From a commenter at Mead's The Death of the American Dream II:
In an otherwise excellent essay, a distinction that Mead fails to grasp is the difference between what I will call a “breadwinner” business and a service business.
A breadwinner business is a business activity that brings money into a community. It can be manufacturing, agriculture, mining, banking or even government (e.g. Washington D.C., which hauls in cash from every state). When the breadwinner business closes down (the mine plays out or the factory closes), you have a ghost town. Service businesses can provide jobs only in communities that have a thriving breadwinner business.
Small businesses in general are service businesses that are completely dependent on the health of breadwinner businesses.
American prosperity completely depends on the health of our breadwinner businesses, and policymakers should be focusing solely on policies that will help those businesses succeed. This is not an issue of big business vs. small business; it is an issue of winning in a severe competition in a hyper-competitive global marketplace.
It's an interesting distinction, but I am not sure how well it holds up. In the failing old towns that I have seen, the main breadwinner (ie importer of $) is via government in all of its redistributive efforts, such as Social Security, Medicare, welfare, government jobs, government job programs, etc.
