Brad's Bunker

September 25, 2005 By Brad Lawrence

THE BUNKER INDEX

Self Employed Question

Say you open a business, and sell widgets. The widgets sell like gang busters, however, in order to keep selling the widgets, it will require that you re-invest more than half of your profits into the production and search for more widgets. The widgets are SO popular that soon other industries are finding ways to use them and the public is getting to the point where the widgets are indispensable, EVERYONE must have widgets and their offshoot other enterprises.

But the widgets catch on in other countries and pretty soon, although this country has become dependent on widgets, other countries making use of them makes the ingredients of the widgets harder and harder to come by.

But the public demand for widgets doesn't go down, and so in order to keep making a suitable profit you keep raising prices.

And then there are the do-gooders, who make it even harder to produce widgets by joining like-minded groups who exert pressure on their pusillanimous politicians to make it almost impossible to make widgets in this country, making up silly laws to please the do-gooders, who claim environmental reasons as well as scenic beautification reasons (the factories etc. used to make the widgets are unsightly and there may be an accident at the factory which may hurt some plant or animal life).

And while you are making a ton of money, you keep having to use more and more of your profits to keep production and supply up, all the while attempting to keep the supply affordable.

Yet there comes a point where the production is NOT possible without raising the price of your widgets to a point where the public complaints about the price becomes intolerable to our pusillanimous politicians, who insist that because you are making obscene profits (according to them) you must take a loss in order to keep the public at bay, or you must come up with a substitute for the widgets to appease the public.

So you are in a quandary. What should you do?

What, dear reader, would YOU do?

I'll tell ya what I'd do, I'd pack up my kit bag and let someone else take the loss. Sell off the factories and ships, and think of new ways for making money.

I'd be damned if I was going to work for nothing. That's the American way, or did I miss the headlines which say we've gone totally socialist?