A New Small Business

OK, so now I have started Hollis Internet Marketing and I am building websites and marketing small businesses in my area. It is going fairly well, but it's not really a living yet.

I have a lot of hope that eventually it will develop into an honest-to-goodness business. And one of the problems, according to my accountant, of working "for the man" is that, while you do have a job and you do get paid, there is nothing you have invested in. With Hollis Internet Marketing, I will actually build an investment.

One of the things that i hear a lot about is that Republicans favor small businesses in their strategies. Well, I sure don't see anything coming my way from them. They tell me that my taxes will go down if I vote for them, but my taxes didn't go down appreciably under Bush and they indebted our nation horribly. Fact is, in order to get the services we all want, we need to pool our money, somehow. If it takes $1 Million to build a mile of interstate highway, we need to pool our money because I know for sure that I can't afford more than a few yards, let alone a mile.

They're losing the "less government" argument with me, as the development of the Department of Homeland Security was the largest increase in government bureaucracy since the 1960s.

I think there is this Mythological America that we all like to hearken back to. An America with a very small government, one where most people paid no taxes. Where government was pretty much nonexistent. It's not true, you know. There has always been government in the cities in America. And sometimes that government pretty much ignored its citizens to enrich those who had their hands on the reins of power (think Tammany Hall). but American was largely agrarian back then. Of course if someone sold you bad beef, you got sick. If your community wanted a school, you all had to pool either your money or your work and build a schoolhouse, then pool your money to pay a teacher -- usually supplying her with a home to live in as well as an income.

So there were taxes back then. We just didn't hate them that much.

And where "government" didn't exist, it was pretty scary. After all, when was the last time you and your wife went for a stroll and ran into a known prostitute? When was the last time you were asked to join up with a number of other men to run off or kill a thief? I don't see that posses are all that necessary today and I also don't see them accidentally shooting the wrong person. Instead, I generally see very good police work and very intelligent prosecutors who take the law seriously and not into their own hands.

Oh, and one doesn't go to one's barber for surgery, either.

I think that Mythological America wasn't all it was cracked up to be. We certainly didn't have interstate highways, storm sewers, paved streets with curbs that kept your yard from flooding from the runoff from your neighbor's yard across the street and public servants who are professional and not venial and prone to corruption.