Current Date

The Conservative Reader:
Iowa

Login
Local Economic Development Through Youth Entrepreneurship

Local Economic Development Through Youth Entrepreneurship

by | Jun 3, 2013

business start-upWell, another class of high school graduates are killing time until they begin their college experience. In four, five, or six years, many of them will graduate from college, and move to Dallas County so they can work as temps at Wells Fargo.

Meanwhile, town squares across Iowa are emptying out. I’ve spent some time exploring small towns in rural Iowa, and there are common threads that threaten to further damage the prospects of the young, and may even threaten the existence of many towns across the state.

And so it goes; young people leave to try and buy jobs that don’t matter (and often don’t exist in large numbers), buildings stand unused, and eventually the towns just collapse into stagnant malaise.

What Muscatine Has To Say

Muscatine is a unique town; the downtown fell into disuse as businesses moved to the ring road, but Muscatine kept some relatively large manufacturing and agribusiness installations, as well as banking and insurance industries. This meant that there was cheap, unused store space downtown, and a population with enough disposable income to support a restaurant culture which is unique in my experience.

Italian, Mexican, and Korean (called the Yakky Shack, it was a personal favorite of mine) can be on the menu for any given meal. Avenue Subs, just around the block from my former law office, is truly unique. Their sandwiches cost more than the chain sandwich restaurants, but the place was always busy at lunch time.

If you can re-create their menu reasonably well, you could open up in any mid-sized Iowa town and I’d bet you would do very well – if you can keep start-up costs down.

What Can Communities Do?

I am often accused of “having no answers,” and “being negative and critical,” and “being mean.” Well, I am an intensely unpleasant person in many ways, pessimism is the lubricant of victory, and I don’t believe in the government’s ability to solve social or economic problems – which translates into “having no answers” when you live in a society enamored by Statism.

In towns and counties across the state there are established businesses, and many of them have working relationships with chambers of commerce or local economic development corporations.

Some of these business interests and organizations have either direct control of vacant retail space or contacts with property owners with retail, warehouse or light-industrial space to offer but with no available takers.

So, how about a community-level angel investor network? Why don’t we put young entrepreneurs together with established business owners or property owners to help them raise start-up capital – cash, space, or equipment – for their own small businesses.

What businesses? That’s the beauty of it – I don’t know. I think the sandwich shop idea would work well in any town of about 5,000 + people, especially if you can get space within walking distance of the largest employer in town, the school, or the college.

Maybe internet commerce, custom clothing, fresh foods, computer game design, who knows.

But, College is Important for Jobs Skills…..

No, it is not. The idea that your young go-getter will be more entrepreneurial after spending half a decade with tenured academics is laughable. If you need to learn accounting, take accounting at community college part-time for a fraction of the cost.

Why can’t Iowa become the youth start-up capital of the country? Why must we continue to shuffle the young and the (presumably) ambitious into expensive colleges only to graduate with the pressure of debt and depleted financial resources pushing them towards the work-a-day life that could disappear in the next round of layoffs?

I’m Just a Lawyer, but…

Now, I am perfectly willing to admit that I am not the exemplar of my own advice – think of me as the desert hermit the protagonist seeks out for guidance. That is probably why I was attracted to the law, and most of  my legal career has involved debtor-creditor law, so I know how debt can screw up a life or a business venture.

This is how the Chamber of Commerce can help. They can assemble angel investors with cash, equipment, or space available. They can arrange discounts for accounting and legal services for things like taxation and payroll. They can send experienced businesspeople into the schools to speak on business creation, promote self-employment, and whatever else they can think of to encourage young Iowans to consider independent livelihoods without the need for debt financing.

If you fail, then start over with a different idea. If you succeed, then you owe me lunch.

 

The New Obama Concoction: Fairness and Protection

The New Obama Concoction: Fairness and Protection

by | May 19, 2011

How is it possible to resist the charms of any elected official offering the dual benefits of fairness and protection? After all, is not being treated equitably, while simultaneously being spared the pain of those who would seek to harm us, not of ultimate worth? Fairness must certainly be the quintessential American value, right? And our entire system of justice; is it not specifically designed to bring both fairness and protection?

Over the next year and a half we will hear the word fairness as if the word encapsulates the complete and final animation of the American ideal. We will also be offered a basket overflowing with governmental “protections” from rapacious bogeymen, both known and unknown. This little “benefits package” will come neatly wrapped in the form of a vague threat that would have us believe any alternative to this package would immediately result in enslavement. It is only demons that would offer us, the American people, anything less.

The real wonder in all of this is how Thomas Jefferson seemed to have completely missed the significance of the beatific vision of the liberal left. To have settled for such suboptimal and simple notions as life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must clearly validate the marked progression in our political thinking. Alas, we are talking about a couple of centuries of human achievement. If we can build an iPad, we must certainly be able to build a perfectly integrated, transparent, and high-functioning system of governance. We call this “political science,” as if it was somehow scientific.

Hope and change was the first chapter. Fairness and protection are now emerging as the second chapter. The only remaining question we now have is in determining which of these sets of notions is the most utterly naïve. There is, however, no remaining question as to which is more dangerous. Chapter Two is an unmitigated societal, moral and economic horror show.

Like hope and change, fairness and protection are proffered without definition or object. One man’s version of fairness is another man’s version of purgatory. To suggest that protections are being afforded is to beg the obvious question, “Protection from what or from whom?” The suggestion, of course, is that the government will become both the ultimate dispenser of fairness, and the protector from anything that is “not-government.” This is a binary universe in which the government is the center of virtue, and everything and everyone else is either mundane or oppressive.

In a hypothetical world where half the citizenry are drunken bums and the other half are productive and hard-working citizens, what represents a fair tax rate? Apparently, there is a fair answer to this question, albeit that the obvious answer seems to elude most of us common people. Not to fear, in the liberal mind, they have the answer. And if regulation doubles the price of that which we seek to consume, we must presume that the level of “protection” is worth paying for.  Just ask them. They not only have all the answers, they are willing to impose them on everyone else.

They spin a web of myths. It is only unfortunate that these myths are so seemingly beguiling.

When Mr. Jefferson offered his modest notions of a sustainable basis for societal success, he understood that the government can only create a set of conditions where people can optimize their unique futures. He had seen the fairness and protection “themes” played out in history and seen the implications of the associated governmental arrogance. Mr. Jefferson was willing to look at humanity in a more positive light than many of his contemporaries. Even he could not begin to fathom the negative implications of what is now being offered as the standard offering of the Liberal Left.

When the markets create a willing buyer, and a willing seller, at a given price, most of us would agree that the “trade” was fair. On the other side of the equation, when the government intervenes in anything, it is not fairness and protection that we receive. It is rather just someone’s version of coercion. The liberal definition of fairness is just another form of arbitrary and completely baseless enslavement. It cannot be heard in any other way.

Fairness is only found in established conditions. It is never found in a quest for derived outcomes. When liberals transmute the definition of fairness into an effect, as opposed to its native state as a cause, they turn the world inside out. Viewing fairness as an effect is, by definition, fundamentally unfair. And the result is always predictable, and never pretty.


    Log in