Imagine that you are a successful small-business entrepreneur.

And then imagine that the government was forcing you to spend $30,000 to build something utterly useless just to prove that you were serious about your business.  Sound crazy?  That is essentially what is happening to Minnesota funeral-home entrepreneurs:

Verlin Stoll is a classic American entrepreneur.   Although he’s only 27 years old, Verlin opened his first business, Crescent Tide funeral home, in St. Paul last April.  He prides himself on being “a different kind of funeral and cremation service” by providing high-quality funeral goods at a lower cost than his competitors.

With basic services at merely $250, Verlin saves his customers serious money.  The bigger funeral homes on average charge ten times as much.  Indeed, Crescent Tide is one of the only businesses in the area that benefits low-income families who cannot afford the high prices of the big funeral-home companies.

Predictably, Verlin’s business model is a success.  And he wants to expand on that success by hiring new employees and building another business so even more Minnesotans can benefit from his services.  Unfortunately, there’s an obstacle standing in his way:

Big government.

Minnesota refuses to let Verlin build a second funeral home unless he first builds a $30,000 embalming room.  He doesn’t have to actually use the room, it just has to be there.  As Institute for Justice economic liberty expert Katelynn McBride explains: (more…)

I occasionally broker commercial loans between finance companies and small businesses.  It gives me a lot of pride when I bring together an American entrepreneur who is ready to risk all his assets on his own business, with a finance company that sees a way to help that businessman and make a profit himself.

For the past month, I’ve been working with a financier to bring funding to 30 entrepreneurs, eager and ready to start up their businesses.  Yesterday I had the most dis-spiriting conversation of my professional career with my financier, whom I’ll call “Joe”.

Joe has a credit line with a Gigantic American Bank.  The Federal Reserve has slapped the Bank, and all other banks big and small, with new regulations regarding how they loan their money, who they loan it to, and issued a mountain of compliance rules.  The Bank cannot rely on their internal compliance auditors any longer, either.  They must use independent auditors.

The Bank, in order to remain in compliance, must shove all these same regulations and compliance rules onto whomever they loan money to, including Joe, who also must engage an independent compliance auditor.  Joe must shove all these same regulations and compliance rules onto whomever he loans money to, including these entrepreneurs, who also must engage an independent compliance auditor.

The cost of all these regulations and compliance audits, at the entrepreneur level alone, is $30,000.   It costs a heck of a lot more as you move up the chain.

The entrepreneurs cannot afford this.

As a result, the entrepreneurs’ dreams of starting their own businesses die on the vine.  They now must go back into the depressed job market to (not) find a job.

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For thousands of years, philosophers have told us that if we are to live our lives at their best, we should seek truth, beauty, and goodness. Of course, each of these qualities has raised thorny issues and provoked ongoing arguments. That people have carried on such arguments, rather than surrendering themselves to their raw appetites and animal instincts, may be counted a valuable thing in itself. A final resolution of such deep questions may lie beyond human capacities.

In regard to goodness and beauty, I have nothing worthwhile to add to the discussion. For guidance in seeking goodness, we may look to saints, theologians, moral philosophers, and moral exemplars of our own acquaintance. For demonstrations of beauty, we may turn to nature and to artists, great and small, who have adorned our lives with the grace of music, poetry, and the visual arts. My own professional qualifications, as an economist and an economic historian, do not equip me to contribute anything of value in these areas.

I do feel qualified, however, to speak with regard to truth, because the search for truth has always served as the foundation of my intellectual endeavors. Moreover, my study, research, and reflection within my own professional domains have brought home to me a relationship that others might do well to ponder and respect―a relationship, indeed, an array of relationships, between truth and freedom, such that anyone who seeks the triumph of truth must also seek to establish freedom in human affairs.

When I began my academic career in 1968, my research specialty was the economic history of the United States. I was expected to publish the findings of my research in reputable professional journals. For a young man just beginning to master his field, carrying out publishable research was a daunting task. Thousands of other writers had already contributed to building up the literature in my field, so adding something of enough importance to merit its publication in a good journal was hardly an easy task.

I discovered, however, that one way to proceed was by identifying significant mistakes in the existing literature and correcting them. Moreover, I soon found that many such mistakes had been made. To put this statement in another way, I found that the existing sources often failed to tell the truth about one thing or another, and in some cases the falsehoods propounded by one writer led later writers, who relied on those false statements, to make errors of their own.

We often think of the scientific or scholarly enterprise as a cooperative process in which the establishment of one truth facilitates the establishment of another, but, unfortunately, the process often works in an adverse way, too, as the establishment of one falsehood fosters the establishment of another.

The errors in my fields of study and research take two main forms: factual and interpretive.

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Tomorrow, Florida has a golden opportunity to strike a major blow for economic liberty.

The vital question is this:  Will Republican senators live up to their promises to remove job-killing regulations and red tape, or will they cave in to powerful special interests and high-paid lobbyists?

On Friday, the Florida Senate will vote on HB 5005, a House bill that removes needless licensing requirements for several harmless trades—including hair braiders, outdoor theater workers and interior designers.

But as the video above explains:

The legislature set out to [remove] unnecessary licensing laws, including one that makes is a crime to practice interior design without a college degree and a two-year apprenticeship . . . . Lobbyists for the American Society of Interior Designers are trying to derail reform efforts by stirring up trouble in Tallahassee before the legislative session ends this Friday.

The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) represents less than three percent of all designers, but its members have designated themselves as spokespeople for the entire industry.   And for the last 30 years, ASID has spent millions of dollars on a coast—to-coast lobbying campaign designed to legislate potential competitors out of business.

This 30-year fight all comes down to the Florida Senate tomorrow.

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When you think about a highly aggressive cartel teaming up with politicians to pass protectionist laws that kick entrepreneurs out of work, you probably don’t think about interior designers.

But you should.

The American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) represents less than 3 percent of all designers, but its members have designated themselves as spokespeople for the entire industry. ASID has spent over 30 years and millions of dollars lobbying from coast to coast for interior design licensing schemes.  Not surprisingly, the schemes they propose would force all interior designers to have the exact same credentials as required for membership in ASID.

The group has worked relentlessly to enlist state legislatures in its campaign for total industry cartelization. The Institute for Justice has documented these efforts in a study titled “Designing Cartels.”

Florida is ground zero right now in this epic battle.

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The Institute for Justice has been vindicating the rights of entrepreneurs for the last twenty years.

Across the country, IJ has teamed up with casket makers, florists, hairbraiders, horse teeth-floaters, interior designers, sign-hangers, taxi-drivers, trash haulers, vintners and numerous other Americans to secure their basic right to earn an honest living.

This week, we are proud to announce a new, nationwide effort in our fight for economic liberty:  Our National Street Vending Initiative.

From coast to coast, we will team up with mobile food vending entrepreneurs whenever their rights come under attack, filing lawsuits and engaging in grassroots activism and media efforts.

In conjunction with the launch of this initiative, we have filed a major federal lawsuit against the city of El Paso Texas:

For thousands of years, vending has been a way for entrepreneurs to provide for themselves and their families.  In the United States, this ancient trade is more popular than ever.  By 2007, over 760,000 vending businesses were operating in the country.  And consumers love them, so they continue to grow.

The Economist magazine predicted that in 2011 food vendors would create “[t]he biggest shift in America’s culinary landscape” and that “some of the best food Americans eat may come from a food truck.”

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The past is not always a prologue to the future. But looking at some of the big winners and losers of 2010 does provide some strong hints of a positive 2011.

The biggest winner last year was the Tea Party, which shellacked President Obama in the election. Mr. Obama becomes the biggest loser. And the economy and stock market will be the beneficiaries.

The elections were the first major step toward restoring free-market capitalism and rolling back big-government controls, planning, and spending. This is a money-politics issue. Stocks roared 20 percent during the second half of last year, as markets sniffed out the huge political change. Post-election, stocks also had a big move, finishing the year at better than two-year highs — going all the way back to pre-Lehman Brothers.

Sure, there were important economic factors involved. Europe didn’t fall apart. The dollar didn’t collapse. And better U.S. economic numbers started coming in. (Double-dip bears also were big losers last year.) But rising political confidence helped, too.

The emergence of Tea Party free-market populism — what I call Reaganomics 2.0 — is hugely bullish for stocks and the economy in 2011.

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What drives an entrepreneur to start a business?  Is it solely about money?  Or is there something more?  I argue that often it is the  same creative drive that compels an artist to paint, a musician to compose, or a sculptor to look at a piece of rough marble and see an angel inside.  And those who understand the mind of the small business owner know why the proposed tax increase in 2011 will do more harm than good to the very people this economy needs most to create jobs.

On FBN’s Bulls & Bears recently Democratic strategist Jehmu Greene, the token liberal steak tossed into the wolf den of laissez faire commentators, uttered words to the effect that if we allow the Bush tax cuts to remain, the “rich” (I guess that’s me?) will not put the money into the economy but rather just squirrel it away “in their banks…It would not go into job creation or creating capital for small business.”

My first thought  was: “In my bank? Really?  How many businesses have you owned?” (To be fair she did co-found some internet venture called Urban Hang Suite which shuttered in 2003).  But then I reminded myself that, like Ms. Greene herself who has been in non-profit and/or government almost her entire career,  very few people in the  Obama administration, from the president on down, have ever started a business.  Thus they cannot understand what drives entrepreneurs to succeed.  They think it is just about take-home pay.

It’s said that small business owners work eighteen hour days for ourselves so we don’t have to work eight hours a day for someone else.  And often our income on a dollar/hour basis is less than the established firms we may have left to go on our own. Certainly this is generally true for those few scary years at the beginning when a myriad of mistakes are made and unanticipated events occur that prompt the principals to pay ourselves only after all other obligations have been met   So why do it?  Why take such risk?

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