No Thanks

I belong to a local Businessmen’s/Professional association. It’s one of theses places where you spend around two-hundred bucks to join and then get to attend business-card exchanges and “networking” breakfasts. The breakfasts are where we have a fellow member or invited guest talk about how swell the organization is and use the verb “to grow” incorrectly. A quick aside, the organization is fairly decent as it has raised over ten grand for local, township-level charities over the last year and expects to beat that this year.

At a recent breakfast we had a county commissioner join us. Like most counties in my Commonwealth, ours is governed by a three-man commission which must never be more than two members of a particular party, i.e. there can never be three Democrats or three Republicans. Right now, we have two Republicans and one Democrat and the gentleman that came to our meeting is the junior Republican.

He started off innocently enough about how important business is to our county. Then he starts on about the myriad state and county organizations (ABCs, for the mind-numbing fealty government has for initialing every single entity it begets) that exist for the sole purpose of helping business.

Now here’s where I start to get excited. We have a Republican talking about how bureaucracy affects business. Now this guy wasn’t elected, he was appointed because the guy who had the job got elected to a higher office. But his seat was coming up for election and I figured he was going to endorse scraping this nonsense.

Nope. He wants another layer.

His plan is to create another ABC that will help businesses work their way through all of the organizations that already exist to get as many government hand-outs, taxpayer money and tax-breaks (loopholes) as possible.

Because—and here’s the money line—“Helping you succeed, helping you make money, is why government is here. That’s my job.”

No, it isn’t. A thousand time no. That is MY job. To bust my ass and build (not “grow”) my business and turn a profit is why I’m there. Your job is to propose legislation, make sure that enacted legislation is executed and keep the peace.

Reasonable men can disagree on what type of legislation and how far reaching it may go. But seeing government’s mandate as helping businesses succeed seems pretty far off of the reservation. Keep taxes low and regulations reasonable; good, well-run businesses serving a public need should flourish.
Providing tax abatements to woo would-be businesses is a slap to the businesses already in your bishopric. This new business deserves some enticement while your current constituents who’ve already provided your personal and county income must continue to pay full freight, higher taxes? How about lowering all taxes, then businesses would still be enticed to come and you reward the people who’ve already worked to make the county worthwhile to begin with? Cutting all of these ABCs would more than compensate for the possible drop in revenue that a tax cut would entail. But the good news is that if you cut taxes—to a point, I know—public revenues have a tendency to go up. Something the fine elders of the City of Philadelphia have never wrapped their little heads around.

But that’s not the point. The point of cutting taxes is to cut public revenue. So we can’t afford multiple layers of bureaucratic nonsense trying to find new and cool ways of spending money that isn’t theirs.

After this breakfast I mentioned to the gentleman that actually it was my job to make my business succeed, he looked at me like I had two heads. He said, “well, surely the county can try to help”.

No thanks, I don’t need their help nor do I want it. I’m just embarrassed that I’m the exception.

And don’t call me Shirley.