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Well put, skipsul. See also: Extortion.
Skip, can you put conditions on the localities from where you hire?
Well done.
Worthy of Main Feed promotion.
We’ve been living for decades with the businesses that specialize in filing taxes that are too complex for most mere mortals.
What economic activity will be next?
I’ve been wondering recently if I’m paranoid.
Then I think about this, or about how any off chance remark can be construed as hateful by the twitter mob, or how any way of expressing romantic interest in a woman is—at her sole discretion—sexual harassment. I wonder if an inability to distinguish ordinary people with ordinary motivations with threats to my well being is, strictly speaking, my brain’s fault.
Yes, indeed. Let me add my congratulations!
By the way, read American hero Hank Rhody’s Office gothic if you want to see the kinds of employees that this kind of employment generates. Ricochet is becoming self-aware, folks!
Possibly. It’s not something I’ve ever felt I had to do. I hope I never get to that point, with the exception that I will never open an office in California or New York.
Not until your son from the future comes back & tells you about the underground entrepreneurs of the Corvette resistance, is what you mean!
Not paranoid. Gothic. American gothic.
I don’t think it’s happened yet.
In case it doesn’t, let’s hope for a Most Popular box moment. Only 73 comments to go!
If someone mentions a certain candidate, we’ll be there in 5 minutes.
Skip, Augustine is saying, we will bring revolutionary justice if the class structure of Ricochet does not do justice. This is true.
Preach it, brother.
Our leaders decry the power of big organizations, while — in the service of “the little guy” — they make it nearly impossible for small organizations to be born or survive or thrive.
It’s all first-order thinking. Protect employees enrolled in 401(k) plans! (But the rules lead employers not to offer plans, so fewer employees get to participate.) Protect employees from capricious firing! (But the rules lead employers to be more circumspect in hiring.) Make sure health plans offer comprehensive coverage! (But the rules make the plans so expensive that some employers have to cut the plan offerings altogether.)
And on top of all the individual cost-benefit calculations, the whole apparatus becomes so unwieldy and complex that a business owner must to devote all his time to compliance rather than running the business, as you illustrate so well in the OP. No wonder our country’s rate of new business startups has plummeted. Net new business creation is negative now.
We have become France, but without the benefit of efficiency that comes from centralized micromanagement.
Or decent cheese.
Excellent post, Skip. I got taken by a fired employee to the local human rights commission. Thank God and conservatives that my state allows employers to terminate “at-will.” I had painfully followed employment law very carefully (most in my line of business use independent contractors, quite illegally) and luckily I live in a small city where I had met the local, very smart, very Left-wing labor lawyer, who, after hearing why I had terminated, agreed to represent me if need be. As he said, “When they hear my name at the Commission, they will know she has no case.” So, after taking a few years off my life, she lost. Lots of morals here, but one of them certainly is that one risks a lot more than money in being an employer.
Decent cheese is illegal because it does the naughty when you’re not watching-
You say that on this side of the Wisconsin border!
In all seriousness though, I do wish we’d deregulate the cheese market with perhaps more fervency than all other markets.
I’ve started tagging my posts “Not Trump.”
You have to learn from the French to watch the cheese do the naughty. The rest will follow-
When I wrote that post this morning I decided to tag it with “Not Donald Trump”, and was thrilled to see you had invented that invaluable tag.
I’ve never been more thrilled to be associated with Onanism.
C’mon down to Texas.
Too warm for my tastes.
There we go: Main Feed.
Smart politicians invest in “constituent services.” My last vote for a Democrat was for Jack Reed, when I lived in Rhode Island. Not that we had much of a choice–or that my vote made a difference–but I was grateful for the help his staff gave my family.
Reed’s office broke a multi-month logjam at USCIS that threatened to prevent the adoption of our now son. It was a nightmare of slow-walked paperwork, walled-off bureaucracy, and inert civil servants. The last straw was the black hole into which our consular appointment had fallen: our tickets and approval hung in the balance. Within 36 hours, Reed’s staffers had fixed everything (though annoyingly, the appointments appeared with apparently backdated approval dates).
Of course, my gratitude toward Reed was mixed with nausea. I’d had to swallow my pride, and ask my elected “fixer” to cut through the cancer of the administrative state.
I work in the PEO industry. It’s really not like that. The actual employer still retains effective control. And even for employers not in California or Ohio (those states get extremely complex), managing the process and doing the ordinary federal and state tax filings are ripe for outsourcing
I agree that the regulatory mire helping to fuel this industry is ultimately a disaster and should be reversed. However, there is still benefit to this for general risk mitigation (even assuming a sane regulatory state of affairs) and for the substantial savings on benefits programs in terms of both cost to participate participation and cost of administration.
Skipsul,
A tour de force. This post should be required reading for all presidential candidates including the democrats and every single Congressional staffer.
I am a laser physicist at a university and have thought about starting businesses to commercialize technologies, but every time I am completely deterred by just what you describe. Fortunately, I also work closely with a couple smart tech companies with either much braver entrepreneurs than I, or at least with entrepreneurs that were a lot more naive than I am when they started their companies.
Palin?
Ah, the “Chicago Way.” Get the right person to fix it for you, regardless if you were right or wrong. :-)
Well said, and so true, and so terrible.
My husband works by himself and has a shot at a project he can’t safely do by himself. He is highly skilled at that type of project and finds it satisfying, plus it would be better paying than other projects. He needs one or two weeks’ help, for which he could probably convince our son to pitch in.
Our son worked for him in the past but doesn’t now, so there’s no payroll service or worker’s comp insurance in place. Setting that up would take several days and cost several thousand dollars. Hiring our son off the books risks everything we have including jail for my husband. Doing it alone poses a substantial risk of permanent injury to my husband. I suggested looking into hiring our son through a PEO, which I guess would take a couple days and cost several hundred dollars.
He’ll probably do it alone.