Good Failures Vs. Bad Failures

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I found Tom Richman's article informative and thought provoking -- particularly so since I work for the National Federation of Independent Business, the largest of those Washington spokesmen for small business that he and Dr. Birch believe speak only for the past or, at best, the present.

One of the primary reasons I enjoy working for the NFIB, in particular, and for the small business community, in general, is that Mr. Richman's conclusion that such spokesmen work only to preserve the status quo is just wrong enough to provide hope and excitement for the future, and just right enough to be a continual source of tension.

Very often, the struggle in Washington over "whose ox is going to be gored" is shortsighted and as messy as a wrestling match in a mud pit. Much lobbying comes down to primitive territorial struggle -- and it is fierce, unending, and does tend to promote the "past or, at best, the present."

The small business community has had to become good at this kind of lobbying, however, because, as we all know deep down, and as Mr. Richman's article so clearly shows, "small business" is not a single interest group as commonly understood in Washington. That is the dirty little secret of small business lobbying and that is what so often makes it hard for legislators to understand or deal with us. In fact, it is the broad-based small business lobbying organizations that most persistently and most vociferously argue that the country must "foster enterprise" itself, must resist trying to make life riskfree, must preserve the right to fail along with the right to succeed, and "that safe-guarding the untidy process that includes business births, deaths, growth, and decline" does "take precedence over preservation of any single interest group."

Small business means opportunity and risk, it also means the competitive enterprise process, diversity, and freedom in all its untidy manifestations. Defending and promoting small business means defending and promoting the process itself, not just small businesses. That is why small business people and their representatives in Washington are the best safeguards of our historic freedoms as well as the best hopes of our economic future.