New Biggies Help Self-employed

Everybody knows that the e-businesses like Amazon.com and eBay are revolutionizing
the economy. Or something like that. But under the radar they are revolutionizing
business in ways you wouldn’t expect, according to
Glenn Harlan Reynolds.

eBay is offering health insurance
“to their `Power Sellers’-- basically people who sell
$1,000 or more a month and get good customer reviews.” So not only does eBay provide
a marketplace for millions of buyers and sellers, but it also is facilitating their
transactions with services that we traditionally expect from top tier employers.

You can do things now, as a little guy, that formerly
could only be done with a big organization. But what’s interesting is
the symbiosis here. The little guys can do as well as they do because
of the big organizations, like eBay or Amazon,
that they associate with, not in spite of them.

Our liberal elites have been so busy defending Bill Clinton and hating George W. Bush
that they are completely missing the revolution in the workplace that millions
of Americans are experiencing.

There has been a quiet revolution in business technology
over the last generation, in which business skills that used to be considered an
“art” have become paint-by-numbers technology. What used to be called “a good
bedside manner” in client relations is now called “managing client expectations.”
There are lots of similar little changes in business practice
that have been systematized and refined over the last
generation and most of it has happened under the radar. The symbiosis between big
business and the little guy reported by Reynolds is just one example of this trend.

No doubt our liberal masters will wake up one day and demand to change it all, like they
did a century ago when they woke up to the horror of jumped-up barrow boys
like telegraph clerk Carnegie
and bookkeeper Rockefeller running mega-corporations.

A century ago they cut the upstarts down to size with anti-trust law
and economic regulation. Will they do something
similar this time around? Or will it be too late?