I certainly didn't originally mean it to sound as a complaint, but as a self-employed small businessman, I am sensitive to the things that can impact other self-employed businessmen.PUCKER wrote:I told myself before I posted this topic that "someone somewhere surely will complain about it." And sure enough...
The Annoyed Man wrote:The only problem is that we have members here who earn significant portions of their livings teaching these classes. It's nice of the Trophy Club PD to offer this, but I would hate to see those who put so much effort into promoting CHL having their livelihoods yanked out from under them.
I own a website design business. If government suddenly started offering my kind of services for free, how could I expect to stay in business? Government would put me out of business. When government became the new "owners" of GM, they threatened Ford, the only remaining healthy American auto manufacturing company. It's just a simple axiom of capitalism that government has no business being in business. The state of Texas set up the CHL system so that private contractors could instruct and test CHL applicants. This is good. By doing so, they created a new industry, jobs, and private income, on which taxes are paid, and which dollars are poured back into the economy. Now a local city is offering those services for free. This is bad. They diminish the local industry, put jobs at risk, reduce private sector income, reduce local taxes collected on that income, and remove those dollars from the local economy. If they charged the same rates as local private contractors, that would be better than nothing, because they would at least be competing, but still not as good has simply not getting involved in it in the first place. Government doesn't provide driver's education/training anymore either. If they aren't going to even do that, then they certainly don't have any business in providing firearms training - military training excepted.
So yeah, I guess this is a complaint. Sorry if it seems crabby.