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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Action

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

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

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[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

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“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

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

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

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

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