"Minding YOUR OWN Business!!"

Have you ever heard the names Harlan Sanders, Sam Walton, Henry Ford, Dave Thomas, Bill Gates or Samuel Colt? These names belong to a group of American success stories that span decades of small and large businesses that have succeeded in our great nation. These names have provided hundreds of thousands of jobs to engineers, clerks, truck drivers, assembly line workers, stevedores, secretaries, cooks and laborers for several generations in America. These names are responsible for most of the taxes that are collected for the running of our government; not only what the company pays, but the taxes on the income that was generated by the employment of hundreds of thousands of American working people. In turn, these people and people like them, have reaped a profit because of their risk and investment in America. There are many other names that you won’t know; list after list of failed businesses where those who invested their time and finances didn’t become successful. Some ideas, some products and some dreams don’t come true; there is risk in the market place and failure may only be one quarterly statement away.

Engineers, clerks, truck drivers, assembly line workers. stevedores, cooks, and laborers can lose their jobs when business goes bad and an economy goes dry. Those displaced workers will have to find employment elsewhere; they will clean out their lockers and walk out the door of their old job and start to hunt for something new. They are walking away, but their former employer has probably lost most of his financial solvency and is left with unpaid bills that only he is responsible for. It isn’t likely that a former owner will get any funds from those workers who just lost their jobs; and he doesn’t expect any funds from them, after all, it was his business. No business owner wants to close down and leave his employees without income. No worker wants to leave his position as long as it provides the income he depends on for survival for himself and his family, yet other than his years of work and expertise, he has lost little in comparison to the losses his former boss has incurred. The owner built the business, the owner invested the money and time to make it successful and he only expected labor from his employees. You probably heard the term “a day’s work, for a day’s pay”; that is what your employer expects!

Recently, our President, Barack Obama, made a statement saying “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen!” Now I know a business won’t succeed without customers, or qualified staff and management; that’s common sense. I would like to say this to all business owners “YOU DID BUILD THAT BUSINESS, YOU DID MAKE IT HAPPEN!” The statement by Barack Obama shows just how out of touch he is with the American economy and the principles upon which America has been built. Risk is always a part of business, and failure is always a possibility. Those who choose to venture into business ownership do so at their own risk (unless you are SOLYNDRA), and success or failure is only theirs to bear.

Perhaps Mr. Obama was talking about the Founding Fathers when he said “Somebody else made that happen”, because those who invest in themselves truly embrace the principles of our Constitution, and have pursued that happiness those Founding Fathers wrote about in that Declaration of Independence and Constitution. I do believe you can attribute some of your success to those men who had the foresight to give individual freedom prominence in America; other than that, I don’t know what Obama was talking about! Well, maybe it is because he never held a regular job in his life, and had NO CLUE OF HOW FREE MARKETS WORK!!