Self made entrepreneurs are all very well and good. But you know what? Not everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. It's scary. And if you have a family and your family depends on you bringing home some money on a regular basis, and you need health insurance for your kids, maybe you can't afford to be an entrepreneur. So maybe you're somebody's employee. So what you're doing, is, you're working for an entrepreneur. I hear, in fact that there was this guy, Mitt Romney I think his name is, who right out of college, with a wife and a couple of kids, and a desire for more kids -- he actually didn't go out and run a business. Imagine that. He took a job with a salary and some benefits. Then, when he was asked to run a business, by the company that he'd taken the job with? He was averse to doing that...do you know why?
He [Romney] explained to Bain that he didn’t want to risk his position, earnings, and reputation on an experiment. He found the offer appealing but didn’t want to make the decision in a “light or flippant manner.” So Bain sweetened the pot. He guaranteed that if the experiment failed Romney would get his old job and salary back, plus any raises he would have earned during his absence [emphasis mine]. Still, Romney worried about the impact on his reputation if he proved unable to do the job. Again the pot was sweetened. Bain promised that, if necessary, he would craft a cover story saying that Romney’s return to Bain & Company was needed due to his value as a consultant. “So,” Bain explained, “there was no professional or financial risk.” This time Romney said yes.
And, this is not in the
Vanity Fair article from which the above is excerpted, but do you know what? I bet that position, for Romney, came with health care for Romney, his wife, and his young family, and I bet it came with a guaranteed salary floor. That's a pretty great situation for an entrepreneur, a guaranteed, no-risk, no-lifestyle-diminution, no-lost-job-if-you-fail, no-sacrifices-by-the-wife-and-kids...type of situation. I bet he even got liability insurance.
So, is that the same type of entrepreneurship that the GOP espouses? The up-by-your-bootstrap flavor? No, it really isn't.
So, anyway, that's the entrepreneur, the vaunted job creator. Handed the very attractive job, which he by all accounts did well at, but which he would not have taken, by the same accounts, had he not been given a really rare set of circumstances which ensured that his personal stake in failure was nonexistent.
But what about the people who take the jobs that the job creator makes? There is this GOP parade of job-creators saying "I built that" -- but if they could actually have built it all by themselves, they wouldn't need employees. Small business owners are not hiring employees because they are altruistic. They're hiring employees because they can't do all the work that needs to be done. What company with a decent HR department doesn't say that their most valuable asset is their workforce? I've run a small company. You have good employees, you succeed. You have bad employees, you founder. You should definitely get some credit for picking good people, but once you've done that, your employees get credit, along with you, for helping your business grow, for creating even more jobs, and for doing good work.
So, now we have another category: employees. Let's make this a referendum on whether employees versus employers, and employees will win. There are a lot more employees. And employees work hard, they take pride in their work, and I'm surprised right now that the Democrats aren't trying to make some kind of argument that the work employees do is just as valuable, and every bit as important to the process of job creation, as the work of entrepreneurs.
And I hear there's another class of people out there: caretakers. These are people who work very hard, and who don't create jobs, but who are important in the lives of people who either will work in the future or have worked in the past. I hear there's a lady that everybody in the GOP seems to respect, who never has drawn a paycheck or created much of a job (as the result of her own entrepreneurial efforts -- I'm sure she's been a boon for the dressage and personal service industry using her husband's money, but that sounds like a suspiciously Keynesian way of creating jobs). Her name, I think, is Anne Romney. Other caretakers care for veterans, when those veterans are family members who have been wounded in America's wars, for their aging or disabled parents or other relatives, like Anne Romney for their children, and they receive no money for this.
And there is yet another class of people out there: public servants. These are people who work very hard, who don't make as much money sometimes as they could if they went into private industry, but who think they are doing something important and who feel called to help their fellow citizens. I would put members of the military in this category, and school teachers, firefighters, and policemen. I would put people who volunteer to be on their local school board or city council in this category, and I would also put in this category people who run for public office. I hear there's a guy named, what is it? Oh, Mitt Romney who took a long time out of his life, probably at least a decade, for no compensation, to help out one of the states he lives in and one of the countries he pays taxes to.
So: employees, caretakers, public servants. How can the GOP so blatantly disrespect all of these categories of people, and how do we let them get away with it?