The Balance Beam

Ashley stood at the pinnacle of accomplishment, the gold tier, on the London Olympics award platform, having bested the world field in the balance beams. More than a little guilt consumed her as she knew her coach deserved the honor more than she.

“You should be proud of yourself?” a friend commended her coach, Boris Sagakov.

“Yes, I worked hard, it was an incredible challenge overcoming her ineptitude on the double twist loop combined with lack of concentration,” replied the coach.

President Obama echoes the view of professor and Senatorial candidate Elisabeth Warren that the successful (defined narrowly as business owners) are but a compilation of the effort of smarter people who choose the greater cause of public service over work, in Obama’s words, “behind enemy lines.” It was multi-cultural professor Warren who inspired the graduate student who taught the teacher who taught modern music composition to best selling rapper “I’m Not.”

The benefits of the President’s brilliant investments in the public sector from green energy startups, added IRS agents, increased regulation and more money for failing schools to fast trains with plenty seats will eventually generate a new wave of growth and enhance our standard-of-living. Although it will be the self-centered who will take credit for advances and reap the majority of the benefits, it is the central planners, those smarter than us, that credit is really due.

In a daze I joined the chant – “Thanks to you, our omnificent ‘state’, from whom all goodness and greatness flow. Credit be yours for guiding us, a helpless and incompetent lot, toward a greater good, a utopia constructed by superior morality.”

“WAKE UP HONEY!, time to get up and face reality,” Sue exclaimed as my dream faded away.

“I know you are a good coach Boris but too bad Brittany didn’t make the national quarter finals after you taught her for ten years or Sarah who was so injury prone,” Boris’s friend cautiously brought him to reality.

“What can I do, all clay is not the same,” answered Boris.

Eighty percent of businesses fail in the first one, three, or five years depending upon whose data you use. Successful people-whether entrepreneurs or not and the underemployed have access to the public school system, the same public airways and drive over the same bridge. Many with disadvantages overcome, many with advantages fail. If the public sector is due credit for success, what of failure—balance?

Of the 80% of businesses that fail is it because of:
-subpar, protected public school teachers
-high taxes
-burdensome government regulation
-political views incongruent with the elite public sector (think Chicago)
-lack of access to capital because of:
-the government deficit usurpation of capital
-over-regulation of financial institutions squeezing small banks
-over-litigation tolerated by politicians who are financed by lawyers.
-difficulty finding employees from those addicted to endless unemployment
checks, subsidized housing and utilities, free cell phones, contraceptives and food stamps?

Entering the kitchen awake now I asked, “Please hon wake me sooner tomorrow and let me dream not.”

Sincerely,
A Narrowly focused businessman