Interesting article in Inc.magazine online yesterday: “Who Speaks For Entrepreneurs?” It explores the politics behind polling that purportedly captures the sentiment of small business owners. Here’s my take away: You MUST be involved in politics today if you are a small business owner. But my analysis starts with a different observation.
A free marketplace for goods and services is the most democratic institution ever devised. People vote every second when they decide which products to buy, whose services to use, where to travel, how much time to spend online, and on and on. Everything about a free market is not only free, it’s instant, egalitarian, self-organizing, and democratic.
And that is exactly why political Progressives hate free markets. Progressives don’t want the people to decide what the people should have or do, where the people should go, what the people should see. Progressives believe the people are too stupid and too weak to take care of themselves and only smart society should be allowed to make such important decisions for the stupid weak people.
So we have polls.
Polls are a brilliant subterfuge to replace personal freedom of choice with smart society dictates. Polling sounds so democratic. Polling is like voting isn’t it? Ha! The article I cited above tells you exactly how pollsters manipulate polls results to give the answers they want you to hear. And then the pollsters use the polling results to manipulate laws in favor of their pet projects. Laws that remove and manipulate choices consumers could have had in a free market, and it’s all justified because after all “57% of Americans believe…” Political Progressives love polling because they can tell you how they want to limit your freedoms in a way that makes it sound like it was your own idea!
Which leads me to my conclusion: If you are in business, you MUST be involved in politics. Because people making and influencing laws do not care about democratic institutions like free markets, they care about polls. As long as Americans keep electing political Progressives who are intent on quashing free market choices, you have to be involved in politics to make those politicians limit choices in ways that help your business.