IS THE GOAL A POST INDUSTRIAL AMERICA?

 

If one can step back from the headlines and advertising campaigns far enough to look at the big picture it is possible to see why private business leaders are so unwilling to invest capital. The latest business periodicals claim somewhere between one and three trillion dollars in private capital is sitting idle in Americas businesses today. I personally believe that the number is much higher because small business owners are holding on to their cash reserves instead of investing them for the same reasons as the large corporations. The capital that is not being used in small businesses is hard to measure and as such tends to be overlooked. We know that small businesses are responsible for most of the job creation in this country contrary to what the government would have you believe. The anemic job creation numbers during this so called recovery give us a fairly good picture of the outlook of small business owners. I can tell you from personal experience that owning a small business means waking up everyday facing a lot of uncertainty. The multipronged assault that is being waged by our government on business using taxes and regulations add to the uncertainty causing many entrepreneurs to adopt a cautious cash strategy.

Not all of us are smart enough to see the threats and take the safe approach. Maybe I should rephrase that and just say some of us, including myself, are dumb optimists who go forward with our research and development as if the perilous regulatory environment didn’t exist. We have been designing and building industrial assembly lines for 31 years in our small business. The 2008 crash virtually destroyed our customers and forced them to cancel all capital projects, the very projects we needed to survive. We cut 94% of our workforce and managed to limp along for two years before we came to the conclusion that our market was not going to recover soon enough to save us. The other owners and I pooled what was left of our financial and fixed assets and went to work trying to find a market where we could survive and grow. Oil exploration and food production looked like good candidates as the demand tends to stay high for those commodities. The last three years of all out effort by the core group in our company have resulted in the successful launch of a new product line in farming. So successful in fact that we grew our labor force back up to 39 employees and realized that we needed to expand our facility and hire 38 more people.

With the exception of the IRS I think we have gotten the unwanted attention of just about every federal, state and local agency that exists. The gauntlet of regulations, fees and penalties have become so daunting that our management team just withdrew our permit application and decided not to pursue the expansion in our county or even state. The deck is so stacked against business today it is necessary to ask oneself if the goal of our government is to create a post industrial society out of America. Any one of 800 species listed as threatened or endangered can be used as a weapon by the environmentalist crowd to take away private property rights while the EPA stands ready to crush your efforts using the clean air and water acts. I am not saying that I favor pollution mind you but regulating all of our industry out of business and into foreign countries is a bit short sighted. I have worked overseas for many years and I know that other countries do not hold the environment in the same high regard that we do. We have a great product with real market demand and no way to get through the maze of regulations so that we can supply the demand. One public official went so far as to tell me that I should get my products built in China and import them. I pointed out that it would cost American jobs if I did and he replied that I was just a dinosaur who didn’t understand that we weren’t a country of lunch buckets anymore! I’m almost 60, I guess I should probably just stop trying to run my business but like I said earlier I’m just not that bright and I am tired of looking around and seeing all of the abandoned industrial sites in this country. The politically correct crowd has managed to shape public opinion to the point where profit is considered to be bad and welfare checks are good. People who protest the waste fraud and abuse in government are labeled “domestic terrorists” while mass murderers from Fort Hood and Boston are considered victims lashing out at their oppressor, America. I don’t know what a post industrial America looks like but I know Americans are going to need to learn to live without all the modern goodies, security and freedoms once our industrial foundation is gone.