Can’t Please Anybody
Apr 18th, 2010 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: Policy MattersMicrobusinesses, to use a phrase I learned from my grandfather, can’t win for losing.
If you point out how small they are — which is, after all, their defining characteristic — then people will tell you that’s why you shouldn’t care about them. They are too small to matter.
If you point out that not all of them are that small, at least in terms of revenues, then they will say, “Clearly, current small business policy helps microbusinesses, too. We should keep doing what we’re doing, since it is obviously working.”
In other words, microbusinesses are small and that’s why we don’t get what we need.
Except for those microbusinesses that are not small (in revenue, if not in head count). The high earners “prove” that success is possible with what’s already there, which is why we still don’t get what we need.
And, if we point out that those few high-earning microbusinesses are the exception that prove the rule, and that microbusinesses may be too low-revenue to care about but they are too numerous to ignore, we get vague promises that somebody will look into it.
Except that “they” never do.
What is odd about all of this is that the continued push for growth is puzzlingly short-sighted. If we have learned nothing else about the 21st century economy, surely we have learned that business needs to be able to move at the speed of ‘Net.
It’s a lot easier to do that when you’re micro.
Of course, one might expect policy makers to push for growth in the way that they did half a century ago at a time when they are all in a panic at the number of jobs lost during the punishing recession that probably just ended.
But maybe, just maybe, the economy is not ever going to look like it used to anymore, no matter what they do. Maybe they’re going to have to think of something else to save said economy and get themselves re-elected.
Maybe a little outside-the-box thinking is required.
It’s really too bad that we almost never seem to elect people who are good at that sort of thing.
[...] something I wrote in my latest Policy Matters column and it’s been a recurring theme of mine here at The Journal Blog: that one of the competitive [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Freya Mullaney. Freya Mullaney said: Microbusiness and thinking outside the box. Hmm — http://www.microbusinessnewsbriefs.com/2010/04/cant-please-anybody/ http://bit.ly/9agWED [...]