The Kool-Aid Konglomeration

I admire the entrepreneurial spirit.

My brother and I had our brief leap into the cloudy waters of entrepreneurial exuberance... we briefly ran our own paint and wallcovering store ... but I soon found the waters cold and foreboding and have not quickly ventured back in.
My brother, on the other hand, has made something of a life of running his own operations - and it seems that he would have it no other way.

The entrepreneurial spirit runs in our blood to a degree. Our grandfather - "Pop", seemed to gravitate toward such adventures. Though he spent his life farming and then working in a cotton mill, he and his brother - Earnest - often seemed to be working together on something.

At some point during their younger days, they tried their hand at home-made liquor. As I recall the story, they had a unique inventory system of storing the bottles or jugs in holes in an embankment - under clumps of tall grass.

I think they were beginning to see some local success. Good news, however, travels fast and someone bragged about their liquor to their father. I think he issued his own brand of "cease and desist" order.

On another occasion, they traveled to Florida to pick oranges. The one thing I remember about that story was that Pop explained to me the proper way to pick an orange - with a twist. If you just pull it off the tree, the stem will pull a plug from the peel, so you have to give it a twist as you pull.

I remember one night that Pop talked a great deal about that adventure, but I don't remember much of what he said and I regret that I didn't learn more.

After Pop retired, he went into the fish-bait business and became a main supplier of "red wigglers" to local bait shops.

My Dad, who now seems to focus on just a very limited number of stories that he tells over and over, often talks about how he sold snow-cones out of the back of his car for awhile.

There is something very exciting about going into business. One of the things I enjoyed during my few days of selling radio advertising, was dealing with brand new businesses. There is just a certain infectious giddiness that people feel during those early days - often before the realities of cash-flow, profit margin, overhead, taxes and the like set in.

I think that entrepreneurs are the artists of the business world. It is when business most resembles God in that it creates.

I still have the little table that I used as my first Kool-Aid stand.

I am not sure of how old I was, I don't remember how much money I made or who purchased my watery Kool-Aid, but I made some sales. I remember dancing around on our front porch, shaking the money in my money box and shouting "I'm rich!".

Didn't everyone have a lemonade stand or Kool-Aid stand at some point, or has that tenant of Americana also faded into obscurity?

I am troubled these days by the constant barrage against those that take risks and achieve. It is wrong on so may fronts. For about twenty years now we have heard the mantra of "raising taxes on the rich" and "making the rich pay their fair share". Achievement and gaining wealth have gotten a bad name.

Those who achieve are often somewhat responsible for the pay check of those of us who work for them - a fact that is too seldom point out. There was a time when there was a universal recognition in this country of the contributions of those who begin and build businesses. When an entrepreneur took great risks and found success, people recognized that manufacturing plants grew up and then neighborhoods and churches and cities and schools. That's how communities were formed.

Sure, there were imperfections, people were not always treated fairly but in a free society, the markets would regulate inequities.

Let's take the example of Kool-Aid stands. Suppose one Kool-Aid drummer is selling a watered down product at exorbitant prices, before long the market will correct that. An new kid will decide to sell a better mix of Kool-Aid at better prices. And as he achieves success, more kids will enter the market and suddenly the Kool-Aid consumer finds that prices are lower and the Kool-Aid is better than it's ever been. And the kid with the water-down stuff has either corrected his practices or gone out of business, all because of competition.

When I was in the retail paint and wallcovering business, there were some paint manufacturing companies that had the dubious reputation of allowing an independent dealer to build up paint sales in a market, then stepping in and building a company store to compete with their own client.

With all the advantages held by the company owned store - the little guy would soon be out of business.

That is the trouble behind the bogus idea that a "public option" national health care plan will "promote" competition. It actually accomplishes just the opposite.

When all the little guys (the insurance companies) have to compete with the one big "company store" (the government) - a "company store" that makes the rules and regulates all the other stores .... a company store that is well-funded because it doesn't have to compete, but rather is funded by tax monies that are confiscated from the public without choice ... a company store that can regulate pricing, prohibiting the little guys to compete... it is pretty obvious that the little guys (the insurance companies) will go out of business.

No matter how evil you may think they are, consider how that so many would be effected by the collapse of such an industry. Employees of these "evil" insurance companies own homes, purchase automobiles, buy groceries, dine at restaurants, pay property taxes to fund public education, purchase clothing, cell phones, computers, refrigerators .... the list goes on and on.

It's funny to me how that one year ago, our government was willing to go overboard in borrowing against the future of this nation and to go overboard in usurping government control over several industries that were "too big to fail". Now our government is planning to launch a plan that would wreck an equally large industry. All because they are the "straw dog" set up to take the attention off the fact that 1/6 of the economy is becoming government controlled.

I'm not drinking their Kool-Aid.