Profits are never guaranteed for small business owners

Unlike Fortune 500 companies who can often rely on bailout packages when things don't go well (or artificially cheap credit to finance stock buybacks), small business owners have skin in the game.

It sounds great in theory to own your own business and "keep all of the profits," but it doesn’t really matter if you keep 100% of the profits if there are no profits to keep! This is what the general public just doesn’t seem to understand about owning a business.

There are no shortcuts or guarantees.

If it were easy to start a business and make easy money, everyone would do it. They don't, because it's not.

Most people lack perspective because they've only ever signed the back of a paycheck, not the front. It's easy to look at the 1% of small business owners who are making great money, and wonder how they do it. “Wow,” you think to yourself, “that must be amazing!” What you don’t see are the years—or even decades—that the business owner invested to get his business to that point. This is a classic example of survivor bias: you don’t see the 99 small business owners who worked just as hard but still failed.

This is why asking successful people to pay their "fair share" is asinine. They already have.