New Biggies Help Self Employed - Road to the Middle Class

EVERYBODY KNOWS that the e-businesses like Amazon.com and eBay are revolutionizing the economy. Or something like that. But under the radar they are revolutionizing business in ways you wouldn’t expect, according to Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

eBay is offering health insurance “to their `Power Sellers’-- basically people who sell $1,000 or more a month and get good customer reviews.” So not only does eBay provide a marketplace for millions of buyers and sellers, but it also is facilitating their transactions with services that we traditionally expect from top tier employers.

You can do things now, as a little guy, that formerly could only be done with a big organization. But what’s interesting is the symbiosis here. The little guys can do as well as they do because of the big organizations, like eBay or Amazon, that they associate with, not in spite of them.

Our liberal elites have been so busy defending Bill Clinton and hating George W. Bush that they are completely missing the revolution in the workplace that millions of Americans are experiencing.

There has been a quiet revolution in business technology over the last generation, in which business skills that used to be considered an “art” have become paint-by-numbers technology. What used to be called “a good bedside manner” in client relations is now called “managing client expectations.” There are lots of similar little changes in business practice that have been systematized and refined over the last generation and most of it has happened under the radar. The symbiosis between big business and the little guy reported by Reynolds is just one example of this trend.

No doubt our liberal masters will wake up one day and demand to change it all, like they did a century ago when they woke up to the horror of jumped-up barrow boys like telegraph clerk Carnegie and bookkeeper Rockefeller running mega-corporations.

A century ago they cut the upstarts down to size with anti-trust law and economic regulation. Will they do something similar this time around? Or will it be too late?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

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[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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