No bailout, please. Just back off.

I’ve been a small business owner for over twenty years. Although I’ve really only had one business all along, I’ve had one partner, three partners, and now, no partners. We’ve worked with at least five different banks and the SBA. We’ve marketed solely via direct mail, then with telephone and fax marketing, now with the internet. We’ve done trade shows here and abroad and opened and closed an office in a foreign country. We’ve employed a lot of different people over the years, trained them well on the basics for work in their further careers, sold a lot of vendors’ products, and helped a lot of customers get what they need to run their businesses. Although it’s just been one business, all these reinventions along the way are what make it an enterprise and what make my work, like most small business people’s work, entrepreneurial.

Times are tough right now; the toughest I’ve ever seen. I noticed sales slowing down right after Easter (which you may recall was in March last year) and they never picked back up. In fact November and December were downright rotten. Orders still come in, but customers do not spend a penny extra.

I’ve discussed what I think are the reasons here before. In a nutshell, fear took over. Leading up to the election from the get-go last winter, there was a steady drumbeat of pessimism about the economy. I knew this was crazy because in January and February we had the two best months we’ve ever had, and our market, the sewing industry, is a bellwether for the health of the entire economy. We are normally first into a recession and first out of it. So recession was not inevitable. But as the presidential primaries rolled on, with the Democrats needing justification for all that change they were peddling, we got talked into it. Then for the final coup de grace, Hank Paulson convinced George Bush that the sky was falling. In October. Just before the November election.

The rest is mystery. I don’t know how such presumably smart people could be so stupid. Economies are mostly smoke and mirrors anyway. When you go around cracking the mirrors and blowing hard, it’s going to get pretty ugly.

And Obama in his Sphinx-like, passive-aggressive, newspeak way, is seizing in this mess an opportunity to enslave more voters on the government payroll. And companies. They’re lining up like Miley Cyrus fans at the ticket counter for government “assistance”. I read somewhere yesterday that anybody with a business license is looking for a bailout now.

Wrong.

Only the big corporations are lining up for bailouts. No surprise. I have little respect for them anyway, about as much as I do for unions. With few exceptions, big corporations are PC. They’re monopolistic not entrepreneurial. They adopt unwise labor practices that inhibit their competitiveness, like paying health benefits for homosexual partners of their employees and pushing the Family Leave Act, and then endorse them as law so they can compete against smaller, more efficient private companies. And I’ve noticed they do not seem to answer to their shareholders any more, or else the golden parachute phenomenon would not exist. I presume that’s because most stock ownership these days is via retirement accounts where the stock purchases are really made by cartels, not individuals.

Smaller, entrepreneurial companies like mine are not looking for bailouts. And we are the only way out of this mess. We are the only place in the economy where true job (i.e., wealth) creation occurs. Don’t make us tote the note for all the non-producers (big corporations, big government, big labor) by burdening us with the biggest part of the tax load. Don’t throw more regulatory idiocy at us (for a great example of this, read about CPSIA, a tremendously burdensome government mandate with little to no real benefit coming down on all U.S. manufacturers and retailers in February).

We millions of small business people don’t want to serve any master, least of all a bunch of special interests and politicians.We don’t want a bailout. We just want the government to back off and let us produce. If Obama were inclined to turn the tide on this recession, he would do nothing more than clearing the way for small business to succeed. Then, as Milton Friedman told us decades ago when we were faced with the similarly unfriendly Carter years, our businesses will be able to fulfill their true social responsibility: profit.