My family ran a successful business for 100 years. My great grandfather Napoleon Bail, an immigrant from Quebec, arrived in the United States in 1872 at the age of six, and by his twenties, had started what would become Napoleon Bail Shoe Store and Repair Factory. It became of mainstay of downtown Holyoke. Until the Great Depression, the business made much of its money selling shoes. When the Depression hit, the repair factory kept the store afloat. People couldn’t afford to buy shoes and instead spent more money fixing what they had. Repairs might not have been enough to support the family and its workers either, but my grandfather sought out and obtained a contract with the Civilian Conservation Corps to repair their shoes. Those contracts carried our family business through dark times. It would never have occurred to any of my family (which weren’t all Democrats) to claim they had done it on their own.
By the 1980s, the shoe business had changed. Shoes were no longer built to last. Everyone was wearing sneakers that were made cheaply in foreign countries. When they wore out, people threw them out. Malls were replacing down towns, and big chain stores were selling shoes. Independent business were dying. They continue to die. There are a lot of reasons for their deaths, but they have little to do with Scott Brown’s
This anti-free enterprise attitude, epitomized by Elizabeth Warren, the liberal Harvard professor who has made it the calling card of her Senate campaign against me, is that every achievement in life is a collective effort….
These entrepreneurs understand — better than any politician — where small businesses fit in the community, and how, in a free society, we all depend on one another….
Only the most rigid ideologue would come along and insist that these men and women — the ones who do most of the hiring in America — have failed in some duty to their communities or to their country.
America’s entrepreneurs have built great things on their own. If only leftists like Warren and all Occupy protesters weren’t so wrapped up in taxing and regulating them without end or in denigrating their achievements, these men and women would do even greater things and hire even more workers.
Here you have it. The problem with unemployment is big government and “leftists” (like Brown would recognize a leftist is he met one). Only an idiot actually believes this, and although I have serious reservations about our junior senator’s mental acuity, I don’t think he or Eric Geppetto Ferhnstrom think that big government and taxes are the problem. They are selling what Greg Sargent calls a “bill of goods.” It doesn’t matter what the economic question is, the Republican answer is always lower taxes and less regulation. As David Atkins points out about Brown’s statement,
There is nothing in this statement that isn’t a lie. Taxes? They’re at their lowest point in 60 years, especially on the wealthy. Income inequality? At or near record highs. The stock market? Still doing much better than the real economy, with the Dow Jones up near a nosebleed-worthy 13,000–nearly 4,000 points ahead of where it was when President Obama took office. Oh, and the reason we’re in this economic slump in the first place? Deregulation was the primary cause. So where are all the jobs?
The entrepreneurial myth is what’s new, and although it may appeal to small business (an extremely broad term that includes everyone from who sells Avon to corporate startups) owners, it’s crap.
Scott Brown is peddling full-bore Ayn Rand Objectivism: the business owner as epic hero, struggling to succeed to provide jobs to the ungrateful and parasitic masses. In reality, of course, corporations aren’t in the business of creating jobs: they’re in the business of making profits for shareholders and investors. If they can do so by hiring fewer workers and paying them less, they’ll do it in a heartbeat. The success of small business depends on the infrastructure our taxes pay for, and a healthy consumer base willing and able to purchase products. The biggest threat to small businesses is the predation of big business forcing them out of the market. The biggest destabilizing threats to general prosperity going forward are the financialized casino economy in the short term, and the effects of climate change in the long term.
The biggest threat to small business these days is not government, it’s big business, which is doing all right, especially given the economy. The mom and pop convenience store down the street and the 60 year-old pharmacy in my town are both threatened by a new CVS and the currently expanding Cumberland Farms store. Small business owners may support Scott Brown, but it’s not not big government they have to worry about, it’s corporate America and the Randian rhetoric that appeals to their egos as it threatens their livelihoods.
but it’s only a snapshot of one trend, as is Brown’s assessment of small business’ problems.
We are probably a medium business.
Without revealing my company, suffice to say that we are in an industry where revenues are being hammered by long term trends. These include:
Foreign competition has taken over the low end of our industry
There is too much capacity in our industry and that has impacted prices
Technology trends are reducing demand for our products
So where is government in this? Well….
We are continually forced into new administrative health care compliance activities
Our health insurance costs increase, partially driven by things like MA health insurance mandates (great, I can get free in-vitro fertilization, and 40 other things paid for).
Our electricity costs in MA are twice what they are for our operations in the Midwest (and alternative energy mandates are forcing them higher).
We can’t do things like hire contractors because of restrictive MA contractor laws. If you get let go (because of our downsizing) we can’t keep using you part time as a contractor, it’s unemployment as the only option.
Also due to our industry we are paying the full 35% corporate tax rate.
It’s these types of things that people need to understand are not helping businesses.
The family split and a cousin started his own store down the street. The store was so dead that I used to spend hours talking with my great uncle who was a right-wing Catholic. He used to give me stuff from Phyllis Schlafly and Reed Irvine. Newsletters and pamphlets in those in those days. We got pretty close and then I went away to college.
After college, I worked in an independent bookstore that was just trying to compete with the big box bookstores that put chains like Walden’s out of business. My bookstore is still there, but with digitalization and Amazon selling books, business is tough there too.
I kept coming in at the end of an era.
I think most people just want to work at jobs. It has taken me a long time to figure out that I’m not suited for it, and if I’m going to make a go at what I do, it will have to be on my own.
Very few people try this and many fewer succeed. I haven’t succeeded. But going after the 1% or the 3% is hitting the few who make this thing go. By definition they’re going to be unequal.
As far as Ayn Rand goes, I would encourage every young person to read her. I don’t like her books now, and sure it’s a myth, but it’s a myth that makes young people try to build something new.
I see “you didn’t build that” when applied to startups and local small business as an attempt by the old to try to cut off advancement by the young. If Obama or Warren directed their words at the financial elite I would be on board. Why haven’t they?
“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.” — John Rogers
This has been helping our business, but electric rates in MA are way to high. The firm in our building previously departed for the south for electricity at lower rates
are we able to get gas out of the ground, where we thought it was impossible.
Thank goodness it is safe and relatively easy to do.
MA has one of the highest electrical rates in the nation. Why Cape Wind is a dumb idea.
Now you know
http://elizabethwarren.com/blog/meet-our-volunteer-db-reiff
Because Now DanFromWaltham is going to be crying his poor little eyes out and then he will be demanding to see the GPAs and Transcripts from every Democrat running for office this year.
Boo Hoo Hoo.
idiot, but not in so many words.
http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/241431-elizabeth-warren-walks-back-save-capitalism-story
She actually said this
On Sunday Warren said in an interview with National Journal that occasionally a successful Wall Street businessperson will come along and say they support her because they felt she would save capitalism.
n/t
Excuse me. I need another beer.
Happy days
has a very interesting column that speaks to this:
Sometimes he’s really thoughtful and gets it. Other times, he’s Thomas Friedman with glasses.
This column, of course, is chock full of unsubstantiated assertions. (“Believe this in your thirties and forties for better outcomes!”) What makes up for it is the poetry of its construction and the psychological insight that accompanies it.
When the poetry isn’t as good or the assertions have more important consequences, yes, he can be Thomas Friedman without the mustache.
“In short, as maturity develops and the perspectives widen, the smaller the power of the individual appears, and the greater the power of those forces flowing through the individual.”
-Brooks
Brooks’ assertion seems to undermine Churchill’s. I wonder how they feel about that at the club?
Churchill’s quote was stupid. People with well-developed political points of view can trace their beliefs back to basic assumptions about human nature and society. That’s true regardless of both sides of the political perspective. Barring a close examination of those assumptions and corresponding change of thought, a shift to conservatism in later years has little to do with wisdom.
a nagging sense of personal failure or regret.
Wow, was it good!!!! What Republican wil do an ad for EW? Perhaps Jane Swift?????
n/t
WASHINGTON — Vietnam veteran Doug Sterner, the inspiration for Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown’s recently introduced Stolen Valor Act, is endorsing Brown’s Democratic opponent for Senate, he told The Huffington Post.
I think I just heard an ad for Brown the other day from a Worcester City Councilor, whose name escapes me, but who also identifies as a Democrat. Brown has always played up his supposed independence and can point to just enough votes to “prove” it. I think the strategy can be very effective and needs be countered, either by getting a Republican to likewise cross the party line as Dan suggests (though my choice would be Bill Weld if he would do it), or by hammering him on specific votes that are neither independent nor in line with MA voters.
I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Like you said, “who cares?”
debate performance and ground game. There’s an active ground game for Warren. Granby even has its own self-appointed committee.
… and he similarly endorsed Geo Dubya Bush in 2000. Fat lot of good that did him… and us.
And, speaking personally, just about the only thing that might get me to vote for someone other then Elizabeth Warren would be a Bill Weld endorsement.