(I write from the UK, so UK laws apply, YMMV)
A couple of weeks ago I got into the rear seat of someone’s car, the front seats were both occupied, they turned around and told me to put my seat belt on, I told them to fuck off, they told me it was the law and I would be fined, I told them to to fuck, drive or I’ll walk / get out / etc.
The fact is I do not actually know what the law is on this in the UK, I know seat belts are now mandatory for front seats, I don’t like it but I comply, but I have no idea about back seats, so basically I reacted badly to being told what to do and being treated in my eyes like a 5 year old.
I could google it, but I do not care.
With my business head on there are similar controls, there are many many many things that I *must* do, and in certain ways only, because if I do not I am liable to all sorts of consequences up to and including imprisonment and having all my assets taken.
I’m at one of those sorts of places now, I have a big legal step to take, and I’m 99.999% likely to take it, but reading and re-reading and re-re-reading everything is a good way to programme yourself with all the new requirements, and you need to do this or you will fuck up, and it will be enforcement time again.
I try to explain this to people, especially young people, you are not allowed to make any choices about sex or alcohol or a million other things, you are treated as property of the state, which you are, arguing about whether your master is righteous or just or good is irrelevant, you are property, your arguments and thoughts and feelings are worthless.
If you are deluded you will think that milestones in your life such as 16 and 18 and 21 give you new freedoms and abilities, meh, for every supposed extra “freedom” you just got, you also got about a million other “obligations” and trust me, they more than outweigh any benefit you think you might get from the freedoms you think you got.
As a small local businessman, let me be blunt, unless you are also a small local business owner in the same jurisdiction, you have no fucking idea just how many rules and regulations and things I have to have and do and comply with, just to open the doors and hopefully get some custom…. you’d fucking shit yourself, and then ask me why, why do I bother, why is it worth it?
10,000 a year for the rent, 5,000 a year for the rates, 5,000 a year for the light and heat, 1000 a year for the accountant, 2,000 a year for the various insurances and licenses, 1,000 a year for the various inspections and certificates, 3,000 a year for general maintenance (fire extinguishers and first aid kits as much as paint) I’m missing loads but we are already up to 27,000 a year and you haven’t made any sales yet.
When you make sales you have to act as the state tax collector and state spy, you don’t get paid for it of course, and again if you get it wrong you guessed it, they can take all your shit, you can go to prison, etc etc etc.
Not that our courts of law are impartial or fair, but even if they were, none of the above gets heard in a court of law where you get to argue your case, it is all statutory legislation, and some government appointed drone with absolute authority will decide if your efforts comply or not.
People will ask me why I do it, the answer is simple, I actually have a bit more freedom than you do as a wage slave.
I have to fucking work for it though, because much of the advantage comes to exploiting the 0.03 incremental wriggle room in each law and regulation and adding it all together to come out ahead of the wage slave.
Why bother? If you are just a slave?
The truth is brutal, slavery is like communism, the equality for all is just theory, in practice there are differences, some slaves get culled for military draft when the shit hits the fan, some slaves get culled for extra taxation, some slaves get culled for just being slaves.
If I believed for one minute that the future for the remainder of my lifetime was likely to be all rosy and nice and fluffy and puppies with shades of the ideological american way where all you had to do was work a bit to stay afloat, I’d never have made the jump, I would have stayed on the side of flying under the radar and black economy and cash in hand and work where you can.
I don’t believe it, I see all sorts of chickens coming home to roost, and I know enough to know that as a wage slave, I’ll be fucked, maybe not as fucked as the next guy, but I will still be fucked.
As a small business owner I’m still a fucking slave, I might still be chained to a fucking oar, but I get to make my own chains and the oars are on deck, not down below.
As a small business owner I actually do have a small voice that gets some lip service from local authority, if your home gets burgled you’ll ring the police and they may or may not come around a few hours later to tell you there is nothing they can do, here is a crime number for your insurance claim, as a business owner they are there within the hour, with the scenes of crime / fingerprint guys, and when the crooks eventually get caught 18 months later it’s *your* break in they get prosecuted for, the 99 houses they robbed as well are “taken into consideration” to clean up the books.
The thing I said about about getting to make my own chains is it, it really is a good description, and my chains look really fucking good, but my main priority is comfort and ease of breaking, if you know how, while looking like solid 18 mm unobtanium to everyone else.
It *is* a gamble to do it, it *is* a big step into the dark / unknown / new territory, it does have real risks, there are none of the safety nets, as illusory as they may be, that you get being a wage slave, but the fact is if you aren’t prepared to take an educated gamble now and again, you might as well be dead.
There are also lots of peripheral advantages that you do not at first see, or, if you do, you do not really know what you are looking at.
Want to do the cambelt and brakes on your car, no problem, pull it into your industrial shed with all your tools and everything else, close the door and go for it, realize you also need a water pump and some brake lines making up, just pick up the phone to one of the motor factors on the same estate and get it delivered, want to take three days over it, so what, it is locked away secure in your own place, come rain / snow / shine it makes no odds.
As a private citizen I used to marvel at all the shit I would get through the letterbox, go on, have a free credit card, go on, have a free store credit card, well, that ain’t nothing, get yourself a proper business and a proper business unit on a proper industrial estate and suddenly it is the aforesaid motor factors and everyone else offering you accounts with Net30 and Net60 terms, Net90 for some of them.
*IF* I wanted to go the electric car route the problems I have at home are somewhere to park it while charging it, and charging it, after all all I can reasonably pull is single phase 230 VAC and 13 amperes, 40 amp breaker for the whole house… 40 x 230 = 10 kW at the industrial unit I can pull 3 phase, 50-60-70-80 kW no problem, and the electric is cheaper per kWh than anything I can get at home, and I will only run into issues if I pull big inductive loads like big motors starting up which will load the local grid… as for parking spaces I have six…
My “home” used to be my cave, I’d pull up the drawbridge, close the curtains and lock the front door and sit in my pit locked away from the world, but anyone could get in if they wanted to, in about 30 seconds with a pry-bar, nowadays my home is sparse and spartan, most of my shit is up the unit and I spend most of my time there.
My stereo which used to get occasional use for an hour or two every couple of week, quietly, because, you know, neighbours, gets used every day, sundays it’s cranked up, no neighbours.
Even the fucking broadband is better / faster / cheaper / lower contention at “work” than it is at home.
So yes, I am still a fucking slave, but there is a difference between being the cotton picking nigger at the bottom of the pile and the nigger in charge of the workshops.
And ultimately, when presented with the opportunity (which I had made and been working towards myself) the question you ask yourself is this, will I ever forgive myself if I do not take the chance, because if I don’t, I can see the future mapped out before me, and it’s all “meh”…
Not being the bottom of the ladder nigger slave gives me more freedom for whatever the future brings, and the more turmoil that future holds, the better I am able to weather it, the higher my slave status.
Having ten piss poor choices always beats having two that suck donkey balls big time.
I could give up my rented house and almost pay the rent on my work / industrial unit with the money I saved, like I said in a previous post, I reckon there are at least a dozen single guys on the industrial estate living under the radar in the industrial units they rent for their work.
I do not say this as an ooooh that sounds exciting I’d love to do that, but it sure as fuck beats being homeless, all you have to do is be real quiet about it.
It’s plan B, and plan C, and plan D, and having those “they may suck, but they suck less than not having them” alternatives… and that’s the difference between being the cotton pickin slave and the workshop head boy slave.
A US$ crash, massive forex changes, deflation, you name it, those things still concern me, but over the past two years I have managed to maneouver myself into a place where they concern me a lot less than they used to.
When things change you do not want those changes altering your blip on the radar profile from lost in background scatter to “oho, what’s this?”