Imagine that some of our Congresspeople–Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Dennis Kucinich, and Robert Byrd, for example–formed a professional sports team. Baseball, basketball, football–take your pick.
Would anyone invest money in such a team? Would anyone go to watch it, for any purposes other than mockery? I think the answer is pretty obvious.
Well, the average Congressperson probably knows far more about sports than he knows about business. Almost certainly, he watches sports on TV…he may well have played himself in his younger days…whereas the typical Congressional knowledge of business is comparable to a baseball-watcher who doesn’t understand the difference between balls and strikes. Yet this Congress, with the encouragement of the Administration, is arrogating to itself the power to micromanage every business in the country in excruciating detail.
C Edmund Wright:
The big opportunity now is to spend government money: an eighteen-million-dollar government contract to create an awful Recovery.org website, SEIU union jobs in ObamaCare, bankruptcy lawyers, and perhaps carbon credit trades coming. There are ACORN-style crony contracts to be had, not to mention all the jobs created by the David Axelrod astroturfing media escapades. If you are connected or if your dream is to enrich yourself by killing the dreams of others, then the field is ripe for you.
But if you simply want to live some iteration of building a better mousetrap, this is not currently the country for you. And entrepreneurs can sense it. This is not about tax policy. It is not about health care. It is not about cap-and-trade. These are all terrible and need to be stopped, but most importantly, the dying American dream is in trouble…This kind of economy cannot work — not until pigs fly, or until Barney Frank dunks on Lebron James.
See also Michael Malone: Orphans of the Storm:
What does seem obvious is that the economy wants to recover. I can see it everywhere around me here in Silicon Valley – companies (notably the PC makers) putting out great new products, entrepreneurs writing business plans, talented people anxious to get back in harness. And I sense that’s true almost everywhere else in this country. Even the stock market rally seemed like a bull banging against a gate waiting to be unleashed.
But while we all may be ready to get back into the race, Washington – in whose hands our collective fate now sadly rests – may not be ready to let us.
..also Malone’s The PR Summit
…Jonah Goldberg on experimentation, uncertainty, and the economy
Front and center for me, being a business owner, is my crushing tax load. Personal taxes, business taxes, now perhaps a tax on my health care plan that I provide for my employees, rising taxes on the county and municipal level on everything from buildings to property, etc. etc. I have never seen it as bad as it has been this year and I expect it only to get worse. The rising taxes are making it harder and harder for a guy like me to justify going through all the things it takes to run my own business.
See also the Advice Goddess.