Entrepreneurial America

American needs to renew her entrepreneurial spirit.
They didn't call it that back then, but entrepreneurship is what built this country. People from all over the world risk it all to just to get here, and people born here take risks in the hope of improving their lives.

Big Business and Big Government hate free markets

Capitalism is about efficiency, and that means making more money with less people, which explains why job growth has been so sluggish while the stock market climbs.

Big Business is bureaucratic, as is Big Government, which explains their natural affinity for one another, and their mutual disdain for entrepreneurship and the little guy. Capitalism galloping along the wild economic frontiers is distasteful, unorganized, incomprehensible. It’s scary and dangerous, but that is where the growth lies.

The Messy Paths of the Free Marketplace

Carl Schramm, in his article The Messy Path to Job Creation, explains that the lion's share of job creation is done by small companies and new startups. Government "job creation" should avoid picking favorites and instead create an environment that is inviting to potential entrepreneurs.

Schramm also advocates...

...stepping up efforts to get the less-represented parts of our population into the mix.

Our goal should be to double the number of Americans who are serious about starting businesses...

Our entrepreneurial spirit is almost crushed. A stultified, soul-destroying bureaucratic mindset has gripped us, and it is killing us, our economy and society. We've got to shake it if we're going to make it in the 21st century. Government and education are two places for us to start in on immediately.

Government Bureaucracy Needs Entrepreneurship

our bureaucracies are not just cumbersome time and creativity sucks; they are expensive as well. Federal, state and local government can become significantly cheaper as we strip out the layers of bureaucracy, dispense with work rules developed in some cases back when carbon paper ruled the world, and restructure patterns of organization and management that date back even farther.

People who like low taxes and people who like big government can agree at least that by systematically making government cheaper we can have all the government we need at rates we can afford (Mead)

How? Privatize it! 

Management of the frequency spectrum and government social programs, automobile and drivers licensing, airport security, and the thousands of other petty bureaucracies... Turn it over to private companies on fixed contracts, and they will figure out ways to make these government functions more efficient.

What will happen to all those government employees thrown out of work? The good ones will form companies or join existing ones to bid on the privatized government work, doing much of it from home or satellite offices, allowing government to sell off real estate and save on maintenance and utilities costs.

We Don't Need No Education!

I watched Pink Floyd's The Wall the other night, and I was again reminded how much I hated school.

Mediocre, conformity inducing, alienating, time wasting: the school system trains kids to sit still, follow directions, and move with the herd. As the economy becomes more fluid, more entrepreneurial, it is clear that raising one generation after another of aspiring time-serving bureaucrats is not very effective. But isn’t it also a terrible waste of human potential? (Mead)

This "big box" approach served its purpose 50 years ago, but it's time for a new model. Mead continues...

Maybe there’s something more we can teach our kids than the bland pablum of the standard school curriculum; maybe there are ways we can organize learning so that it is more individual, closer to home, better integrated with the world of work — and more rewarding.

The way forward is not stacking bureaucratic remedies upon bureaucratic failures, but private enterprise and entrepreneurship in education. Open it up! Make every school a charter school and hand out vouchers to everyone. Teachers Unions? To hell with them. We need parents and student unions.  The good teachers will end up better payed, and the bums will be flushed from the system.

Introducing true entrepreneurship in schooling at all levels will allow the market to discover the needs of the consumer and tailor services appropriately. Monopolistic Bureaucracies are inherently unable to do that.

Free-market capitalism is messy, especially for the small startups. Failure rates are high, but the consumer benefits, and stiff competition builds better employees and better business owners.  Government should lower the regulatory and legal barriers to market entry, as Australia does, and confine itself to setting the rules and punishing violators.  Uncle Sam needs to stop picking winners and losers, because he almost always gets it wrong.

http://blogs.forbes.com/carlschramm/2011/01/19/the-messy-path-to-creating-jobs/
http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/01/17/the-next-american-upgrade/