Go to PDF Version | Go to Recent Issues
To save time in the future, you may select one of the preferences below. You may update your eIBD preferences at any time by going into My IBD and selecting Update Your eIBD Preferences.
Set Web-Based Version as Default Set PDF Version as Default Set Recent Issues as Default
Get QuoteSearch Site
Daily Graphs Online
Michael Wolfensohn, a councilman in New Castle, N.Y., recently inducted himself into the Bureaucrat Hall of Shame by calling the police on two 13-year-olds who — cue sinister music — were selling homemade cupcakes without a license.
Everyone loves to hate bullies who kick sand in the face of 98-pound entrepreneurs, so stories like this often make national headlines. But these tales are more serious than they seem because kid-entrepreneurs are canaries in the economic coal mine.
If a cupcake stand can't survive more than a few hours' exposure to bureaucracy, what happens to real businesses?
Nothing good, actually. In the grown-up world, entrepreneurs starting small businesses spend months, even years (and huge amounts of money), trying to comply with needless licensing requirements concocted by people such as Mr. Wolfensohn.
Erecting Barriers
Our organization, the Institute for Justice, just published eight reports detailing barriers to small-business entrepreneurship in eight major cities. These studies document every sort of petty rule that the human imagination can devise — from fingerprinting customers in Los Angeles used bookstores to requiring a license to act as a tour guide in Washington, D.C.
Every small-business entrepreneur in America is trying to support his or her family, employ people and compete with other firms while trudging through an energy-sucking quicksand of regulation and bureaucratic indifference.
Politicians like Wolfensohn claim to love small business and job creation, but they put enormous barriers in the way — requiring unnecessary occupational licenses, huge fees, permits for everything from paint to signs to parking, and months if not years of bureaucratic hoop-jumping.
If those kids want to get the proper permits to sell their cupcakes, it could take them months and thousands of dollars, if they are allowed to do it at all (which they probably aren't).
Worse yet, lobbyists in every industry are pounding the halls of state legislatures begging politicians to enact ever more restrictive occupational licensing laws that do nothing but suppress competition and drive up prices for consumers. And yet, from the Newark taxicab cartel to interior designers in Miami, such government-imposed barriers stifle honest enterprise.
Even the monks of St. Joseph Abbey in Covington, La., who seek to support themselves by making and selling caskets, aren't immune from such bureaucratic bullying. They've had to file a federal lawsuit because Louisiana makes it a crime to sell their simple wooden caskets to the public without becoming state-licensed funeral directors.
For the last two years, $250,000 in annual income has become an arbitrary line in the sand of a renewed class war. Those above it must alone have their income taxes raised. Those below are deemed more virtuous and so deserving of a tax cut. But what exactly is "rich"? Zillionaires such as Warren ...
For once, top Obama economic advisor Larry Summers got it right. Warning opponents of the big tax-cut deal, Summers told reporters, "Failure to pass this bill in the next couple weeks would materially increase the risk that the economy would stall out and we would have a double-dip recession." Too ...
Imagine a simple law that would serve as a template for what's achievable in states and school districts across the nation where students languish in failing schools. The law could spur grass-roots "regime change" in public education by giving parents the power to force recalcitrant school ...
Unemployment jumped to 9.8% in a very disappointing November jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls increased by only 39,000 and private jobs expanded by just 50,000. This is way below what the economy needs. Most discouraging, the smaller-business household employment number fell for the second time in a ...
When reading the White House deficit commission's report, one gets the sense that authors Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles are tired of wrestling with 900-pound gorillas, of fiscal problems so Brobdingnagian that the wise course among America's political elite has been to pretend they do not exist. ...
Register
Diversifying can cut off risk. But too much can cut off profit.
Get QuoteSearch Site
Read Full Article »
