Business owners decide where and how capital is deployed, this determines where the jobs are and who is hired; they determine company policies as well, which their employees are required to abide by. Employees, earning their living from their employer, find that their own personal interests tend to be aligned with their employer’s. If my employer wants something to happen in my state, I’ll tend to support my employer’s position rather than oppose it, as it will be better for my career to not act contrary to my employer. Employees who “go against the grain” tend to be let go.
The wealthier a person is, the more influence they can have on society and politics; the wealthy are the leaders of society.
As people abandon the idea of owning and operating businesses, they lose much of their influence on politics and society.
Instead, being employees, they must simply follow the orders of their employers; go along to get along.
It’s not impossible to deal with tax and compliance issues; as the government throws things in your path, they need to be dealt with in an efficient way as possible (for example, the modern payroll service is a business opportunity to make a profit while offering small business cheap compliance). Outsourcing of complex compliance, a situation where a person with good compliance experience starts their own business and sells their services to many small customers, allows for small business to get similar economies of scale in that regard as large businesses.
The small business owner simply needs determination, a can-do attitude and some ingenuity, along with a huge dose of skeptical realism. Every time a problem arises, one has to first roll up one’s sleeves and research what current solutions there are in the marketplace. It’s amazing what’s available today.
All the garbage thrown at small business is done to scare decent people out of business, so they remain working and paying without ever accumulating any serious amount of wealth, even working in jobs where they fundamentally disagree with their employer’s ethics.
I agree with everything in your post. However, I have chosen to “go Galt” for the same reason John Galt did.
Your post could have been written by Dagney Taggart before she realized the futility of trying to continue to adjust to the new rules.
Some just see it sooner than others or just reach their limit sooner. I saw this coming when I was in high school. I graduated in 1972. I just assumed it would not hit a breaking point in my lifetime. I didn’t understand the law of compounding then. The reason things seem to be getting more unstable by the year, then by the month, and then by the week is that we are watching this happen before our very eyes:
“Imagine a magic pipette. It is magic because every drop of water that comes out of it will double in size every minute. So the first minute there is one drop, the second minute there are two drops, the third minute four drops, the fourth minute eight drops and so on… This is an example of exponential growth. Now, imagine a normal sized football stadium. In this stadium you are sitting on the seat at the very top of the stadium, with the best overview of the whole stadium. To make things more interesting, imagine the stadium is completely water-tight and that you cannot move from your seat. The first drop from the magic pipette is dropped right in the middle of the field, at 12pm. Here’s the question: Remembering that this drop grows exponentially by doubling in size every minute, how much time do you have to free yourself from the seat and leave the stadium before the water reaches your seat at the very top? Think about it for a moment. Is it hours, days, weeks, months?
“The answer: You have exactly until 12:49pm. It takes this tiny magic drop less than 50 minutes to fill a whole football stadium with water. This is impressive! But it gets better: At what time do you think the football stadium is still 93% empty? Take a guess.
“The answer: At 12:45pm. So, you sit and watch the drop growing, and after 45 minutes all you see is the playing field covered with water. And then, within four more minutes, the water fills the whole stadium. This means that you think you are safe because it seems that you have plenty of time left, whereas due to the exponential growth you really have to take immediate action if you want to have any chance of getting out of this situation.”
Personally, I think we are at 12:45 p.m. right now. The amount of change that has happened in just the last two years is staggering. And the next two years will bring far more.