If Not For Business...

by: ty mccauslin, m.s. | published: 09 04, 2009

While taking nothing away from the numerous contributions and struggles of the American worker for which it stands, here’s an interesting notion that each of us should consider every first Monday in September as we celebrate another all-expense paid national holiday:

Without business there would be no Labor Day!!!

When you stop and think about it, there really is no which came first, the chicken or the egg dilemma here, because without business there would be no employees, and, in the bigger picture, no working Americans to recognize with a holiday. 

Moreover, as shrieks of blasphemy ring out from card-check demanding union faithful like the Teamsters to the AFL-CIO, without business there would be no technological, job-generating breakthroughs like:  air conditioning, catalytic petroleum cracking, the Clapper, hot tubs, insulin, Crayola crayons, Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Hershey’s chocolate, Zippo lighters, optical scanners, sneakers and laptop computers.  

These are just a few of the numerous everyday luxuries and innovations brought to the world by the capital, organizational skills and entrepreneurial spirit of business owners around the world.  

Yet big or small, America’s employers are all too routinely and unjustifiably demonized by radical environmentalists, Hollywood and most recently, B. Hussein Obama, and an overwhelming majority of his lapdog defenders in the mainstream media as nothing but “uncaring, chemical dumping, tax evading, poor robbing, baby killers.”  

Unlike all talk and no action “tree huggers” and other “chicken little” fear mongers, the business community is constantly moving the ball forward on sensible environmental stewardship and racking up real results. 

According to information provided by the pre-Obama compromised US Department of Commerce, business directly invested $1 trillion in pollution abatement and control over the last decade and, in the next decade, it’s estimated that number will jump at least another $1.5 trillion.

As far as American-made products go, many of the most popular tourist attractions, pouring millions of dollars of annual sales tax revenue into state government coffers, stand as a lasting tribute to the never-ending ingenuity and generosity of America’s Entre-pioneers.

For example, during the mid-1930s, Pittsburgh department store magnate Edgar J. Kauffman provided world famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright with both the challenge and funding to design his most “sublime integration of man and nature,” a house built over a waterfall. 

Located halfway between the southwestern Pennsylvania villages of Mill Run and Ohiopyle, Fallingwater has been visited by well over 2.7 million people since this former family retreat was opened to the public in 1964.  

Not surprisingly, members of the American Institute of Architects, have selected Fallingwater as “the best all-time work of American architecture.”

Why Not Business Day?
The driving force behind Labor’s Day’s turbulent genesis should come as no surprise to any employer or non-union supporting employee that has ever had an encounter with dis-organized labor. 

During the election year of 1894, union uprisings against President Grover Cleveland’s “harsh methods” to break up other explosive labor riots made appeasing America’s workers a top political priority.

In the immediate wake of all the senseless deaths, looting and burning of private property, emergency Labor Day legislation was rushed unanimously through both Houses of Congress. 

The final bill sanctioning the holiday arrived on President Cleveland’s desk the day after he ordered military troops to quash the infamous Pullman Strike. 

Ironically, and something for today’s fence-straddling lawmakers such as Benedict Arlen Specter to keep in mind when voting on either card check or universal health care, even though Cleveland caved in and gave American workers an extra day off, he was not reelected.
           
In short, for every “uncaring, chemical dumping, tax evading, poor robbing, baby killing capitalist Michael Moore or other members of the Marxist-tilted liberal media can dig up, slander or manufacturer, there is a Milton Hershey, Sam Walton, Walt Disney and countless other modern-day Entre-pioneers who care every bit as much about their employees and their respective communities as their companies and profit margins.

Rather than celebrating a national holiday specifically created to curtail life-threatening labor strikes, wouldn’t it be much more logical and appropriate to commemorate the life-transforming, accomplishments of America’s innovators, payroll payers and tomorrow makers by celebrating Business Day? 

As in all previous recessions, it will be the ingenuity and generosity of our nation’s job creators, in spite of union bosses and the Obama administration that will generate the economic firepower necessary to put America back to work, job by job, and propel the United States to even greater days ahead.

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