA, COPA, and SOPA? Following the money trail and the advocates and it sure looks like the MPAA and RIAA. Both entities that serve to make the most money by leveraging overreaching laws that are built to compromise basic tenants of ‘fair-use’ and what constitutes ‘ownership’.
Of course, that leads us to patent and copyright abuse. Guess who is making the money there ? the lawyers. If you have ever filed a patent, or been involved in a dispute involving either, you quickly understand the most fundamental principal of modern law. It doesn’t matter who wins or loses in a lawsuit, the only people that profit from a lawsuit is the lawyers. Patents haven’t been used to protect the entrepreneur in years. They have evolved to do one thing, make lawyers rich, and the murky precept of Intellectual Property’ is an extension of that.
So here we go again, ramping up for another big election year. Look at our most likely options for president.
1. A physician that has been a politician for 35 years.
2. A lawyer that has been a politician for 15 years
3. An “investment” businessman turned politician for 10 years
4. A history & geography professor that was denied tenure at a small college in GA that has been in politics for 35 years
Personally, I see nothing that promising in any of the options. None of the options have articulated anything that says that they even grasp the real problems we face. Our problems can’t be fixed with rhetoric. They are going to require an enormous amount of discomfort for a huge cross section of people in this country. It means deep cultural changes in addition to political changes. Electing a president isn’t enough. It means getting involved in changing the culture at a grass roots level.
It means getting back to our roots; Encouraging the entrepreneur; Building the small business; relearning how to be the best at manufacturing, distribution, logistics and innovation.
Stop following. Stop letting Wall Street dictating how businesses are run. Stop protecting big companies behind the legal walls of bogus patents and overreaching copyright laws. Remember the Liaise Faire concepts that helped Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniack, Paul Allen and Bill Gates build their businesses. Few of these could succeed in the hostile to non-venture funded startups and lawyer funded patent warfare.
