I really can't say enough good things about self-employment.
We don't really know how many self-employed people there are in the U.S. Estimates range from 8 million to 15 million. One problem is that many self-employed people, maybe most of them, don't have to pay Federal income taxes because the Schedule C tax form allows a wide ranging definition of "business expenses". Self-employed people filing a Schedule C tax form can often find enough expenses to come close to matching their income. The consequence of matching expenses to income is you get no visible net profit.
Tax benefits are the least valuable element of small businesses.
Among small businesses, I find one-person businesses particularly valuable.
I have always recommended that people who have small businesses (2-7 people) find some way to make them into one-person businesses. I even wrote a book on this subject: Running a One Person Business.* A one person business always needs to make extensive use of contract workers.
From
my thirty five years of experience, working with one person run businesses, I know that one person working
efficiently can result in productivity equal to six people working together in a
small company. That may not make sense if you haven't seen it, but
supervision time is large in a small firm, passing on correct job
descriptions usually goes wrong, meeting time increases exponentially,
and overhead costs rise rapidly with each employee.
In a one person business it is vital to use the help of contract workers and other outside one-person businesses. The importance of contract workers and outside one-person associates is that you only use them when you need them. This means slow periods are not costly and in boom times you can expand your capacity.
I
think that half or more of the productivity rise in the U.S. over the
past 15 years was due to the increase in the number of self-employed. More is yet to come.
Of course self-employed people have a great potential to integrate their work and their passion...which is enough to justify almost anything.
*(The author's name on the one-person book, is not mine, although I got royalties on the book. I gave the authorship of book to a friend as a gift and the friend turned out in the process of preparing the book not to be a friend. In the end 95% of the book is my writing but the remaining 5% was an embarrassment. )