We've Gone from a Nation of Employees to a Nation of Entrepreneurs
by John Lawrence, April 25, 2018
Employeehood is dead. Now everyone is an entrepreneur. First they killed off the unions. Then they took away defined benefit pensions replacing them with 401(k)s. Health care? Forget it. So self-employment or entrepreneurhood is all that's left. Actually that's not so bad in a way. The people that moved here from Europe in the 1500s and 1600s had no pensions or benefits. The people that settled the West had no pensions or benefits. They were rugged individualists. At least they had the promise of raw land given to them by the government to homestead. Of course some of it belonged to the Indians, but no one cared about that.
The pioneers built their own houses, dug their own wells, provided their own sewage system such as it was, grew their own food, made their own clothes, educated their own children etc. They didn't get any help from the gub'ment except, of course, with the free land they took away from the Indians.
Well, today there is a similar situation. The government doesn't want to help people. They want them to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Problem is some of them have no boots! So while some people like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and others will become billionaires, many, many more will fall by the wayside, having not gotten a firm enough grip on their bootstraps or may still be wandering the streets trying to find boots. This creates a problem in a culture for which rugged individualism and self-sufficiency is a thing of the past.
Today we live in a consumer culture. Hardly any goods and services are self provided. People don't even cook any more much less make their own clothes or grow their own vegetables. It's a cash culture. You pay cash for everything or go without or charge it to a charge card. The gig economy provides opportunities for some. For instance, if you have a decent car and a good driving record, you can do ride sharing and if you're in a good market, you can make pretty good money. There's no education, training or certification involved. Pretty much everyone qualifies painlessly. No endless hours spent in a classroom. You can be up and running in a matter of hours. But not everyone has a decent car or any car at all and some not even a roof over their heads.
As more and more people drop out of the consumer culture because they don't have the money to keep buying, they will be joining their fellow American citizens living on the streets. These people will form the Epsilon class as Huxley envisioned in Brave New World. They will die young. While the billionaire class, some of whom have even funded hospitals and medical clinics, will get gold plated medical care, the homeless will die from the lack thereof. But they will also have to become entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs of bottle and can collection which they can redeem for a few bucks. Panhandling will become a large employment classification, second only to those employed in the FIRE sector. Housing will be so unaffordable as to be out of the question. Some enterprising homeless people may even find a pair of boots with adequate bootstraps. Horace Greeley's exhortation, "Go west young man, go west" will become "Start pulling on your bootstraps young man (and woman), start pulling."
