Is there anything Democrats can't do...to kill off America's innovators and entrepreneurs?

Sure as heck not, given their latest sneaky plan to discourage small — and I mean really small — businesses.

According to Jessica Pate, writing at Issues & Insights:

The INFORM Consumers act would impose new requirements and burdens on the millions of people who run small businesses. Similar bills introduced in more than a dozen state legislatures are generally supported by big-box retailers eager to siphon online money back to their stores. Lawmakers should reject them all.

On their face, the INFORM bills claim to make improvements to online marketplaces. In response to increasing instances of so-called "retail crime," including counterfeit goods and online scams, the bills would require every online seller above a certain volume to disclose their current business and contact information to be available and searchable online.

The threshold for "high volume" sellers who need to disclose their places of business to the public is literally $5,000 a year.  Broken down and averaged out, that's $426.67 a month, $104.17 a week, $14.88 a day, and a whopping $1.86 an hour.  Anyone making that kind of money from eBay sales of old clothes and unused sports equipment is now a "high volume seller" who needs to disclose his place of business to the public.  Anyone now with the grand label "high volume seller," in fact, makes many times less the federal minimum wage for his efforts.

Maybe federal employees making more than $5,000 a year should disclose their home addresses, too, given that so many of them are "selling" something.

Since most little eBay-type sellers as well as many start-up pioneers operating out of their garages don't have fixed business addresses and operate out of their homes, that means the public disclosure of home addresses in an easily searchable database by the public.

Sound like an incentive to succeed in a small business without having to buy an office space or an office building first?  It's either that or tell everyone out there where your home address is, because...counterfeits.  You may not be a counterfeiter, but you are now a suspected counterfeiter, and your address must be out there for the public, same as convicted child molesters' are.  It reminds me of an old Forbes story I helped do about why the Middle East was such a hellhole for entrepreneurs — in Egypt before you went into business, you had to buy a building first.  Over there it was because of rent control.  Over here, it's because Congress thinks you might be a counterfeiter.  And these congressional Democrats marketing it as such are sending a chilling message to all the entrepreneurs out there that you either get your privacy or your profits.  If you're a little guy who doesn't own a building for your tiny start-up innovation business, you simply aren't allowed to have both.

It's disgusting.  It's nothing but a phony leftist gaslight to discourage the formation of small businesses.  Who'd like to see that?  Why, the big retailers who didn't endure shutdowns during the COVID lockdowns yet who would like to sweep out all those pipsqueak startups who eat into "their" market share.  There are plenty of ways to catch counterfeiters and the criminal rings they operate, but that doesn't seem to excite Democrats the way this make-them-disclose-their-home-addresses bill does.

It comes at a time when leftists have begun using protests at people's homes as a standard Alinskyite "pick a target" tactic.  Some of these protests can be quite violent, indeed, and with a handy searchable database for leftist use, we can expect a lot more of it.  We've seen this cropping up with increasing frequency already from leftists, who've protested at the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, as well as the homes of bankers by their union buddies who owed them debts and a Walmart construction developer's home (read the details of that one).  There also was the attack by some leftist sicko on Sen. Rand Paul — at his home — which seriously injured him.  In recent weeks, the houseboat home of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin was targeted by leftists at the same time one of them was following Sen. Kyrsten Sinema into a public bathroom with film rolling.  In leftist eyes, they've all engaged in some kind of wrongthink, so targeting them at homes is fine. 

Good luck to the little fellow selling pro-Trump t-shirts now that he's got to publish his home address with this Democrat gaslight measure.

The short story here is that this bill doesn't target big counterfeiters; it targets the little guy.  It's very similar to the proposed Democrat measure of allowing the IRS to snoop into any bank account in America that has a $600 transaction in the name of hunting down billionaire tax cheats.  What that really targets is the little guy who cuts hair or babysits for a pittance and might not claim it on taxes.

Now they've come up with a new scheme to get the little guy with this $5,000 "high volume vendor" trash, which ultimately discourages the formation of small businesses, which must choose between privacy and profits.  Small businesses are vital to U.S. economic long-term growth, as they are the only way to eventually create big businesses that create jobs.  The mission here with this lousy bill is to stomp out entrepreneurship and start-ups forever and leave only big business and government to control all economic activity.  This is appalling and needs to be stomped out by all people who value American economic vitality right now. 

Image: Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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