For John, BLUF: Obama Care could decimate small businesses of 50 or more employees, but encourage more folks to take the small business plunge. Nothing to see here; just move along.
The InstaPundit put up a short post (with link) suggesting The Reid/Pelosi Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (all 2700 or so pages) would tend to limit the size of small businesses to under 50 employees.
GETTING IT FAST AND HARD (CONT’D): How ObamaCare will keep unemployment high — by forcing small companies to cut their workforce to fewer than 50 people.I don't disagree, but I see it as a move that will stimulate the growth of the number of small businesses.
As I responded to Professor Reynolds:
The markets will still be there, looking for people to fill their needs.In this I got a Roger from The Other Cliff. Yes, this tends to reduce us to a nation of shopkeepers, and that is a good thing. More opportunities for more entrepreneurs.
Let's hear it for the 49ers!
Regards — Cliff
"A nation of shopkeepers" is not a particularly wonderful goal to work toward. "Yes" it will create a modicum of jobs, but as with all shops, local, not regional or national. With that, much of America's "inventiveness" and world dominance will have been lost because it takes BIG money to do BIG things. Shopkeepers don't have that kind of dough.
ReplyDeleteWhy will shopkeepers stay local? The real reason lies in the implementation of Obamacare and the requirement of businesses of a certain size to provide health care to their employees, not to even get into the issue of "free" abortion prevention or delivery....this will drive many small businesses to convert to larger workforces (which will look nice politically) but will be composed of part time employees. Look for that to be the new labor force of the next four years if not forevermore. Part timers are comparatively cheap......and even cheaper if you are the proprietor of a "shop."
I would hasten to suggest too that the shopkeeper moniker carries with it a derogatory meaning as well as that of "salt of the earth." Shopkeepers tend not to think large and are necessarily risk averse. This is why England was derisively referred to as a "nation of shopkeepers."
What America needs in not more shops or shopkeepers. It needs a business climate and a social philosophy that encourages....no....demands a pioneer spirit that has as a core belief of self sufficiency.
The problem with that is that it is counter to the desires of those who believe in....demand....big government. The individualist then becomes an enemy of the state....a domestic terrorist....a 1 percenter.....except when they make more than $250k and can "afford" to pay "a little bit more."
There will be very few small businesses created and successfully operated in the next 4 years.
I think that is what Bonaparte thought, just a nation of shop keepers. But, Adam Smith liked it.
ReplyDeleteI am a small business Republican.
Regards — Cliff
I am a small business conservative as well. I believe that the strength of America has been the small businessman who is unfettered by government interference and restrictions on the ability to grow and prosper. I do not believe that there is anything in the current regime that encourages or enhances that sort of small businessperson ethos. The sort of small business that this regime envisions is a much constrained, much controlled, subservient sort of operation in which the proprietor is ever mindful that he or she "didn't build it themselves."
ReplyDeleteI don't know that Adam Smith "liked" the phrase. His reference to a nation of shopkeepers was much more attuned to a government run by a nation of shopkeepers.....and that is the very thing that Napoleon considered as making England unsuitable for war against France. Turns out....both were wrong in their assumptions.
The problem with economics is that it is, in the end, all theoretical and what works, works only in the context of time and place, and is generally not transferable across time and place.
BTW....Obama seems destined to prove Smith's posit that the division of labor would be the destructive end of a nation and its peoples.