Yesterday, I mentioned the need for lifting the regulatory burden on skills-based small business. First of all, what I mean by skills-based small businesses are those businesses that are actually too small for stand-alone management. I mean businesses like my own in which a single person does both the production and management. Can you imagine how much of my would-be productive time is consumed by meeting unproductive regulatory concerns? Can you imagine what happens when someone like myself is in the position of needing help in the production of work? The system and its regulatory complications deter many of us from hiring help and sharing our skills to train new generations of craft artists. The regulatory system prevents overall growth of our economic sector.

The first thing is to bring the government to acknowledge our special status and potential. Given the fact that the entire government from top to bottom consists almost entirely of managers and not producers, that will be no easy task. Secondly, a means must be offered to lessen the standard paperwork burden. Why should individual craftsmen needing to hire help face the same regulatory burden as a management based business with hundreds of employees? It makes no sense. Thirdly, there should be some means through which very small businesses like my own could offer some degree of health insurance to employees. That broken down system on its own would deter most American craft artists from ever considering business growth. And yet, you can do the numbers. If every self-employed tradesman, artist or craftsman were to hire a single helper, offer some level of training to that hire, we would see rapid business growth and an increase in creative capacity.

But, as you know, most politicians have grown up in the management based economic model. They know very little about the use of skilled hands in the making of our world. When we separate the hands from our own understanding of human intelligence, what we have now is what we get. You might notice that we live in idiocy, top to bottom. The energy crisis is the result of distorted politics. The housing crisis is a result of poor politics. The deep division between labor and the management class is the result of poor politics, and all of these are the result of the failure to understand the wisdom of our hands. Now my short rant is complete. I'm heading back to the woodworking which is a great deal more fun than the distracting and destructive regulation of very small businesses in the USA.

I was notified by unplugged.com, a "blog aggregator," that Wisdom of the Hands will no longer be linked due to having less than 50% hand tools content. If you are used to coming here following a link from there, please book mark this site. This site is not about hand tools. It is about hand skills and the implication of those skills on the quality of culture and the quality of human life.