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/

FCC: Fascists Controlling Communication

Inside Every Progressive is a Tyrant Struggling to be Free... And Oppress Others

When liberals like Al Crapton (he calls Limbaugh "Lumbar," so I call Sharpton, "Crapton") shout about conservatives having no right to talk on public airwaves, it means liberal talk radio is getting its ass kicked by conservatives.

When irrelevant nobodies like the Reverend or any MSNBC ranter talks like this, no one even takes notice anymore. Their audience can fit in a port-o-potty.

But when a government official proposes such dangerous and un-American absurdities, it's time to sit up and take notice.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps is proposing all radio and TV stations that broadcast over public airwaves submit to a "public values test."

Copps had suggested that the test would make a broadcaster's license renewal contingent upon proof that they meet a prospective set of federal criteria. (Hillicon Valley – FCC Push)

Local boards packed with angry, agenda-driven liberals would sit in judgment on radio and tv stations, using government-approved criteria such as "Diversity Compliance."  Gotta have the government recommended daily amount of one legged lesbian church bishops, gay soldiers, peace-loving Muslims and of course the stupidest species in America:  The White Male Father and Husband!

Progressives cannot win in the free marketplace of ideas so they propose to use the coercive power of the state to shut it all down.

Media outlets would be required to submit to the Ministry of Truth disclosure reports and programming plans proving their worthiness and "meaningful commitment to public affairs and news programming."  Progressive toadies and bullhorn-wielding activists at the local level will be the foot soldiers in this Obama-approved Hush Rush campaign.  

And make no mistake, Copps and his fellow statists want to expand their purview to all communications outlets, including cable and internet.  Here is Der Kommissar in his own words:

"What we've had in recent years is an aberration where we have had no oversight of the media.

It's a pretty serious situation that we're in. I think American media has a bad case of substance abuse right now. We are not producing the body of news and information that democracy needs to conduct its civic dialogue [...] we have to reverse that trend." (Copps quoted at NewsBusters)

Is this guy crazy? We've got news coming out our ears. Yes, much of it is sports and celebrity-driven frivolity, but serious news and analysis is as close as your computer keyboard or local library periodicals section.

All Palin, All the Time
Maybe he has in mind a press that flocked to Alaska for synchronized Sara Palin dumpster dives?  This same press corps spent more time investigating an Ohio plumber than they did the Democratic nominee for president. Is this the news media dereliction the FCC Kommissar seeks to stamp out?  I doubt it.

The IBD editors ask the most important question:

Who is Copps to make such demands? And why does a man who thinks like a tyrant hold such a high-ranking position in the U.S. government?

It's reasonable to ask, as Republican Rep. Joe Barton of Texas did in a letter to Copps this week, if the commissioner means to give the federal governmentthe power to determine what content is available for Americans to consume. (IBD)

Indeed.  The federal government and its batwinged gargoyles like Copps are not neutral.  They are biased and are therefore unfit to be the arbiters of what free men and women can or cannot read, see and hear.  We're smart enough to figure it out on our own without a paternalistic statist holding our hand.  MSNBC's ratings are in the toilet; America knows crap when they see it.

Cut Government - Start by Dumping the FCC

The FCC is an outmoded appendage of the past.  Time to shut it down.  As a bonus, we would save $325 million per year in the process

The same organization that forced all consumers to buy Ma Bell-made telephones for decades, the same FCC that enforced speech codes via radio "fairness doctrines," the same FCC that took two decades after its invention to OK cellular technology for the marketplace and acted similarly sluggishly with cable and satellite innovation has no business online.  (Harsanyi)

Jack Shafer sees the FCC's latest "Net Neutrality" power grab as a "solution" looking for a problem:

The FCC's sense of urgency may befuddle you. After all, the many-colored, hydra-headed, and infernally useful beast that is the U.S. Internet came into being without government demands and decrees. Without commandments from the FCC or anybody else, American broadband companies invested tens of billions of dollars to create an Internet infrastructure for their customers.

He also explains how the free market works:

Would any of the companies currently in the broadband game have built their systems without the expectation that they could "leverage" their investment? I doubt it.

Do they lust for an Internet environment that imprisons us in their "walled garden" and bleeds us for every penny during our stay? Of course they do.

But then why—in the absence of FCC regulatory powers to ban such Internet land-grabs—haven't the broadband providers erected such walled gardens?

Because 1) they face competition from another broadband provider and don't want to give their customers an incentive to leave, or 2) where they're the only broadband provider, they tend not to want to give a potential competitor encouragement to enter their market.

That's it in a nutshell.  This isn't about the Orwellian sounding "Net Neutrality" or "Open Internet."  As David Harsanyi warns us...

"... doublespeak is still flourishing [...] it reminds us that the FCC's institutional positions conflict with the vibrancy and freedom of the Internet." (Harsanyi)

It's about power and control.  The progressive urge to regulate every last corner of our lives is metastisizing and has spread to the internet

Even the staunchest net neutrality advocate will concede that net neutrality is a fuzzy concept. No network can be purely neutral. If the current Internet didn't prioritize some traffic at the expense of other traffic, the whole enterprise would grind to a halt like Manhattan's streets when the stoplights stop working.

So the basic question here is who will set the Internet's priorities, the government or the providers. (Shafer)

Jack Shafer - Who's Internet is it Anyway?

Harsanyi - Save the Net; Abolish the FCC

New Year Resolutions for the Federal Government

Government Resolutions for the New Year:  Flatten taxes and spread them out among more taxpayers, simplify government regulations, and relinquish every extra-constitutional responsibility back to the states

Job 1 should be to simplify the tax code

No more favored groups or exemptions for any person, business, or corporation.

The fact that 46.7 million earners pay no income tax creates moral hazard - incentives for perverse behavior: Free-riding people have scant incentive to restrain the growth of government they are not paying for with income taxes.(George Will)

The same goes for business and corporations who escape taxation.  Our tax code encourages people to hide their money instead of investing it in the marketplace.  It chases money overseas in search of more fertile markets.  It favors industries like homebuilding and mortgage lending over other productive activities.  This creates market inefficiencies and bubbles.  Tear it all down and let the capital flow to the projects proved worthy on the merits of the free marketplace.

The Crushing Weight of the Federal Code

The next step would be to burn down the warehouses full of the hopelessly impenetrable and exemption-riddled federal code. You can go explore it for yourself Here.  It's searchable!  The word 'feces' returns 91 hits, "candle" returns 120.  Yikes!  "Saudi" is mentioned in the federal code 119 times, and not once related to terrorism or spreading virulent hatred disguised as religion...

The federal code is an abomination.  Burn it down to the constitutional foundation!  It is a mockery of the law and a standing, stinking violation of the very concept of the rule of law.

Restore the 9th and 10th Amendments

The federal government should turn everything back to the states that is not mentioned in the constitution.

The states should then restore the sovereignty of the individual by relinquishing those tasks better left to free men and women.

To see where this rant comes from, go read Toqueville's "Democracy in America," Part 1, Chapter 4:  The Principle of the Sovereignty of the People in America, and Chapter 8: Aspects of the Federal Constitution.