I’d bet that, like me, many of my readers are small business owners. Most of those are probably micro-business owners, with 0-9 employees. I’m not only talking about store owners, but also people who baby-sit, make crafts, cut firewood, or provide health, financial, construction, or personal services. According to the Maine Small Business Administration, Maine has 43,750 small businesses, not counting 96,000 folks who derive income as sole proprietors (63,000 of them meaningfully so). That’s a lot of us! We work hard to succeed, often relying on multiple sources of income, but that’s a small price to pay for the independence we enjoy.

Maine should invest in our communities by ensuring business opportunity and a level playing field for small entrepreneurs like us. We tend to take more responsibility for the communities in which we live and work than do multinational companies managed from afar, and our profits stay in the community instead of shipping the money off to Arkansas. An economy that depends on giant stores and factories (that can close faster than you can say “outsourcing” or “downsizing”) cannot provide the kind of economic security that a diverse small business economy can. Just ask anyone from a town with a multinational company’s mill or an MBNA call center what it means for the life of your community to depend on the whims of executives in a far-away boardroom.

Of course, large companies have their place in the economy. They do some things better than small companies. More importantly, I’ll take a socially responsible large company over an irresponsible small one any day. Leveling the playing field doesn’t just mean allowing small businesses to compete; it means rewarding companies that profit through innovation, hard work, and investment in employees and the community, and punishing companies that profit by polluting, hurting ordinary people, relying on public assistance to supplement poverty-level wages, and so on. One reason responsible companies like Costco haven’t come to Maine is that we permit companies like Wal-Mart to pay poverty-level wages, skimp on health care and other benefits, and receive enormous tax breaks.

In operating my business and meeting with my clients, I have seen many ways Maine discourages micro-businesses.

* It’s unfair that large companies receive giant tax breaks to provide services we already provide without tax breaks.

* We need to eliminate the unfair recordkeeping burden imposed by the Sales Tax regime. It forces businesses with sales of under $10,000/year to pay sales tax on the inventory they purchase for resale; only later can they claim a credit for it on their sales tax reporting form.

* We should exempt $10,000 of a micro-business’s business equipment investment from town Personal Property Taxes, to avoid the time-consuming exercise of calculating and claiming the usually small BETR refund.

* MaineCare and Medicare should reimburse health care professionals within 30 days of submission of a claim. These payments are often over six months in arrears, forcing practices to fold or to turn away low-income patients.

* Nonprofit organizations should be used to provide needed services in areas where the profit motive produces undesirable results, not to circumvent tax obligations and undersell for-profit competitors. I applaud nonprofits like Interfaith Power and Light, which kick start industries that will produce a fairer and more sustainable economy. However, they would be unnecessary if Maine better invested in responsible technologies and made companies pay for the costs they impose on society.

I’ll explore these issues more in later months. Meanwhile, I urge small business owners to join the Maine Small Business Alliance (622-6500, www.msb-alliance.org) and help promote an economy where small businesses get a fair shake and socially responsible companies are rewarded, not punished.