Liberals usually deny that their actions will have a negative effect on the business community and job creation. This denial is essential to their continued viability. If they admitted the truth – that they have contempt for job creators and figure they get what they deserve when big government rears its prosperity-killing head – they would have a pretty hard time shoving their agenda down the nation’s collective throat.
So they really get upset when business owners confirm what everyone should already know – that big-government liberalism cripples the ability of businesses to grow, prosper and create jobs. That’s why they’re mad at Mike Ruffer right now.
Ruffer owns eight Five Guys Burgers and Fries franchises in North Carolina, and he can do simple math, so he’s let it be known he will need to raise prices and cut back on personnel costs as a result of ObamaCare. For this, he has been attacked by the left as some sort of jerk. The Huffington Post even said he’s ungrateful because President Obama once stopped into a Five Guys for a snack.
This is no surprise. The left and the media did the same thing to Papa John’s founder John Schnatter for saying the same thing. Some guy writing for “Inside Higher Ed,” whatever that is, called Schnatter a “moral monster.”
You realize, of course, that this isn’t new. For one thing, Democrats do not understand how their policies hamper small businesses. As many of you know, I tried my best in 1993 to explain this to Bill Clinton when he was pushing Hillarycare. I was CEO of Godfather’s Pizza at the time, and at a town hall meeting in Omaha, I went into detail about how the costs imposed by his proposal would eat into my profits and my ability to keep employees.
To his credit, Clinton had a better grasp of the numbers and of basic business concepts than Obama ever will. But he is still a Democrat and he still falls back into delusional notions about how things work, which is why he suggested that I just raise the price of each pizza 25 cents because it was good pizza, and hey, he’d pay extra for it.
Democrats get upset with people like Ruffer and Schnatter because their entire economic worldview depends on the belief that you can impose all kinds of extra costs on businesses – large and small – and it will be fine because they’ve got plenty of money and they can afford it. They count on the electorate to believe that, when businesses resist the imposition of these costs, this is about nothing but greed and lack of concern for their workers.
The truth is that small businesses (and that especially includes franchisees) operate on very tight margins, and you cannot impose new costs on them without forcing them to make serious adjustments. And these adjustments are not easy to make. You can only raise the price of a burger or a pizza so much before a sizeable portion of your customer base won’t – or can’t – continue to buy it. You can pay for health care for full-time employees, or pay a fine as an alternative, but that will limit how many full-time employees you can maintain.
Liberals don’t understand that limiting people to 30 hours to avoid paying for their health care doesn’t make you a jerk. It makes you a businessperson who is trying to survive.
I would respect liberals more if they would admit the impacts of what they do, and at least try to make an honest case for why these things are necessary. Not that I would agree with them, but at least we’d be having an honest discussion. But that’s not what they do. Instead, they try to destroy people like Mike Ruffer and John Schnatter who expose the truths they want kept secret.
The fact is that ObamaCare destroys jobs because the money to pay for that “free” health care has to come from somewhere. Unlike the federal government, small businesses can’t just print it, and it’s not as easy for them to earn it as liberals want you to think it is.
