“You did build that!”
That was the echo of the 2012 Republican campaign. Entrepreneurs were told to rally behind Mitt Romney-Paul Ryan. They did. About 60 percent of small businessmen supported Romney according to a summer 2012 poll.
Here’s one problem: very few people are small businessmen.
And if you listen to conservatives discuss the appeal of lower taxes and less regulation, the word you hear the most is “entrepreneurs.” Entrepreneur is defined many ways, but often it means “innovator,” or somebody building a business that can scale up. An entrepreneur, by some definitions, is a person whose business will change the way people live or businesses operate.
But if business owners are small minority, entrepreneurs are an infinitesimal minority. Many small-business owners are like your corner grocer, with no intention to expand. Your neighborhood dry cleaner isn’t trying to start a national chain. Your average realtor isn’t looking to add a big staff and become a manager.
This is an important realization as conservatives and libertarians start thinking about what sort of policies would help the economy and people. And it’s fruitful to drill down further.
Beyond the small-business owner is the person who might describe himself as “self-employed.” The freelance writer, the salesman. She’s got no employees, and probably doesn’t have an office. These people aren’t as likely as the entrepreneur to change the world. They may not even be “job creators,” in any meaningful way. But this is exactly the sort of person whom the believer in capitalism ought to celebrate — and see if there’s any change to public policy that would make life better for them.
But if you peer even further into the interesting nooks of the non-corporate economy, you see people engaging in business who probably wouldn’t even call themselves self-employed. The stay-at-home mom who runs a small day care out of her home — really babysitting three kids — may not think of herself as a businesswoman, but rather a mom who hustles to make ends meet. Same with the hobby photographer who shoots weddings to fill the family’s vacation fund. Or the single mom on welfare who paints postcards to calm her nerves, and then sells them.
These people might not fit your definition of entrepreneurs, and they’re not the standard image of small businesspeople. And again, they may not even think of themselves as “self-employed.”
But these are people trying to improve their own lot, or their own family’s lot through independent hard work. Conservatives concerned with helping people ought to think about these people more.
I thought of all of these matters because of this infuriating story by Melanie Armstrong, who took up African hair-braiding, only to run into insane regulations that politicians claim are for consumer-protection, but are instead for protecting incumbent businesses.
Mississippi finally changed the law to allow hair-braiding without the insane regulations. Armstrong overcame them and expanded, like a true entrepreneur. It’s an awesome American dream capitalism story. But we shouldn’t stop at thinking about her. This was the part that struck me:
Since 2005, I have trained more than 125 women who have gone on to earn a living as natural hair braiders. In addition, my shop in Tupelo has provided jobs for 25 women, affording them the dignity and pride of a regular paycheck.
Most of those 125 women she has trained won’t become hair-braiding moguls. Many will be content to braid on their own back deck, never getting a storefront. They won’t be job creators. But there are many more of them than there are Melanie Armstrongs.
