By contrast, Adam Smith, in Wealth of Nations, articulated the labor theory of value. Any given object or commodity has as its value the blood, sweat, and tears that go into it. As Ayn Rand would put it, the quantity of human life that goes into it. Rand acknowledged that every moment spent conceiving of, creating, crafting, designing, and building is a moment that you will never again retrieve – a moment of your existence, which is finite and irreplaceable. What, after all, is the value of Mom’s lemon pie? Is it merely the buck or two some passing hobo will offer? Or is it the care, concern, tenderness, and quantities of preparation that she invested – the hours neither you nor she will ever get back? Again, I don’t object to the little pipsqueak repeating any particular theory, but rather to doing so in complete ignorance of the other theories of value and what constitutes them.

It was ironic. They seemed to think this was somehow a liberal manner of thinking. A third buyer, when I mentioned Smith, said “Well capitalism, you know…” She couldn’t, of course, finish the sentence. Such sentiments about entire realms of thought dismissed as a block are expressed in elipses that terminate in knowing nods of the head by bewildered yet self-assured minds. They think they know what’s wrong with “capitalism”, but the fact that they can’t speak intelligently about it, or tell you anything substantive about what it really is, demonstrates that they don’t care about right and wrong at all. Knowledge of right and wrong require knowledge of the thing judged. Instead, they judge with elipses.

They might be appalled to discover that the value system they’ve expressed is the core of conservatism whereas the value system I’ve cited Smith and Rand expressing is the core of capitalism. In rejecting capitalism, they join the conservatives in commoditizing human labor and thereby upholding an intrinsic class system. Whereas capitalism attributes intrinsic value to labor, thereby equalizing opportunity and attacking any intrinsic class system. In short, where neoconservatives claim a monopoly on capitalism but never actually practice it, and constantly undermine rather than defend it, these nose ring sporting pseudo-liberals are neoconservative by proxy, because they’ve bought into that mythology. They’ve surrendered the liberalism of Jefferson (and Smith) to a quack equation at the same time the rest of the world is rediscovering Smith as a source of liberty from Western tyranny.

It’s again ironic that their view is decidedly third world unfriendly. Chinese factory laborers and migrant fruit pickers are referring back to Smith’s value system. The conservative, drawing on the premise that a thing has no inherent value cannot find an authentic rational ethos for paying a Chinese laborer more than 10 cents an hour. But the Chinese line laborer says the value of a circuit board is measured not merely in what someone will pay but in moments, hours, days, and years of his life, of his family’s lives, and therefore he agitates for a living wage. The fruit picker thinks that it doesn’t matter that some fat suburban mistress won’t pay more than 50 cents a pound for mass-produced (cr)apples – his life is worth more than what she’s “willing to pay”, and it’s his life, his health, his wellbeing, the future of his kids, all of those things that go into bringing that food to market. That apple represents either the possibility of a decent life or a decided bondage to someone else’s decent life.

In short, Smith’s labor theory of value dignifies labor, or rather takes accurate stock of its dignity, where the pseudo-wisdom of “a thing is only worth what someone will pay” is parrot wisdom, one of the Dixie cup platitudes of people who wear nose rings to express their liberalism, but make the patriots who founded their country look like communist subversives by comparison.

This is aside from the confused religious implications in such babble. First, by stating anything about value – even its absence – one is proposing a value system. A system of valuation. And the dismissal of physical objects as having no intrinsic value or “worth” (one can easily say “meaning”) is as clear an expression of atheism as one needs. One may hear it out of the mouths of bible toting fundamentalists who think nose rings deserve a swift beating, but it’s no less a denial of sacramentalism and the sanctity of physical space, of matter, and of the qualities that go into design (intelligence, diligence, attention, concentration, concern). In effect, denying any inherent value or valuation of physical things is a denial of *all* values of any kind. It is atheism par excellence. It also pisses off Steve Jobs, whose incorporeal design values are probably connected to the earphones that sit alongside those nose rings.

And like that atheistic system of devaluation, it is circular reasoning, for the moment it tries to articulate any value, it denies the ground of its own assertions. It cannot tell us “yes but I have a *different* means of valuing labor” – no you don’t – you have removed the logical ground of valuation. Ironically, while claiming to believe only in what it can see, hold in its hands, etc – to believe only in the material reality – it immediately denies the intrinsic value and meaning in that reality (‘only worth what someone will pay’), thereby – again – denying (by its own standards) *all* value and valuation. The anti-material neo-neoplatonism that has devolved into atheism (and ultimately devolves into solipsism) ultimately says nothing that is not senseless cacophony. It is inherently contradictory, groundless, valueless, and an endless loop of narcissistic glossolalia disguised as thought.

One may say that aside from spiritual value, there is no value or, in short, that aside from value there is no valuation or, in extenso, that unless one attributes intrinsic value to the physical space, material, objects, that have to do with man, one can attribute no value to man or to any immaterial thing either. It is intriguing that the nose-ring crowd asserts their commitment to a holistic, more ecologically sound way of conceiving of the world, when in fact they deny this and create in themselves the cause of exploitation, waste, and abuse by denying the coinherent worth of tangible and intangible things, of man and matter, of man and nature, of matter and ‘spirit’. It is the authentic capitalist that is holistic. The nose rings and the neoconservatives are joined in a fragmenting of reality into ‘that which has inherent value’ and that which doesn’t.

By drawing a harsh, causeless, baseless dichotomy between value and object, which is really a rejection of the agreement of intangible and tangible, that is immaterial and material – by referring all value to that which is relative rather than objective, they deny that man himself has any inherent worth, any identifiable transcendent meaning, and so they become apologists for the exploitation they so vocally decry when lounging around tea shops casting copies of Wealth of Nations into the rhetorical flames.

So, good people, the next time someone pops off with “material things have no value but what someone will exchange for them”, offering up the value only by equivalency and commodity theory (which is born of factory dehumanization through mass production and the loss of dignity associated with craftsmanship), remember that what you are hearing also is the slave shackle clanging beneath the deck, the stamp of jack boots marching the providers of hair, skin, and teeth toward the ovens, and the next bombing campaign to ensure that those third world little brown people remain in a production state that keeps the oil or parts or bananas or coca or opium or spice or mined materials or textiles or rubber flowing. After all, those things only carry the value that we who *can* pay for it, we minority few, attribute to them at the checkout counter. And the hands that produce them, that can never afford to pay, cannot attribute to them anything of value, any meaning, indeed their lives can have no intrinsic meaning because they have been invested in things that have meaning only to us.

You see, I listen to you. You armchair philosophers who pad the decision making power of the jackbooted thugs. I take your words seriously, even if you don’t. I’m listening, and I know what you are, and what you’re saying, and what you mean, even if you don’t mean to mean it. But I think you do. Every time you buy another ipod and treat ethics as merely academic, I think you do. And I think I am just as guilty. So no, it doesn’t matter that I’m watching. But somewhere, someone else is watching too. And that will, ultimately matter. The words Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin on their surface mean that a thing is worth what someone will pay. But the subtext is *you* have been weighed and measured, and by that measure with which you measured, so shall you be measured.

Take it how you like. As the automatic payment of reaping for sowing, or as the divine equation of value by a very personal watcher and judge; the effect is the same. As we devalue things that require human life to create, paid out in however small quantities at a time, we devalue ourselves, and we will ultimately experience the outcome of that in the culture and life we are pleased to lead. This is the moral, ethical, and philosophical judgment of any decent thinker that wasn’t a charlatan – be it Martin Niemoller or Martin Luther King.

Lastly, when I hear men drive around and say “I put marble in that building, and that one too. And on that one, I cut stone for the foundation…” I hear a different song than I hear at the checkout counter where nose-ringed punks (the nose ring is just a Blockbuster uniform in a modified corporate work culture) dismiss the lives of better men, of men who work for a living in a way that these little jerks think is equivalent but isn’t. And the guy that’s saying “the stuff that person made has no value that derives from the making” is actually telling you his own future – who he will be – what his work will be for him – the insignificance he will experience and attribute to the principle itself – the personal loss of meaning he will generalize to all and better men. Mene, Mene, as the line goes. Mene, Mene indeed. There’s a value judgment with some bite.

Addendum: someone perceptive may have noticed that I merely alluded to and didn’t state outright what “class system” the conservatism we’ve all become familiar with holds inviolable. I will here make it explicit. It is the class system of the affluent (fat) white or whitish American Protestant over the small (lean), brown or non-Protestant producer peoples of the world who live in commodity colonies (banana republics and energy commodity fiefdoms) that are either complying with demand at the lowest possible wages or are on the target list of potential next campaigns of suppression and control. You don’t have to agree. Conservatism seeks a class system out as a necessary component to its ideology. It commoditizes on contact, human beings and all else. If it weren’t divided as I say, it would be divided another way. Feel free to modify according to what you’re willing to believe. But  that is nonetheless my answer. And the demonstration of Smith’s ideas, and the rest of authentic liberalism (not neoliberalism) setting men free from this exploitation, dignifying labour, and re-spiritualizing the world with holistic thought is happening in places like India where, while we are there exploiting away, are nonetheless generating (as fast as they can) a new entrepreneurial impetus that the founders of the American colony (another ‘producer’ people for a previous Western empire) would be proud of. That’s my take, and I’m sticking to it. Take it how you like. But I’m not with the “American craftsman” who really sits around on his fat sofa calling for government intervention to protect him from men with more ingenuity, acumen, (and taste). He’s asking for regulatory tinkering with prices so things swing in his favor (we sometimes call this price fixing, corruption, and organized crime – but when the fat, white, Protestant guy wants it, it’s policy). I’m not suggesting price fixing either on a neoconservative or neoliberal basis. That assumes regulation is how value is preserved. I’m not proposing any ‘policy’ solution. I’m saying that the value of a thing can neither be dismissed as relative nor ‘fixed’ as relative without doing violence to all value, and without preserving a class system of exploiters and exploited. Hilary and Obama won’t save you, and Romney and GW will just bomb you. Instead of looking for solutions, it may be more constructive to think first, to think in a less kneejerk manner, to really think, and not to act until we’ve thought, and maybe not even then. One thing’s for certain, the rhetoric that’s being bandied about not only isn’t thought, it’s as destructive in its effects as a nightstick on a Malaysian sidewalk. Finally, I should probably call someone a petit philosophe, rather than a pipsqueak or punk, but the ideas people often express, even on ordinary matters, can have such awful implications that sometimes I find it hard not to attribute to them the outcomes of their rhetoric – I don’t want to just let them off like the Heidelberg professors who were just blathering about theory and refused any responsibility for the black era they ushered in. Still, I’m sure a few of my attitudes would have me in a tank somewhere invading Poland right along with the next guy, so I’ll try to give them a break, especially since I’m so fond of Wagner. And besides, every ideologue becomes one by presuming the right to punish; I presume no such thing, and have no respect for those who do.

In the same way, I look at the amounts we pay for food, and it’s obscene. I don’t like it. I try to get around it. But the simple fact is this – every moment we spend preparing food is another moment we can’t do paying work. So we said screw it. My family works all the time, and one of the ways we can handle as many clients as we do, and not be completely exhausted all the time, or ruin our health, is that we get high quality food from people that make good stuff and keep almost nothing in the refrigerator. It’s worth it. It’s an obscene amount to spend, but then we do an extraordinary amount of business compared to our peers. They look at us and ask, “how?” Ask a guy that runs big machinery. You want to run the heavy rig, you’ve got to give it fuel. You’d just better make the output worth the price of admission.

Getting fast, high quality, healthy food (which is increasingly available) has been part of the secret sauce for us. Not driving unnecessarily has been a part of it. We pay for the privilege of reducing drive time, and that’s worth it too. One of the biggest struggles self-employed people have is how to keep up with growth without killing yourself or the business. The constant search for ways to streamline, for greater efficiency, is part of it. We use virtual everything, so we don’t even have to touch mail or go to the bank. We’ve reduced life to the essentials. Work, prayer, art, people, and each other. We’re still working on it. Kaizen. We’re constantly improving. And it costs to improve, but it also leaves you with more time to make money and more time to do extraordinary things that a daily grind never allows.

It’s funny though – stability, from a server standpoint, has nothing to do with a web site that could have been cloned in India. It doesn’t even have to do with how many clients you have. Take Godaddy. They took serious heat for vocally supporting SOPA, and then backed down when a campaign was mounted to leave them in droves. They dumped the vocal support, but they keep right on acting as if SOPA had actually passed.

Stability? Your site can be shut down without even a note to warn or alert you, if a government agency complains to Godaddy about something it doesn’t like. Because that’s law? No – because Godaddy wishes it was. And they’ve been doing it to companies with vast numbers of customers who provide significant infrastructure on the web, essentially shackling independent companies to government extorted control.

They’re certainly big, but is that where you find stability? No, in this case stability lies with:

1. Web hosts that don’t suddenly shut off sites, or do so at all just because Nancy the bureacrat raises an eyebrow and they label it an “investigation”. No – didn’t happen to us – been happening to companies we deeply respect, though. Under these guys’ thumb, the web is turning back into an online ‘service’ like AOL (or Facebook if you’re under 20), with draconian measures happening to any company with a client that ticks off Zuckerberg or the like.
2. Web hosts that are not dependent solely on the aging power grid, and that use renewable energy sources – so when a “28 Days” or “Resident Evil” scenario happens (like if the Republicans lose the next two elections and armies of Sarah Palins come streaming out into the streets looking for human flesh) you’ll at least be able to blog about it and maybe get an e-mail out to the ex- saying “I told you so.” Or maybe order some spaghetti sauce from amazon.com – prefer a scary neocon scenario? OK, so Obama is elected again and the entire Muslim world attacks, and we’re converted to Islamo-socialism. You want to keep your shopping cart working then, don’t you?

The point is that if you’re basing notions of stability on the corporate cultural qualities of the brochure, you’ve fallen for another kind of fundamentalism, with Jimmy the stock photo model that looks good in a suit but is a female stripper on weekends standing in for the televised pastor of wealth like a virtual Joel Osteen. Hey, you can’t fix religion. You just have to let it runs its course. So OK, but part of jobhacking is unpacking that stuff and asking if it really holds water.

The grey suit once typified business respectability too. In the 1950s, as King writes in his new novel on the JFK assassination, business was king and if you wore the right suit and said the word “business” it was like that explained everything people needed to know. Until Enron, the Bank/Corporate Bailouts and Bernie Madoff. And then you knew your father was full of sh*t, unless he was telling you that stuff was bunko all along.

One more stab at this. Stability now lies in:

• Freedom: The refusal to stifle creativity, innovation, and growth in the name of convention, power, and control. The assurance that opening the pipeline of new and different thinking in and about work is a predicate to the sales pipeline.
• Sustainability: The insistence that short term gain is for suckers, and long-term vision, including socially conscious vision and holistic, ecological thought is what will keep the economic grid alive.

If you didn’t notice, these are the same points as those numbered 1 and 2, above – just in more general terms.

We’re “investigating” stable web hosts at this time. When Youtube finally gave the finger to China, folks, you had to know the culture was changing. If you didn’t, you read the news but not the times – the events but not the meaning. They refused to be controlled, or let themselves be taken down because someone posts a video a party ideologue doesn’t approve of. Godaddy, were you not paying attention in class?

“Going forward” (to borrow some corp-speak), companies will stand facing each other along lines of competing cultures – those that trade profits for power and those that relinquish power for the sake of client loyalty and a shared consensus about freedom and sustainability. Google has made some questionable decisions lately, about their user interfaces that smack heavily of control – we’re not watching anyone with rose coloured glasses – but in general, when Google started jobhacking, it should have been a wakeup call.

Related:

We like this host’s ethos pages.

In the US, SOPA is being practiced even though it isn’t law. All the US government has to do is complain to Godaddy (those domain hosting ladies of the evening) and the domain gets killed. No warning. Tens of thousands of businesses and users depending on a given cloud app, and bam it’s down and a business is brought to its knees, livelihoods wrecked, reputations ruined.

The gist is that if you manage to get a video that US government doesn’t like up onto a cloud provider like Youtube, or a web site they don’t like up on WordPress.com, or a form they don’t like hosted on a form site, or document they don’t like hosted by a document hosting company, they can take down that provider’s entire subscriber base by killing their domain with a word. Especially with hosts like Godaddy that drop shorts on command.

But the future will screw the pooch for the US, the US economy, it’s governmental infrastructure, and companies that collaborate (it’s not just cooperation anymore, it’s collaboration). Companies can’t watch every single hosted item or entity for possible thought-transgression all the time. And the cost will be a killer, even if they try.

The future is that any company providing services that someone can actually use freely for content (video hosting, form hosting, wordpress hosting), will “outsource” hosting their apps, media, and content to servers overseas. American servers aren’t safe anymore.

American servers don’t want the business (if it’s like Godaddy). American government doesn’t want the business. The American people that supported things like SOPA (or shrugged it off) don’t want the business. And they don’t want the freedom. And the creativity just makes them look bad.

You, my friends, if you’re in the US, are about to live in a backwater, a berg, a hamlet of a country – hosting-wise. I sometimes think it’s ridiculous that I live in a state where I can’t get dinner after 5pm on a Sunday, or after 9pm on a week night. What, Matlock is over and good, moral people are all tucked in bed? No wonder it’s a corporate wonderland out here. People are living the template of the perfect cubicle farm. But the “morals” are stifling. I can’t get beer in a supermarket that doesn’t have the alcohol content reduced to “non-alcoholic beverage” status. 3.2% – that’s the limit. I give the state I live in crap for being a briar patch on the ass of nowhere.

But the whole country is becoming like that. Just think bandwidth – “speed” if you’re not in the business. Still lucky to get 30mbps rated bandwidth out of your ISP, if anything like that much? Try Japan and Korea, where 1gbps is available. Instant page loads. And now the security state thing in the US, where they can issue a “take down order” on web sites as quickly as a “kill order” on a person. Power ‘deranges’ people – makes us stupid to the point of shooting ourselves in the brains.

The future for the US, on this path, is to decline into a speed bump in the middle of a culturally inbred nowhere. Companies that want to provide creative tools hosted online that allow people to freely make content without heavy restrictions, will of course find fewer roadblocks by hosting their cloud applications overseas. And if it’s something that grows to the size and significance of Youtube or Google, even one such thing, that’s pretty significant in terms of impact on what the US loses.

Don’t believe any of this? Think it’s wild-eyed fear mongering. OK, why is the US the single most desired place on the planet for basing a corporation? All those nice companies that currently outsource the actual production or services overseas, nonetheless want to remain incorporated in the US itself. Why? They’ll tell you – they don’t hide it. They say it all the time. Fewest barriers to realizing their goals with simultaneously most protections from interference by government or other parties. Corporate personhood gets associated with that, but that’s a particular legal doctrine that isn’t required to keep the barriers low and protections high.

So when it comes to web content hosting, which is really web application hosting, there *will* be a trend toward seeking bases of operation that offer lowest barriers to creativity coupled with highest protections against interference. Innovation and creativity, like electricity, seek the path of least resistance. My friends, that’s gospel. You can bet your Bible on that one. And the cost to the US, if it doesn’t get smart, is going to be at least a partial twilight of its relevance, at least in degrees, to innovation and creative potential.

Isn’t that ironic? As the “true Americans” push for greater government control, a bad-ass empire that can shut down any person or entity that crosses an ever tightening line in the sand, those who love freedom will pick places more hospitable to freedom.  On the other side of the world is where the home of free speech and creative opportunity will lie.

Let’s call them Digital Pilgrims, these companies that will make the journey. They’ll hoist their sales and host their apps overseas. See you on the Mayflower, buddy.

image by flickr.com

Managing even our personal finances is actually different when we’re self-employed vs. living as a traditional employee. This is a critical realization and can often make the difference in whether, if we’re starting or operating with modest capital, we actually remain self-employed. When I first went out on my own, I made a handful of changes that have helped sustain me ever since:

Put two “pay days” per month on your calendar, with recurring reminders. This is important for several reasons.

1. If you’re structuring your business soundly, it should actually pay you routinely, because you’re keeping your personal and business finances entirely separate). Having separate accounts, separate accounting, and a specific documented act of transferring payment from the company to you personally, even if you’re the sole proprietor, can not only keep you out of tax hot water, it can reduce personal liability for the company. I use Google Calendar and have reminders set for two specific days of the month selected because, between the two, all my various recurring bill due dates are covered.
2. When you were an employee, paydays were when you got money to pay bills. This is something it’s even more important to recognize and stick to when you’re self employed. It’s easy to just sort of check your accounts when the bills are due, and pay as you go, but effectively operating a business is partly about financial planning. The first and most important reality is time. Debts or bills always have a due date associated with them.
3. This lets you monitor how much money you’ll need by each pay date in order to pay your various expenses (both business and personal), and then up your rate of work and/or growth strategy and marketing activities accordingly. It’s easy to treat “off” time the way we did when we were employees – as time to play video games. Likewise, you worked on a model of putting in time (e.g. 9-5). But when you’re self-employed, a good chunk of time spent growing and maintaining the business (marketing and account) and, if the work needs doing faster or there’s more of it, you’re not simply off the clock – the company’s needs are now your needs. You are the primary investor, and if the company doesn’t bring in enough money, often enough, it’s back to employment for you.

Be smart about credit. Personally, I maintain a personal and business rewards Visa or Mastercard (works in more places) which could float me for a few days (not a few weeks – that’s not acceptable) if it ever makes the difference between being able to act smartly or take a loss. If you maintain cards for that purpose, strive never to have to use them that way. Treat credit cards as debit cards that you include in your payday bills almost like deposits instead of payoffs. Always cover the full balance all the time.

1. Cautious use of credit can help keep you indepdent. Incautious use can enslave you, or send you back to employment lines to pay off the corporate loan sharks. Your primary activity is bringing in income. That means a) marketing for new clients or repeat business, and b) completing projects. Focus on that stuff, and credit will be available but not necessary.
2. You’ll be going out and shopping less and doing more purchases of both business and personal kinds *from home*. So having separate business and personal cards (whether debit or credit) helps make it easy to cover expenses when you’re busy and need to make a purchase fast, and avoid “fudging” when it comes to comingling of business and personal funds. Personally, I also use Amazon Prime, too, so I can get what I need with 2-day free shipping and no minimums. That further reduces the need to “shop” which is the least productive activity on earth.
3. Since you’re paying your bills semi-monthly, pay card balances in full *both* times, so you never hit the 25-30 days before there’s a finance charge on the months with 28-31 days (i.e. all the months in the year). The banks know what they’re doing, you know.
4. Rewards cards either put money back in your pocket (it’s equivalent to a stackable discount of 1-2% that lets you still use coupon codes, etc), or let you eventually fly for taxes and fees without base airfare (although you have to turn over enough points to make that worthwhile, because the cardst that pay the most points have annual fees), or give you points you can use in places you do business (like Amazon, if you use Discover).

Do really good accounting. There are three things you have to consider every bit as much a part of your core work now, besides the “work itself”. 1. The legal formalities. You absolutely have to make sure you use proper contracts, non-disclosures, a proper legal entity for your company, even if it’s just you, and proper reporting and filing with any relevant government or private agencies or associations. 2. The marketing. A company that isn’t growing is dying – it’s just a matter of time. So you have to have a plan for growing your company when you’re not actively working on a project, or even when you are. Letting your marketing die has a cumulative negative effect – it’s harder to start it back up later, like a car that’s been sitting all Winter. Always carve out time for growth. 3. The accounting. If you aren’t tracking expenses and income, you can’t get a picture of your profit and loss, or provide one should you need to. You can’t make healthy business decisions on where to invest (e.g. marketing) or what to purchase, or even what you have to charge. But you’re also extremely vulnerable from a legal and taxation standpoint. Make sure you do it right.

1. I use Quickbooks Online, which is the standard for a corporation or LLC – there are other excellent Web 2.0 alternatives as well. If you’re a sole proprietor, and aren’t planning to form a corporation or LLC any time in the near future, or else you are willing to use a second tool (like Google Spreadsheets) to do some of the tracking, you can use Outright, which is a superb tool for freelancers.
2. If you can’t afford software, or feel more comfortable with spreadsheets, Google Spreadsheets is very good. I use it for personal finances, because I absolutely can’t stand Mint and the various Mint clones, and I need features they don’t have, which I’ve constructed myself in a spreadsheet environment. Spreadsheets have the advantage of letting you custom formulas to see various data in various ways. They have the weakness of containing no canned reports, such as a company balance sheet or Profit and Loss statement. You can, of course, make sheets in your workbook to serve those functions.
3. Again, keep personal and business account separate. Of course each one will have a corressponding entry, when you pay yourself, but that’s about it.
4. Be militant about entering receipts for your expenses and paid invoices for your gross income. Every ten dollars you let fall off the truck in business expenses is $3.30 in extra income taxes you’re going to pay. That’s expensive. It’s already outrageous to have to pay a third of everything you make to pad the coffers of government and government’s friends, not to mention paying it several times over on every dollar, but paying it on money that’s a business expense is insane if you don’t have to. You can bet the big corporations are documenting all their expenses. Also, you don’t want to be in the same bind if the IRS asks you about income, because one of your clients is audited, and you didn’t account for the money they paid you.
5. Get good tax advice, pay attention to quarterly filing laws (which *do* apply even to employees, though most don’t realize it), and make sound decisions on what you expense, how much you expense, and your tax strategy as a business. It’s not only not illegal to have a tax strategy, you can bet any business of size has one. That’s partly why the IRS asks you about your accounting methods, your accounting year, and your main income type, when you file. Nothing we say here is “good” tax or accounting advice; you’ve got to go looking for the real deal.
6. You totally can go paperless when it comes to receipts. The laws have been updated. Receipts need to be stored in a way that’s reasonably searchable (get specifics via Google). Services like Shoeboxed make it definitely possible. I personally use a Fujitsu Scansnap and a cloud backup service, but there are lots of ways to go about it.

Plan Your Health & Finances. Now that you’re not a traditional employee, there’s no one else ‘doing the laundry’ so to speak. You’ve got to take care of the whole enchilada, or else see that it’s done.

1. Maintain a financial plan. I use David Ramsey’s steps. They’ve helped tremendously over the years. If I’m dogmatic about much, it’s probably that. The plan is designed to be useful regardless of where you are financially. Your place on the steps might be ready for a Roth IRA or might not be. The goal is to implement rationality as a principle into our finances.
2. Maintain a health plan. I use an HSA with a high deductable plan, and then cover the deductable gap with gap insurance. There are other ways to go about it, but I’m looking for sustainability in the long term, and my health plan includes insurance as one component, but also constant work toward healthy lifestyle. The goal should be a combination of health-driven activity and laying up against health-related exigency. Keep in mind that, while there are some totalities in health that can’t always be controlled, your wellbeing, comfort, and longevity may depend utterly on financial considerations at some point. If you live in one of the few advanced nations to have rejected universal healthcare (basically, just the United States), this concern is of such agonizing and deadly seriousness that it simply can’t be overstated.

Self-employed people simply have to reconsider their finances when leaving traditional employment, at least in the details, but potentially overall. It really depends on what you were doing before. Jobhacking is really a form of lifehacking, and it begins with hacking your finances – that is, breaking them down into components and restructuring them for sustainability as an independent.

Parents: “It’s time to give up. You’ve had four years to be happy and do what you want.”
Jack: “But I want to do what I want my whole life.”
Parents: “Awffff! Jack, life is not a fairy tale.”
Jack: “But Dad, I don’t want to be some zombie climbing the corporate ladder.”
Parents: “You’ll learn to like it.”

– Glory Daze

Add to this “set me apart as a visionary” Gingrich’s attempt to inject a pulse back into Republican credibility with creative brainstorming about ‘solutions’ like work programs in grade schools. Just as the drama about identity theft led to registering and tagging of children, much like livestock, one could argue, in a corporate farm, so the introduction of kids to a half-way house for economic contribution and tax supply is likely to tightly wed their potential for independent wealth generation to monitoring and tracking.

FYI: Lest anyone suggest we’re advocating tax evasion, that would be to almost intentionally miss the point, for which we’d zonk you on the head for the intellectual dishonesty that gets trotted out whenever one suggests power isn’t an absolute deserving of worship. We’re not aware that evasion of monitoring is the same as tax evasion, however.

In short, we’re likely going to see the rise of the independent professional not as a surprise to those who plan and regulate, or those who wield political control. The only surprised people are the ones who still call for the plant to re-open long after the company has moved on – those who keep calling for “jobs”, and are conditioned by their political leaders to do so, because “job creation” is an almost religious placebo in rhetorical manipulation of crowds. Everyone else knows the culture has shifted to a condition more similar to the pre-industrial era and, therefore, going after evil deadbeat independent workers, not evil industrialists, will likely be the next big trend.

Rao’s piece, The Gervais Principle at the same time discusses the sociological bubble currently experienced by the corporation. One wonders if the corporate types denying there’s anything wrong realize that that one is going to break as well. Rao ties all this together with discussion of Whyte’s book. Highly recommended reading (all of this stuff).

Here then, for your consideration, is submitted an action plan and manifesto for the jobhacker. Here is how we occupy the American economic system.

The Action Plan: If we want to truly Occupy America, it’s harder work that carrying a sign, camping in a park, or going to jail.

• Start a business – occupy the economy. If you want a voice at a corporate board meeting, you have to buy shares. If you want an economic voice, you can’t be the cattle on the economic farm, or the battery powering the cubicle farm. You gain shares in the economy by building a wealth-generating property upon it. You want to occupy Wall Street? Create a company.
• Collaborate and engage in coworking and startups. Founding businesses is the original basis of our founders’ democracy – ask those guys who opposed the stamp acts. They didn’t call for more taxation of business – they were business founders who knew that business that was neither subsidized by taxation (like the megacorps in big food, big energy, big pharm, big finance) nor heavily burdened by taxation (e.g taxing gains and dividends) were the cornerstone of all possible liberty. They were, regardless of size, what we today call “small” business owners. They weren’t camping, they were creating.
• For every grievance that the 1% has exported our jobs, create a new job to replace it. You can’t complain that someone else is responsible for keeping jobs here, if you aren’t producing any jobs yourself.
• For every grievance that corporations aren’t taxed the same as we are, get yourself taxed the way they are – start a business, make it profitable, and earn capital gains. Yes, our system is designed to favor businesses, because business is the free economic engine that powers liberty. Depending on a dispensary of jobs empowers dependency, not liberty. Don’t complain about bad treatment from the farmer – stop being a cow (say “moo”). You have every right to create your own business entity, as long as it honestly intends to make a profit – do it, and then make some real money. The US doesn’t have a shortage of tax income – it has an excess of spending and waste and a shortage of tax producers.
• For every grievance that the corporate ‘animals’ are getting fewer and bigger, eat bigger animals than yourself. Become predatory about irresponsible or unhelpful corporations, like the mongoose going after the giant snake. One day, you can collaborate with enough other small businesses to buy the big corporations out, but meanwhile just do it the usual way – put them out of business by being more agile, lean, creative, and innovative – by the time you get done, they won’t be worth buying anyway.
• Liberate the economy, for yourself and for everyone else: build, invent, innovate, create, and sell.
• Above all, sell. What is needed now isn’t more political ideas. In this economy, with the candle burned down to this nub, any idea that doesn’t make money is wasted. It’s the same with the environment and climate change, isn’t it? We’re in a state of emergency. You think taxing the rich will save us? It won’t even buy you more Cheetos on the way down. We need ideas that lead to the generation of work, wealth, and the rebuilding of the collaboration and community of mom and pop businesses, entrepreneurs, and free agents (we used to call those yeomen). We need a renaissance of the things that start up an economic engine, because this one, and indeed the world that has come to depend upon it, is stalling, and it’s about to be a dark, ugly, brutal fight for the last of the fuel.

The Manifesto: You want to carry a sign? Let it be your brand name, and it should stand for “I add value to the economy. I am self-sustaining. I create work. I make new things. I have new profitable ideas, and then build an enterprise out of them that puts wealth into ordinary circulation. You are a jobhacker, and this is your manifesto:

• I build more than I use. I build enough for three people. It’s not enough to just support yourself anymore. If you want to have a world to live in, you have to support those who will be your clients and fellow consumers too. Don’t just use only what you need, like the guy who just buries his talent and doesn’t grow it. If we are to survive, you must not only not waste – you must create excess. You must contribute to genuine societal wealth in ways that trebly exceed your own use of it.
• I create the economy I want to see, not rob it from others like cave men in a famine surrounding the village with the granary and wielding their demands and their clubs (We are all bludgeons, you know, or else we are builders, growers, and makers of things). The economy is only a dictate if we allow it to be. They can’t repair or restore it – they don’t know how, and couldn’t if they did. We are the builders of the emerging economic order, not them. Recognize they’re dinosaurs and stop focusing on them and the old economy – focus on what *you* are doing to create the new one.
• I don’t wait. You still want corporations to *assign* us things to make? Why are they the only source of ideas? That’s thinking exactly like the 1% wants you to think. It’s their competitive advantage. Be a thousand points of innovation, and found not a thousand new camps, but a thousand new successful startups. Camp on the economy they want to control.
• I don’t lament a lack of jobs. Who ever told us that we were guaranteed a job for life, ensured by corporations, the government, or society? Our parents? They were wrong. Who made us think we were entitled to a job? They were wrong. There may be few jobs, but there’s plenty of work, because the field of innovation is unlimited – not enough of us are discovering and doing it. Create your own job – employ yourself, and be an example for people to do likewise. Create the new model, don’t depend on the old one. Thinking of a job as a social entitlement that someone gives you is thinking of yourself as just as much a tool of corporate greed, a farm animal, as if you were the “Megamart” or “Megapharm” CEO looking down. Build a better alternative. Take responsibility for your own skill set and how it adds value to society. If you truly can provide a service someone wants, you don’t need a job, you can sell, contract, or employ yourself.
• I don’t lament jobs moving overseas. Don’t want US jobs exported? Create several new ones in the US, or wherever you prefer to live. If there aren’t enough jobs where you are, it’s because there aren’t enough job creators there doing new things. A lot of innovation is happening overseas, of course, but that isn’t the only cause of the drain. Instead of lamenting brain drain, be a brain yourself. A brain in this case isn’t a genius – it’s just someone who thinks about how to create value where s/he is. It’s not someone else’s responsibility to employ us; it’s our responsibility to employ ourselves. And if we can’t sell our services and skills on the open market, we own that and must revise our skills or our strategy. The alternative is the confession that in fact they, whoever is “responsible”, owns us in that way. I don’t want to have owners. I do not lay eggs or say “moo”.
• I don’t lament big corporate control. Don’t want to be dependent on big corporations? Start a small company and be just and ethical and open and curious and flexible and experimental and responsive and everything your last ugly company wasn’t. Enough of us will exceed and supplant them.
• I focus my voice on the core method of control. Want a democratic voice? Be like the first US citizens who had one – oppose heavy taxing of companies and found companies yourself, like they did. We were once “une nation de boutiquiers” – a nation of boutique owners – of shopkeepers. Enough of us owning a sector of the economy free from excess interference is a cornerstone of democratic freedom. And now, you don’t even need the shop to be a shopkeeper.
• I protest every day. Engage in the ultimate protest against corporate hegemony – start your own company, do contract work, become a freelance professional – ditch the dependency on a corporate job (or the lack of jobs), create *multiple* income streams instead of buying into their dependency system on just a single one for life – and then you are as free as they are. I don’t want a career, because a career is an unreliable myth – I want multiple or highly flexible income streams and the agility and mobility to change them as needed, adapting to demand, the economy, and my ability to innovate and create value.

If some of these items could be more specific, they gain by being more flexible and open to movement and differences of understanding. This isn’t the magna carta – we’re not going to post this on trees in the local park, although you may feel free to, if you give Jobhacker.org the credit. This is more or less a statement of principles that many of us are already living or engaged in, but it’s helpful to encourage ourselves and one another, and share with others the opportunities we see for not only making a meaningful contribution to our society, but also for defending our civilization from the decay into which both the Occupy Movement and the government and counterpolitical response indicate we are descending. Now is the time of our revitalization. Join us. Become a jobhacker or, if you are one, be bold and act knowing you are rescuing the bright city from collapse into a new dark age.

See you at the revolution.