This is the Cator Daily Podcast for Friday, November 11th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown. Home-based businesses represent a massive, if largely unseen, source of American productivity, but local governments often throw

up hurdles to keep individuals from incubating and developing businesses at home, and very

often for specious reasons.

Chris Edwards is author of a chapter in Cato's new Empowering the New American

worker book, Dealing with Home-based Businesses.

We spoke this week.

Well I think this is one of the great under reported stories in the American economy

is the boom and home-based businesses.

According to the Small Business Administration, about half of Americans, America's 30 million small businesses are home-based

and if you think about it historically many great American companies like

Apple Computer, Hewlett Packard and Amazon're all started out of people's garages and they

grew into these giant multinationals.

So home-based businesses are hugely important, not only because they provide opportunities for

entrepreneurship for many millions of Americans but also because some of

them grow into really big and important companies.

So since COVID, we've seen the explosion,

for example, in the online website,

ETSI, which is a marketplace for arts and crafts that mainly meet people producing their home so

ETSI is over 3 million sellers today on its platform so this is all really fantastic because home-based businesses fit into modern

lifestyles. You have many parents needing to care for young children or

elderly parents.

...