Encouraging local entrepreneurial spirit

I give locals their full dues and accolades for breaking out on their own engaging in small businesses that trigger wealth and jobs creation. It takes courage, determination and lots of hard work to venture out on your own.

Business, in the olden days was conducted via the barter system. Historically, it’s a practice since generations ago that is part of the local culture. It doesn’t, however, involve the actual exchange of cash for goods and services. The latter was showered in local cooperation, i.e., building of a new family dwelling where villagers show up to lend a hand.

For years, I’ve probed what policy setbacks have in fact triggered the gradual death of local business entrepreneurship spirit here. Yes, a large portion of the destruction can be attributed to the well honed mentality of everything government. It’s the legacy of Interior and Defense.

These isles were shut out from the rest of the world for purposes of intelligence operations. But the Department of the Navy showed locals how to operate small businesses. Our old folks picked up from there. It eventually developed into family business enterprises such as Joeten, Carmen Safeway, Villagomez, among others.

In all our efforts, it seems we were willing to leap into being our own bosses. But it gradually and steadily slipped into oblivion as more locals join the public sector. No wonder more than half the local work force are in government pushing papers or passing time with computer games.

This would have to change and in doing so, we need to buckle down and review arcane economic policies that have discouraged local entrepreneurship spirit. I am talking about outdated taxes and umpteen number of fees that have derailed investments. The excise tax is one form of taxation that slams new business startups into instant extinction requiring tax payment even before you sell your wares or services.

Coupled with this is a greater evil across the sea where detractors work the clock to sink local entrepreneurship even quicker and deeper into the nether world of bankruptcy, hopelessness, joblessness and abject poverty. Thanks to friends in various quarters who have stood on the firing line to convey our sentiments. Yes, it is the most egregious agenda of a Nuremberg equivalence threatening our economic freedom.

Make no mistake about it: We too want our economic and political freedoms that have been allowed to descend in communities across the land of the free. It is wrong to promote dependency for we too know full well that this isn’t the essence that made our country the greatest among nations.

National policymakers who understand the fragility of island economies have empathized with the need to protect what took years to build. If only both sides of the Pacific could establish a meeting of the minds, then, and only then, can local entrepreneurship take to greater heights. For now, let’s delete arcane tax policies and unnecessary fees to grant locals greater opportunities to contribute to this archipelago’s wounded efforts at wealth and jobs creation. Si Yuus Maase`!

Strictly a personal view. John S. DelRosario Jr. is publisher of Saipan Tribune.