The American Dream used to be a simple matter of marrying your sweetheart, buying a house, raising a family, and finding a job. That job was the linchpin of your success. With that job, you could afford to buy a home, provide for your family and save for your retirement years.
But no longer. Times have changed, and so has corporate America. With job insecurity on the rise and employee security on the decline, now more than ever the hope of owning your own business captivates the hearts and minds of millions of Americans. From the mom and pop convenience store around the corner to the Sunday morning cafe, from the beauty parlor nearby to the computer dealership at the mall, nothing else captures the American Dream like the prospect of owning your own small business and being your own boss.
Every year, millions of Americans forgo successful careers as employees and set out to become employers. Equipped with nothing more than courage, dedication and an idea, the American small business owner is truly the American Dream personified. And we all owe so much to the great economic pioneers who chose to go it alone. Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in his cluttered workshop; Henry Ford put together the first Model T in his shed. Steve Jobs created the first “user-friendly” computer in his garage. Microsoft, one of the most successful companies of the last 30 years, was hatched in a college dormitory in the 1970’s. And that’s what the American Dream is all about.
The freedom to go it on your own. The freedom to break from the past. The freedom to seize the future. The freedom to try and fail and live to try again. The freedom to turn your dreams into reality.
Small business owners want freedom.
As a small business owner who worked many years in the manufacturing and retail business, I have been fortunate to experience the freedom of building something from nothing. I have been blessed to wake up each morning with the satisfaction of knowing I built a business, created jobs for dozens of employees, and improved people’s lives by selling them a product they wanted to buy.
I know firsthand that it is not government that creates jobs. It is the hard work, the entrepreneurial spirit and the motivation to succeed that is the root driver of job creation and economic growth in this country.
The problem is our government is dominated by politicians who have no experience in the private sector. Many have been groomed for political life since a young age, never venturing out into the real world, never attempting to understand the kind of hard work and sacrifice small business owners endure in pursuit of that American Dream. They have never run a store, or had to make payroll, or work around the clock to fill an order.
Nowhere is this more apparent in the New Jersey Senatorial election. The frontrunner on the Democratic side, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, loves to talk about his plan for creating jobs. The irony is that he has never once actually created a job.
His five-page jobs plan reflects a pernicious ideology that takes it on faith that government knows best. Mayor Booker actually believes jobs and innovation come from government bureaucrats. He thinks that the private sector, that intangible animal spirit that drives human beings to achieve and elevate everything around them, is secondary to the inefficient and sterile bureaucracy best known for red tape and costly inefficiencies.
Mayor Booker’s laundry list of proposals includes a system of manufacturing innovation centers that will direct development of new products and direct the education of a work force to meet the needs of the manufacturers of the products created by these so called innovation centers.
In other words, Cory Booker believes the only way to create jobs is for bureaucrats – underwritten by taxpayer dollars – to decide what products should be produced and to guide manufacturers through the creative process.
The most troubling part of this proposal is what happens next. If, somehow, this disaster manages to get off the ground, Booker calls for “robust oversight” to assure the success of these “innovation centers.”
These type of policies belie a dangerous contempt for individual initiative and the creativity that responds to the needs of consumers on a daily basis.
Let us consider some of the great innovative projects of the past century.
There was no “robust oversight,” no political appointee or lifetime bureaucrat looking over the shoulder of Steve Jobs as he worked to change our lives by developing the iPod or iPhone. No government official with a clipboard stalked Henry Ford around his factory, no senior official from the administration tracked Bill Gates’ progress.
Yet Booker and his Democratic colleagues promote exactly this kind of stifling environment where the best and brightest are reduced to cogs in a massive governmental machine.
It’s time for Washington to get out of the way and let small business owners achieve for themselves. I envision a future in which Washington takes a back seat to individual initiative, allowing the American entrepreneurial spirit to thrive instead of keeping it caged up. I envision a world in which federal bureaucrats work with small business owners — not against them — to improve community life around them. I want an environment where dreamers are fettered only by the limits of their own imagination, not by the lead balloon of needless Washington rules and regulations.
The price tag on Cory Bookers’ so-called job proposal is $1.6 billion – which is $1.6 billion our government doesn’t have. But the real cost of his program is so much greater. The real cost is the loss of creativity and entrepreneurial risk-taking in the private sector that feeds economic growth in this country. The real loss is the possibility that the next great invention; the next iPad or next life-saving medical device, may never get off the ground. The real cost is that the indomitable desire to work hard and succeed – the force that has made America the greatest nation on Earth – will be snuffed out, along with our greatness.
Steve Lonegan is a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in New Jersey.