J.R. Blackwell: Job Creators →
I have long held that the internet is the true free market experiment. That it makes certain logistical advantages of physical commerce held by larger corporations irrelevant, and that stifling these is the greatest regulatory threat to free market capitalism.
Now…if you’re a capitalist, if you’re a laissze-faire capitalist, you should recognize this and be against the law. Which is why you see some Tea Party organizations protesting the law. Not only are they supposed to be ultimate capitalists but they’re also supposed to be a grass roots organization that exists because of the internet.
I’m certainly not a capitalist. Yet, I see how the internet changes everything. For everyone.
It brings a fighting chance to us all. Whether that’s due to increased communication, increased access to the market place, or just increased equalization in presentation, it brings us all a fighting chance to make something of what we do.
Elected officials talk a lot about about helping job creators, small business, and innovation. With the general election approaching, candidates talk a lot about entrepreneurs, the people who take an idea and a plan and make it into a business, a business that turns around and hires people to help them with their business.
I am lucky enough to know a lot of entrepreneurs, people with small businesses that have created jobs for me. When I was laid off last year due to financial constraints, the people that kept me in the black were small business that hired me to create book covers, photo-spreads, and hired me to write fiction. These businesses operate their sales primarily though the internet. They use the internet to Kickstart, to sell, to distribute. They are the people who have hired me and other freelancers. They are my living.
For me, SOPA and PIPA are not just bills that would increase censorship and decrease free speech. They are not just bills that put too much power in the hands of big business. They are bills that could damage my livelihood, and the living of the small businesses, the little upstarts, the people working from home and hiring me to make bookcovers for their self-published book. These are bills that could take away my job. In a time when finding work is difficult for so many, do we really want a bill that will hurt job creators?
If elected officials really want to help job creators, then they won’t pass these bills. Help me keep my job. The EFF has made it INCREDIBLY simple for you to figure out who your representatives are and contact them all at once:https://blacklist.eff.org/
Maybe someday I’ll tell you about how I’ve been thinking since about 1994 or so that the communist uprising of the Industrial Revolution, the worker’s revolt has truly never happened. And how globalism and the internet continue to push us towards the critical mass of that. I mentioned it to a teacher in 1994, who nodded politely. I mentioned it to a professor in 2001 who told me to read Hardt & Negri’s Empire, which I bought but never read. Always meant to.
By the way, in 2014, when the health care law kicks into effect, how many people with a marketable hobby quit their day job when they realize they can live off their hobby and have health insurance? How many people take a chance on their entrepreneurial dream because they no longer have to worry about needing the benefits of that day job to pay for their medication?
