When I were a lad

sorry for the typos and sentence mistakes, I didn't realize there would be no editing :)

I'll give you a brief summary of my history with small business. I'm relatively young (35 today actually) but both of my parents are much older. My Father passed who passed away 10 years ago would be 78 and my Mom, who is very much alive turns 75 this year.

Both of my parents grew up extremely poor, one in rural Indiana, the other in Indianapolis both were born during the tail end of the depression. My Father dropped out of school by the sixth grade in order to work and help support his family. My mother made it through most of high school before having to get a job to get by.

My parents met, got married and my Father was drafted and went to the Korean War. When he came back they had a couple of kids, my Father farmed some land during the day and drove a truck at night, they bough a house in the small town my Father had grown up in.

There was one restaurant in this small, wisp of a town in the middle of Indiana, owned by an older couple that was wanted to retire. My Dad walked in spoke to them for an hour or so and bought the restaurant on a handshake. My Father must have been so proud. This man who had stopped going to school at an unimaginably early age was now a small business owner. (Also this was a building and my family lived upstairs from the restaurant)

I came along after they had had the restaurant for about six years. When I was 10 years old, in1984, men in dark suits and sunglasses came into the restaurant, semis pulled up outside and IRS agents seized everything inside the restaurant. 16 years of work gone.

Years later I would research and find that this all started over an initial $1,500 tax discrepancy. By the time my parents realized the mistake the penalties and fees had more than quadrupled it and it was growing every day. They did not have the kind of cash on hand to just make it go away. They tried to go to court but a small town, hick lawyer against the United States Federal Government didn't stand much of a chance. In a matter of months my parents had lost everything they had spent their lifetimes working toward.

Neither of them ever cheated on anything a day in their lives. They certainly weren't savvy enough to try and cheat the IRS. Nor was their business raking in some immeasurable fortune that they were trying to avoid paying taxes on. It was a simple mistake, by simple people. A mistake that wound up costing them their entire life's work.

My parents were never out from behind the 8 ball again. The rest of my father's life him and my mother worked whatever jobs two older, uneducated people could find and lived paycheck to paycheck.

If anyone tries to tell me that the American Government was not actively complicit in the destruction of small businesses in America while corporate America found ways to monopolize and make unthinkable fortunes, then I would like to have a few words alone with them.

Um, I would argue, "this guy" -> http://torontorealtyblog.com/

Seriously, brilliant stuff.

Dennis - I 90% sysmpathize. Except I too grew up in a rural community and the bank manager knew you, your family and your busines. He (no sheilas as bank managers then) was to be feared second only to the priest. Gods like this can be either benevolent or despotic.... well you get my drift. Can we have a democratic , systematic approach without being beholden to our betters and certainly without the craziness of today? Dennis -- can you architecht something better than what we just had and what we had long ago?

Yes I can but not for public consumption right now

ok

Those days are gone. Greed killed the innocence of business. When people realized that business and politics could be manipulated to amass wealth on an unprecedented scale, all of the "personal" part of business was ushered quietly out of the way. It was no longer enough for a few hundred people to make a decent living, buy a house and put food on the table. The trade off was that one or two people became incredibly wealthy while the rest of us suffer the consequences.

Nice post.

I like this.

"A few hundred people... make a decent living, buy a house and put food on the table".

That's what I want from my business. And it's what plenty of other home-based business owners want, too.

And yet so many of the business-help books seem to think that if you want a business, you want to be the next Richard Branson.

Bleurgh.

M