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Reading a recent shagbark post about how women are attracted to men who don't have bosses over 'wagies', I found myself thinking about owning a business. As as American it's obviously glorified, but I'm wondering if it's easier to own a business now than it was in the past?
Seems to my relatively uneducated mind that over time in America owning a business has in some ways gotten harder, some ways easier. Nowadays you can do the online business, make money not doing anything physical, just using your wits and social network, basically. Forms can be filled out electronically, etc etc.
On the other hand, back in the day it seems most Americans used to be business owners, especially when more rural lifestyles were more common. Folks owned farms, or a general store, and didn't really have many forms to fill out, though of course they paid (much lower) taxes.
Anyway as a somewhat half-assed tie in to the culture war - which tribe is better for business? Red tribe nominally wants to be but... they also seem to not follow through with that a lot. Blue tribe has become more kleptocratic lately. Maybe it's a tossup?
Can't really give you advice for the US, but at least in Germany you're 100% better of being a wagie. The entire system is clearly designed around you, especially the tax system, but also benefits, insurance, absolutely everything. My wife got a free 10k "stipend" as support from the government for her "women-led startup" when our second child was small so she was still partially in maternal leave. It was extremely stressful since we had to communicate with multiple agencies to find out how this is handled and the majority of their staff literally told us they have absolutely no idea, so we got bumped up to the local boss ... who also told us they have no idea, lol. After a while we found out at least that, despite being called a "stipend" which in academia is usually not considered an income, this one is anyway since there legally is no such thing as a stipend for a business, apparently.
The best part? Since the staff from the family office was hopelessly out of her depth on how to handle it in general, we structured my wife's maternal leave in such a way that she claimed was best so that we at least know how much maternal benefit we still get (greatly reduced, but at least we get no surprises from the family office). A few months later insurance calls us, and tells us that my wife has fallen out of the public insurance: Due to the structuring she is now considered fully self-employed. To add insult to injury, the way we originally intended to do it would have not led to this complication, it was entirely a result of our negotiations with the family office. Suddenly she has to pay a few hundred € every month that we wouldn't have to otherwise. We recently calculated it out - taxes on the stipend, lost benefits, extra insurance costs - and we got basically nothing out of the stipend compared to my wife being 100% in maternal leave for the entire time. It was a lot of extra stress and work, almost entirely spent on negotiations with legal bodies, for no benefit for anyone at all whatsoever.
Also, by my impression going up the corporate ladder of some BigCorp has a much better floor AND a better ceiling unless you're exceptionally confident in yourself. But it probably depends highly on the field, in some it seems to be unavoidable that you have to do a a jump from wagie to self-employed when going up the ladder, like attorney partnerships.
On the tribes, in very general terms blue is worse on pushing bureaucracy, but red fucks up international business.
Absolutely depends on field. The vast majority of Germans (and basically all other Euros) cannot independently reach real wealth by being wagies. There are exceptions - if you have the education (enough credentials in the correct field) to really go up the corpo ladder or to become an expert at the local branch of a US company/startup, you don't need to risk anything - but the overwhelming majority of people simply do not have a route to break into a 6 figure salary while employed. The distribution of salaries is just to narrow, and there's almost no long tail in Europe (things look orders of magnitude more dire if you aim above 200k: less than 1% of adults in Germany earn more than 200k EUR, and that number includes all sources of income - so there's a lot of business owners, partners and capital income recipients in that block).
But if you own a business? There's no cultural monetary limits. No education/credential requirements. "Just" the soft skills, the drive and some luck (which you need to climb the cropo ladder as well) can get into the top few percentile points of income/wealth. And sure, you need to build momentum. You need to pick a field that allows for commerce (because selling things scales much better than selling labor) and that allows you an easy path to exploit the labor of the people you hire. But both come practically built-in with many blue collar careers: many of the people in those field do not want (or cannot) directly compete with you, they want to be hired; and most of your customers don't only need to buy labor, they also need physical products (which you can sell them with good - and often obscene - margins).
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