NFIB Focus – Jack Faris

It was Benjamin Franklin who first portrayed American tradesmen and shopkeepers as honest, diligent, hard-working people. He possessed an unparalleled ability to see something much larger than toil and profit in the efforts of his fellow business owners. His writings, filled with images of leather-aproned solid citizens willing to sacrifice their lives for a greater cause, helped define American entrepreneurism.

Silversmith Paul Revere and farmer Ethan Allen and thousands of other entrepreneurs, history tells us, were ready to transform themselves into fierce and unselfish warriors in times of crisis. More than two-and-a-quarter centuries later, American small-business owners remain as resolved as their forebears to shutter their shops and stores, don their nation’s uniform and stand shoulder-to-shoulder against tyranny and oppression.

That spirit of faith in the ideals of freedom and democracy is responsible for the existence of America’s free enterprise system. To that spirit can be traced the origins of a commitment that today thrives in 25 million small businesses.

As we celebrate National Small Business Week May 17-21, let us keep that spirit in mind. It is the philosophical bedrock of a system that represents more than 99 percent of the nation’s employers who employ half of all private-sector workers, pay nearly 45 percent of America’s total private payroll and generate between 60 percent and 80 percent of the net-new jobs created each year.

Imagine the grin on Ben Franklin’s face were he to learn that he helped foster the formation of a system that annually churns out more than half of this vast nation’s non-farm, private gross domestic product. He would be delighted to hear that small-business owners in the 21st Century produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.

Computer technology would come as no surprise to the Philadelphia printer-statesman-philosopher-inventor who tried to capture electricity with a kite. He would take pride in the fact that today’s small firms are where nearly two-fifths of all the nation’s high-tech workers, such as scientists and engineers, find employment.

The entrepreneurial Franklin would celebrate that 53 percent of small businesses in this country are home-based. The humanitarian Franklin would celebrate the fact that women own 5.4 million small businesses and that growing slices of the nation’s entrepreneurial pie are being enjoyed by Americans who trace their heritage to Africa, Asia, Latin and South America.

The wise author who long ago advised “Early to Bed, and early to Rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy and wise,” would likely be among the first to shout a grand hurrah in celebration of the nation’s small businesses.

The spirit of free enterprise is alive and vigorous as ever. Let us invoke the memory of those who gave us the master plan that has become the American Dream: small business. And let us honor those who pursue it.

Jack Faris is president of NFIB (the National Federation of Independent Business), the nation’s largest small-business advocacy group. A non-profit, non-partisan organization founded in 1943, NFIB represents the consensus views of its 600,000 members in Washington, D.C., and all 50 state capitals. More information is available on-line at www.NFIB.com.