PrintJuly 27, 2009
The Small Business Solution
Obama's efforts to "help" the economy are focused almost solely on propping up giant corporations and vast labor unions. He seems to believe that these organizational behemoths are the key to employment, productivity, and wealth in America. This is how authoritarians think: Big government, big business, and big labor pressed into a common purpose will make life better.
Economic reality is very different. Jobs, particularly highly productive jobs, are created through small businesses. Small business owners are incomparably more flexible than vast corporations. They have tiny, almost nonexistent, bureaucracies. They frequently offer workers an excellent opportunity to evolve into partners, becoming employers and owners themselves.
While Obama flounders for yet another economic miracle, Republicans should be staking out the promotion of small business, the acquisition of small enterprises by Americans, the proliferation of home businesses, and the decentralization of our economy as their turf: the loud, clear, and consistent voice of real economic reform and revitalization.
Bigness in any form is not the friend of economic efficiency or conservative values. We who have for decades defended giant corporations should not stop defending free enterprise, including the economic liberty of giant corporations, but we should seriously rethink where we focus our attention in trying to make America great again.
It is absurd that corporate executives with huge salaries are considered wedded to conservatives, and yet they are almost slavish in their devotion to the Left. These behemoths have had advertising campaigns closely tied to the goals of the Left (e.g. making everything "Green") and their campaign contributions support Democrats more than Republicans. Government help is almost always directed at keeping these megacorpations viable, whether they deserve it or not.
Small enterprise has few political friends in Washington. Its owners and workers produce real wealth (or the business folds quickly) and, perhaps most importantly, these small businesses truly represent America in a way that giant corporations do not. This is not populism. It would be immoral and silly to try to punish any business which produces goods and services that Americans want.
But there is much to be said for shifting the attention of federal help from leviathans like General Motors, whose unions make them uneconomical and whose large corporate salaries make them convenient whipping-boys in the public media, and instead making the spread of entrepreneurial spirit the primary focus of all plans to make our economy grow.
If Democrats and the Left want to paint themselves into the corner of defending big government, big business, and big labor -- fine! -- those groups are already in their pockets, they are already highly politicized, and they are already a heavy drag on our economy. Let conservatives and Republicans, instead, stand up for the smaller businesses, who are our friends and who are already the friends of the American ideal.
Why not, for example, propose for every existing business with annual sales of less than $1 Million a tax credit for any new employees hired during the next twelve months? Unless these workers were productive, no small business would have a reason to hire the employees, but if the new employees were productive, small business would have a much stronger incentive to take the risk of expanding operations with this sort of tax credit. Small businesses are naturally lean. New employees of small businesses would quickly learn a variety of new job skills and learn about the free enterprise system, not in the bowels of some giant corporation but in the everyday dealing with customers and clients.
Why not lower the income tax rate for individuals whose incomes are derived from small business enterprise? Make small businesses, not the corporate ladder, the easiest path to succeed in America. There are many ways in which the federal government could actively promote small, robust, responsive businesses to assume a greater role in our national economy. And this would also mean government could "allow" ill run small businesses to fail. Closing down General Motors became "unthinkable" because it was so huge. Its very bigness made us as much its hostage as it was our hostage. We need an economy in which the successful succeed and the failures fail. We are quickly moving away from that model.
Finally, by emphatically shifting the focus of the economic debate from the huge, conspicuous entities into the owner-operators of millions of ordinary Americans, we can make Leftist Democrats appear to be what, in fact, they are: enthusiastic champions of gigantism in all aspects of our life, because it is infinitely easier to control a few hundred corporations than a few hundred thousand small, flourishing businesses.
A small business solution to our economic malaise need not include subsides or loan guarantees or ownership by the federal government. It is a concept which Americans understand and which has a natural appeal to the alienation which gigantism has created in our lives. Republicans, in the clearest terms possible, could be the champion of the little guy. Leave Obama in the position of adopting our policies, continuing his failed policies, or doing nothing really at all.
Americans are ready for a new course between being placing our destinies in the hands of the federal government, gigantic corporations, and bloated labor unions on the one hand, and ordinary small businesses on the other hand. Let us give them that choice.
Bruce Walker is the author of two books: Sinisterism: Secular Religion of the Lie, and his recently published book, The Swastika against the Cross: The Nazi War on Christianity.
