by Tyler Durden via Charles Hugh Smith
If you make it increasingly costly and risky to open a small enterprise, then no wonder unemployment remains high.
You hear a lot about Kafkaesque stifling bureaucracy in
Greece and other struggling European nations, but America's Status Quo
is trying its best to destroy small enterprise with taxes and crushing
bureaucracy. I am self-employed, and have been for most of my
life. When I did take a paid position, it was in other small enterprises
or local non-profit organizations.
I mention this because there is an unbridgeable divide in any
discussion of small business between those who have no experience in
entrepreneural enterprise (i.e. they've worked for the government,
NGOs/non-profits or Corporate America their entire careers) and those
who have.
There are all sorts of similar chasms that cannot be crossed and
which quickly reveal a surreal disconnect from actual lived reality: for
example, the difference between actually playing football--yes, with
pads, a muddy field and guys trying to slam you to the ground--and being
an armchair quarterback who's never been hit even once, never caught a
pass or ever struggled to bring down a faster, bigger player. (And yes, I
did play football in high school as a poor dumb skinny kid who mostly
warmed the bench for good reason, but I lettered.)
At the extreme of this disconnect, we have armchair generals
screaming for war who have no experience of combat or war as it is
actually experienced.
You get the point: it's very easy for well-paid pundits who
have never started a single real enterprise or met a single payroll to
pontificate about "opportunity" and small business as the engine of
growth, blah blah blah. It's also easy for those with no actual
experience to reach all sorts of absurd conclusions about how easy it
is to turn a small business into great wealth. (No, Bain Capital or
other Wall Street outposts of financialization are not "small
business.")
In real life, it's only easy to run a small business into the
ground, especially when there's a thousand tons of junk fees, taxes and
useless bureaucratic requirements on your back. Lest you think this an exaggeration, consider that it took two years and $200,000 to open an ice cream parlor in a vacant retail space
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http://www.zerohedge.com/news/guest-post-small-business-america-burdened-crushed-doomed
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