Pajama Entrepreneur

After weeks of hoping that France will get its first woman president, I am sad to report that Nicholas Sarkozy has won the French presidential elections (53%). Segolene Royal got 47% and won mostly in the western and south western parts of France. You can see the graphic by clicking here.

Whether or not he can deliver on his promises is a huge question. There’s a lot of disappointment among the Left in France and in other European countries, but they can’t go on trying to solve today’s problems with yesterday’s solutions. Working people know you can’t battle the negative effects of globalization using slogans and methods that worked in the 1950s and 1960s. That’s the problem with the Left in France and to a certain extent, the traditional Left in other countries. They’ve lost credibility among their own followers. In countries like the Netherlands, where they have abandoned the class war rhetoric, they have not found an identity or a set of prescriptions that might work. They have younger members who are trying to modernize them, but there’s a core constituency of traditionalists who refuse to move on with the times.

At the heart of the problem is the belief of many on the Left that people are helpless creatures. That might have been true in the early part of this century when many working people had little education and did not travel. That’s not true today. Most people want an opportunity and have the skills to take advantage of that as long as you don’t erect too many barriers. Most people dream of starting their own businesses and being independent, not sitting in a big bureaucratic organization waiting for the next restructuring round to kick them out into the street. They’ve tried that already, waiting for their labour unions to bail them out, waiting for the government to impose restrictions. It did not work.

So how does a Social Democrat encourage people to become independent? How would a “socialist” party make the small entrepreneurship dream come true? Certainly NOT by taxing people to death, not by carrying on with the anti-business rhetoric, not by imposing silly 35-hour work week rules, not by making it prohibitively expensive to hire people, not by pretending you can stop globalization at the border, not by imposing more regulations.

Of course not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Many people just want a stable job so they can pay their mortgages and go on family holidays every year. But even there, pretending that people can have a job for life with a fat pension, and telling them they can have it, is lying. The social democratic parties in Europe cannot look at people in the eye and say, “Look, there is no such thing as a permanent job so we will now focus on helping people retrain. We will encourage businesses, large and small, to invest locally. We will encourage people to start their own businesses so they have some control over their destiny.”

It’s time for social democratic parties to stop the anti-business, anti-entrepreneur crusade and start distinguishing between those businesses — small ones — that do add vitality to communities and the large ones — Walmart — that suffocate them. It’s never been an easier time to start a business and most people, especially under 40, have given up on the lifetime-job dream. Most of them don’t want to sit in a big company for 30 years.

In the center of Amsterdam where I live, I have seen a lot of young people start wonderful boutiques, restaurants, cafes and trattorias. They’ve made our community a great place to live and work in. Many of them used to work for other people, but they are how happier working for themselves, even if it means putting in longer hours.

There’s no such thing as job security anyway, so why not start a business?

Initiatives such as this one in Hayward County, North Carolina are examples of how local government can help starting entrepreneurs.