How to go to Work for Yourself with a Home-Based Business

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Another benefit to husbands, wives, and youngsters all working on the same payroll is that you eliminate the system wherein everybody goes a different direction at 9 a. m. Togetherness isn't measured in dollars, but it has its worth . . . and if that's not enough solace, let this explanation from one family partner I talked to suffice: "The fights are worse, but the help is cheaper!" So "you pays your money and you takes your choice".

IF IT'S SO GREAT, HOW COME EVERYONE ISN'T DOIN' IT?

There's no denying that self-employment is not for everyone. It takes a certain "ingredient" that some folks have . . . and others don't (quite possibly because The System has taken it away from them). Eliot Coleman, a homesteader in Harborside, Maine (and a close neighbor of Helen and Scott Nearing) explained that difference with his own simple eloquence one morning while talking about the reaction of the local townsfolk to a nuclear power plant that's planned for Coleman's neck of the woods:

"They think the nuke plant'll create jobs," he said sadly. "So I'm afraid a lot of people are in favor of it. Some nicelooking man in a suit says, 'Nuclear power won't hurt you,' and they stop worrying about the dangers, because jobs will be created. The trouble with some folks is they want the job to come to them. Not enough people look around to see what needs to be done."

The cities are filled with people like those Coleman described, and sad to say, many of them don't realize they have the power to change things-on a national scale, and starting right in their own back yards-by creating their own small-scale enterprises.

THE ERA OF THE HOMEGROWN BUSINESS... IT'S HERE!

The majority of people still haven't caught on to what's happening . . . that's a fact . . . but the pendulum-too long in the corner of the multi-national corpora. tions-has begun to swing back toward the independent economics of being your own boss. What turned the tide?

During the 1980'x, the impersonality and the efficient coldness of chain businesses began to make themselves felt among millions of employees and millions of customers who were fast becoming "consumers". The franchise system flourished in those boom years, but the real owner was still a thousand miles away, and that fly in your soup was packaged last April.

As resources dwindled andcosts climbed, substitution and inferior quality diminished our respect for possessions. Things became "disposable" (a big selling point in the 1970'x). Imitation became the key means of concealing substitution in the "goods" we bought from mass producers. ( Some of the steel in my car is painted to look like wood. . .plastic is painted to look like steel . . .and what I thought was rubber on the bumper scraped off in places as only paint will do!) While traveling cross-country, the tourist now never has to ask where the toilet is, as long as he stops only at Brand X Motor Inn and Restaurant. Marketing, like television programming, has become a cynical measurement of some electrically determined, lowest common denominator. The consumer has lost both his sense of uniqueness and any respect at all for the marketplace. Our "needs" are anticipated and met in increasingly repetitive ways.

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