There's often (though not always) some size cutoffs in various benefit requirements for small businesses to relax the rules a bit. Such as 50 employees for the ACA I believe.

But I agree, people act like the economy is nothing but fortune 500 megacorps and push for laws that make it harder for everyone to survive except for such businesses and their employees.

And people always miss the hidden cost, even when talking about the fatcats. If you require companies to provide a year of severance, then everyone just gets paid (n-1)/n as much on average, where n is the average number of years an employee is expected to stay.

I've heard the difference between European safety nets/regulations and US systems described as "freedom to" vs "freedom from". If we accept your premise, that the hidden cost of regulating severance is a decline in salary, this fits the above difference. In the US, you have the "freedom to" be as irresponsible as you want, living at or beyond your means, but if you're laid off, you bear the responsibility of dealing with the consequences. In Europe, you have the "freedom from" having to worry about that situation, since the safety net will provide some time for you to get back on your feet, and the price was a lower salary (in effect, forced savings).

More Americans work for large employers than small or mid-sized ones.

Is this stat still up to date? It changes drastically between booms and recessions. In some years small businesses have had far more employees. A fact which should affect policymaking as much as the ratio at any given point.

Either way I'd expect fewer americans still work at large businesses than at small and mid-sized businesses combined.

Not by a big margin. Around 47% of the workforce is employed by small businesses.

So that's a minority.

And "small businesses" with fewer than 500 employees represent 99.7% of all businesses and yet they represent less than half the total workforce.

The issue of course is that more regulation makes it that much harder for small business to hire and over time forces more and more of the economy and the labor force into the arms of big business.

That's 10s of millions of small companies hiring half the people. The point being there's plenty of people in America becoming "owners of the factory".

Your small companies hire up to 500 people which is nowhere small.

Also, it's not because a company is small that the owners are small time business people. The owners might be independently wealthy.

Why don't you look at the actual data: Firms with fewer than 100 workers accounted for 98.2 percent, and firms with fewer than 20 workers made up 89.0 percent. [1] The vast majority are small companies with single-digit employee counts. Add in independent contractors and it's even more skewed.

Being an entrepreneur means getting things done with what you have. You don't need to be wealth and instantly go from 0 to 1000 employees. Most people start with modest means and build up from there.

1. https://sbecouncil.org/about-us/facts-and-data/

Wrong. 80,5% of all SMEs don't employ anyone (nonemployer firms).

So not only do most Americans do work for multinational companies (53%) but on top of that, 80,5% of the ones working in SMEs are themselves the owners and don't have any employees to speak of.

Which leaves a whopping 19.5% of American SMEs which actually employ workers.

So you're dead wrong.

cf: https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/advocacy/2018-Small-...