(You Better) Take Care of Business, Mr. Business Man, by Martha Thomases- Brilliant Disguise | @MDWorld

February 7, 2015 Victor El-Khouri 0 Comments

In preparation for another election year, our elected representatives (and those who would like to be) are falling over each other to praise the small business.

I like small businesses.  My father started one with his partners (small in the sense that they didn’t employ more than a dozen people or so) and gave me a comfortable life.  Lots of people in my family work for small businesses.  So do my friends.  On a national scale, small businesses provide the most new jobs.

(The flip side of that is that most small business start-ups fail, costing their communities jobs as well as goods and services.  I know.  I started a small publishing business that failed.)

I’m in favor of making life easier for people who own small businesses, just as I am in favor of making everybody’s life easier in general.  However, that ease shouldn’t come at the expense of the greater public good.  To me, this makes obvious sense.  And yet, this is not obvious sense to a newly elected United States Senator.

You might have seen more about this story on Wednesday’s episode of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillson thinks that it’s wrong for government to force restaurant employees to wash their hands after they use the bathroom.  To him, the free market should determine the issue.  Let those restaurant owners who want to make their employees wash their hands use that as a marketing issue when competing against those restaurant owners who don’t.

In a perfect world, this might work.  We might also have unicorns and jetpacks (maybe even jetpacks for our unicorns).  In the real world that we inhabit, this situation would make a lot of people sick.

Okay, that’s an extreme example.  Not politically — Mr. Tillson is a United States Senator, not some afternoon talk show host — but I’m not trying to argue that conservatives want you to get diarrhea from an E Coli infection.  I’m saying that, from their own words, they put the interests of business owners ahead of the interests of the public at large.

Marco Rubio, another elected United States Senator, has a new book out, which he was recently promoting on TDS.  Like many in his party, he is trying to figure out a way to deal with income inequality while not going against his conservative values.  Mr. Rubio thinks that, instead of raising the minimum wage, the progressive proposal, we should instead increase the earned-income tax credit.  He says the families will benefit without threatening the profits of the small business owner, which might encourage the business to hire more workers.

This was an interesting idea to me, one I played with in my head for a while.  In the end, unfortunately, I think it’s just another government give-away.

Here’s the thing:  For the purposes of this discussion, I’m going to make an assumption — that Senator Rubio’s proposed EITC improves the wages of eligible families just as much as an increase in the minimum wage.  The working families are better off.  The business owner is better off (because he/she didn’t have to pay more to the workers).

Where did the money come from?  It came from the government.  It came from you and me.

Who derived the most benefit?  The business owner.  Our tax dollars paid the difference between the current minimum wage and the proposed living wage.  It’s similar to Wal-Mart and MacDonald’s and other large employers teaching their low-wage workers how to get food stamps and welfare.  The owners get the profits, and you and I, the taxpayers, pick up the slack.

Starting or buying a small business is a risk.  There are no guarantees of success, as this chart makes abundantly clear.  People who take risks are entitled to earn rewards when their risks pay off.  They are not, however, entitled to government assistance to prop up their profits.

If you can’t afford to pay a living wage, you can’t afford to hire anyone.  That’s the free market in my world.

Media Goddess Martha Thomases would still like that jetpack, but doesn’t really need one for her cat, who doesn’t like to go outside.