I don’t expect that small business owners are perfect. I tried to address your reasonable objection about exploitation here:

“Obviously, small business owners can be nasty human beings and can exploit their employees and customers. But by definition, in a true free enterprise economy such possibilities are minimized.”

I probably should have said more, but the point is that because small business owners are embedded in their community, they are less prone to abusing customers or employees. The absentee ownership of capitalist corporations is an incentive to not be socially responsible.

As for your article and its proposal. I like the idea of some kind of minimum income, but I am too ignorant about macroeconomics to gave any feedback on whether your proposal would work. I favor it in principle.