Huh. It was a link to a PDF. I can still get it to come up.

Here's the article as text:

Title: "Tell Employees What it Takes to Build a Business and Connect How Government Can Negatively Impact the Free Market System"

During the April 2014 IFDA Washington Insight Conference, IFDA members presented The IFDA Thomas Jefferson Awards during an awards reception. The awards recognize lawmakers who supported free market principles during the 113th Congress based on key votes. In total, IFDA presented 271 Thomas Jefferson Awards in this cycle. Special awards for Distinguished Service were presented to two lawmakers including Sen. John Thune (R-SD) and Rep. Peter Roskam (R-IL). In receiving the Distinguished Service Award, Rep. Roskam gave impassioned remarks to IFDA members about the importance of telling employees what it takes to build a business and to connect how government can negatively impact the free market system and the ability of employers to provide stable employment.

Rep. Roskam said he visits many companies in his district of suburban Chicago. At a typical company, he meets with an owner who came up with a good idea, and began a startup. “Forty years later, they’ve put their heart and soul into this thing. Forty years later they have 200 employees making something,” said Rep. Roskam.

After visiting with the owner and other company leaders, Roskam said he will usually address employees, and many times it is apparent that there is a disconnect between ownership and their workforce. According to Roskam, employees often don't understand the struggle their CEO went through in building the company, nor do they understand that increasing taxes on the owner, especially at S-corps, has an impact on the success of the company and often every employee’s paycheck. Employees feel that way, says Roskam, because the business owner “assumes that everybody understands
his journey, the sweat and the toil, the anxiety, the fact that they almost lost it a few times on that journey — he’s told none of that to his employees.”

Rep. Roskam warns that those same employees are hearing a very different message from Washington DC. “The message they are hearing is a class envy message that says that the only reason that he is successful is because he’s sticking it to you. And rather than the old man saying: ‘That’s not true. Here is how it works. You can do it too.’ He instead is making the assumption that it’s all great. And it’s not all great.”

Rep. Roskam believes business owners need to get “intentional” about talking with employees about the economic reality of tax policy, of regulation, of trade policy, and to link that to the prosperity of the person in the warehouse. “If we do that, then there is this entire group of people who will now advocate for a free market system. They will do so because they now see they are beneficiaries of it, themselves and their family. It’s just human nature that if
you don’t think you are getting a slice of the sunshine, there is no reason to defend the sunshine,” said Rep. Roskam.

In concluding, Rep. Roskam said that believers in the free market should not be defensive. “The free market has created more prosperity for more people than the world has ever known,” he said. “There is no system that rivals it and we need to be reminding ourselves of that, and more importantly we need to be teaching and reminding others about it.”

How in the world can they name an award after Thomas Jefferson and hand out 271 of them to the gang of thieves currently in office?

Anyone posting here deserves at least 3 awards each on that basis.

I might be more impressed with Roskam if he had any experience. So far Roskam has been a teacher, an ambulance chaser, and a congress-critter. I think he should get off his looter's ass and get a productive job.

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