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Take A Job? No, Make A Job.

February 2, 2021/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

The institutional and cultural guidelines today for personal and family income tell us to take a job. The government publishes jobs data as a key indicator of the health of the economy. They publish the inverse set of data – unemployment statistics – for the opposite reason, an indicator of the unhealthy state of the economy. We are subject to reports and commentary on job creation and job destruction. There are blue-collar jobs and white-collar jobs, and there are “non-jobs” in the so-called gig economy (which is institutionally and culturally and frowned upon because it does not provide “stable” or “reliable” jobs, and doesn’t offer “job benefits”, thus exposing gig workers to some set of vagaries or injustices).

Jobs are a product of the industrial revolution. Serfs and peasants in the feudal economy didn’t have jobs. They were “tied to the land” as the history books tell us, either farming for the aristocratic landholders or scrambling for subsistence on land they didn’t own. As soon as factories appeared, so did “jobs”. Somehow, the term tended towards tasks that were “low” and menial.

A job is something the worker takes. It is given to him or her as a gift, a privilege, an act of generosity of an employer. We should be grateful for our jobs, and try hard to keep them, not lose them.

Concepts such as the minimum wage level for a job are intricately entangled in the hierarchical job-granting schema. The power center determines for you how much value you are deemed to generate.

Our entire lives are constructed around jobs. We consume education in order to become qualified for a job. We plan to fund our pension income from the proceeds of a job. We access the healthcare system via the benefits provided to us as a result of our job. We call a job held for a long time a career. Jobs overwhelm lives.

What if the institutional and cultural guidelines were different? What if the life-system we are plugged into from birth was not so dominated by the concept of jobs, of working for corporate employers?

Reframing how we think of the structure of the economy.

The picture we paint of the economy when we talk in terms of firms creating jobs for employees to take is hierarchical. We look up to “Big Business” and rank them on their number of employees. These companies make up the DJIA and S&P 500 indexes that we talk about every day. Smaller companies don’t get a mention. They sit lower down the hierarchy.

If we reframe this picture to think about a network rather than a hierarchy, we can assign a more equally important role to every node and every connection. We can see productive activity distributed across the network, with opportunities throughout. The economy is a collaborative system of production in which there are innumerable choices for each of us to decide how to contribute.

The gradual abandonment of hierarchy in organization is, in fact, quite well advanced in the digital age. Our thinking about jobs and employment needs to catch up.

A life of production versus a life of earning.

Our reward for working at a job is often expressed as earnings. Not only earning dollars, but earning a good living, earning our keep, earning a promotion. We earn by keeping in line, following orders, performing tasks. In the collaborative economic network, we can be producers rather than earners. We focus on how much our productivity in generating output to nearby nodes – team-mates, partners, customers, the next stage of the value chain – so that our connections are strong, and we are evaluated as a strong and reliable link.

Our time and effort is focused on how to be more productive, rather than how to fit in to an administrative harness. Our creativity is liberated and we evaluate our work-life for its stimulation rather than its weekly earnings.

Division of labor and division of knowledge.

Economists have identified a phenomenon they call division of labor as one of the great secret sources of job productivity. The more narrowly each individual worker specializes, the better the combined organizational outcome. This thinking has been pervasive since Adam Smith’s picture of the pin factory in The Wealth Of Nations.

‘One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands’.

The division of labor reduces us all to pin head grinders. The goal is to make each of us so specialized in our function that we can only operate in a hierarchy, we can only perform one narrow task, and we are easily replaced by another individual who can be quickly trained in repetitive pin head grinding.

There’s another alternative, and that might be called division of knowledge. Knowledge is the source of economic production, increasingly valuable when we add to it, whereas labor is a cost, to be reduced and, if possible, eliminated. Every individual has unique knowledge; it’s experiential, subjective, an act of cognition. The most valuable knowledge is tacit, not subject to analysis and not easily shared, guiding individual activity in unique ways.

Individuals can collect, curate, polish and adapt their own knowledge to make more of a contribution to collaborative economic production. They can aim to be best at something in their network based on unique, individual tacit knowledge. It might be welding metals together or writing code or detailing cars or growing vegetables or setting prices for hard-to-price items. They can easily find out what knowledge is required and valued in nearby parts of their network, and adapt appropriately, exhibiting their knowledge for the most eager buyers.

Division of knowledge is more empowering than division of labor.

Measure your own performance.

One of the ways that the job-granting hierarchy exerts control over the job-taker is performance reviews. The employer makes rules about what constitutes desirable performance, and designs ways to measure how well the rules are internalized by employees. Those job-takers who conform best are those who are rewarded with pay increases, promotions and recognition. Performance attributes like “works well with others on teams” and “achieves departmental goals” are designed for the benefit of the hierarchy, and not as guides to self-realization for individuals.

Many of the corporate performance programs require the individual employee to undergo a personality evaluation, often using industrialized frameworks such as the Myers-Briggs Typology Indicator, literally assigning individuals to pre-determined boxes and using the classifications to evaluate their ability to fit in. They’re not examining your personality profile to enlighten you.

Such performance criteria and performance measures are intended to be tied to incentives, to be a medium of motivation. But the high-powered incentives that truly motivate are values such as purpose and meaning, and the sense of achievement that comes from an individual effort to attain a self-chosen goal of the highest order. In a large firm, individual effort can have only a trivial effect on company performance, or even team performance in a corporate context. And there is usually no place for truly individual performance. That would not constitute working well with others.

As an individual entrepreneur, or a founding team member, or a critical member of a small business, it is possible to maximize personal achievement, elevate personal incentives, and take a more direct route to purpose and meaning. Data indicate that small companies are better at attracting superior talent, better at rewarding individual performance, and better at nurturing the kinds of innovation that motivated individuals can contribute. Often, these innovations are better ways to work: new routines, new capabilities, new knowledge sharing. Better ways to work mean more achievement, and more fulfillment for those who participate in the new ways. People-led process innovation becomes a virtuous circle.

Weekend Long Read: American Sports Are Letting Down America.

September 20, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

Why we chose this article: America needs some leadership in exposing and condemning the revolutionary and destructive Marxist ideology behind the Black Lives Matter organization, without triggering or succumbing to accusations of racism. Jason Whitlock is emerging as such a leader. The acuity of his analysis is matched by his moral clarity.

The following is adapted from a Hillsdale College online lecture delivered in Nashville, Tennessee, on August 19, 2020.

Nearly 30 years ago, in a 1993 Nike commercial, professional basketball legend Charles Barkley fired the first shot at the “role model” concept popularized by Columbia University sociologist Robert K. Merton in the aftermath of the 1960s counterculture movement. “I am not a role model,” Barkley proclaimed in the half-minute spot. “I’m not paid to be a role model. I’m paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”

Barkley’s words landed with a force every bit the equal of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem knee 23 years later. Former Vice President Dan Quayle defended Barkley, while Barkley’s fellow NBA superstar Karl Malone criticized him in Sports Illustrated. Leading news magazines, including Time and Newsweek, published articles exploring the controversy. Newspaper columnists from coast to coast—on and off the sports pages—also weighed in. The topic still sparks debate today.

Of the many phrases and concepts Merton coined—including “self-fulfilling prophecy” and “unintended consequences”—“role model” has had the most impact. On the surface, the argument that young people tend to model their behavior after high-profile, successful adults is harmless. However, in retrospect, the elevation of athletes and other celebrities as primary figures in the formation of behavioral norms for young people helped create the conditions that are powering the destructive Black Lives Matter movement today.

Merton’s role model concept undercuts the importance of parents and nuclear families. That was the point of Barkley’s criticism. Feminists and other progressive critics of America’s “patriarchal” society—including the Black Lives Matter movement, whose Marxist-influenced statement of purpose opposes “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—have used Merton’s concept to great effect. Muhammad Ali, Pete Rose, Farrah Fawcett, Barbara Streisand, Mick Jagger, Marvin Gaye, and Burt Reynolds infringed on territory primarily reserved for mom, dad, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and teachers.

Technology has helped advance the process, diminishing the influence of traditional authority figures and strengthening the reach of celebrities. Kids shut their bedroom doors, turn on their televisions, laptops, and game consoles, plug in earbuds, open social media apps, and disappear into a world far removed from mom and dad. With a mere push of a button they tune out the worldview of their families and tune in the worldview of athlete LeBron James, actress Lena Dunham, rapper Snoop Dogg, social media race-baiter Shaun King, and others like them.

On top of all this, we now see America’s enemies, particularly China, using these modern role models to promote racial division and destabilize our country—with those on the political Left as their accomplices. Today, they have coalesced around the Black Lives Matter movement to push America toward a level of racial dysfunction and animus not experienced since the Civil War.

It’s fitting that Charles Barkley fired the first shot against this trend, because American sports have become the Gettysburg of what some have called our “cold civil war.” And if China and the Left complete their radicalization of sports, our nation may never recover.

***

Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.

Nelson Mandela, the South African freedom fighter-turned-statesman, spoke those words in an effort to heal the country he came to lead after spending a quarter century incarcerated for opposing apartheid. Mandela embraced sports’ power to bridge racial divides, looking on athletic competition as a kind of antibiotic for racial animus and discrimination. South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup and Mandela’s presentation of the Webb Ellis Cup to team captain Francois Pienaar stand as an iconic symbol of unity in post-apartheid South Africa. Clint Eastwood directed a movie, Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, that memorialized the importance of the moment. It bears re-watching today.

Since sprinter Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and boxer Joe Louis scored a first-round knockout over German heavyweight Max Schmeling in 1938, sports have served as a powerful racial unifier in America as well. The victories earned by Owens and Louis punctured Hitler’s Aryan superiority myth, unified black and white Americans in celebration, and established Owens and Louis as this country’s first black national heroes.

Owens and Louis laid the foundation for Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey’s partnership with Jackie Robinson to integrate our national pastime, Major League Baseball, a decade later. Robinson’s successful integration of baseball, in turn, inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.

Indeed, Barack Obama, America’s first black president—the world’s first black leader of a predominantly white country—credited Robinson’s career for his own political rise. “There’s a direct line between Jackie Robinson and me standing here,” Obama said in January 2017, while hosting the world champion Chicago Cubs at the White House. He continued:

There’s a direct line between people loving Ernie Banks, and then the city being able to come together and work together in one spirit. . . . Sometimes it’s just a matter of us being able to escape and relax from the difficulties of our days, but sometimes it also speaks to something better in us. And when you see this group of folks of different shades and different backgrounds, and coming from different communities and neighborhoods all across the country, and then playing as one team and playing the right way, and celebrating each other and being joyous in that, that tells us a little something about what America is and what America can be.

Yes, America is a shining example of sports’ transformative power. The games we play, the games at the center of our social behavior, combine with our founding principles to enhance the American experience. America’s enemies know this, which is why the culture war has moved to our arenas and stadiums. Sports are now in the same crosshairs as our Founding Fathers, under attack for past racial sins and unappreciated for their vital role in cultivating racial unity. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but by writing the Declaration of Independence he made the emancipation of slaves inevitable. American sports were once segregated, but no American industry can match sports’ empowerment of black men.

The black-player-dominated National Football League is the most powerful force in American popular culture. It provides the number one television show on five different networks—CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, and the NFL Network. In this era of have-it-your-way TV, where consumers record and watch shows when they want while fast-forwarding through advertisements, only live sporting events can be consistently counted on to deliver audiences that sit through commercials.

But while American sports have never been more influential, they’ve also never been more vulnerable to foreign influence. Their partnership with global brands and their desire to build global audiences have given foreign countries a pathway to manipulate American sports and culture.

Look at how China, with its 1.4 billion consumers, rules the National Basketball Association and its de facto parent company, Nike, the same way it rules Hollywood. Access to China’s consumers and Asia’s cheap labor (even sometimes slave labor) is the key to Nike’s economic growth. The Portland-based shoe and apparel manufacturer generates $40 billion a year in revenue. Its global reach, agenda, and revenue streams dictate the strategy of the $8-billion-a-year NBA. Many are unaware that Nike, and not the NBA, controls basketball. One could make a fair argument that the NBA is nothing more than the in-house marketing department of Nike.

Both Nike and the NBA kowtow to China, which explains their silence on the horrific human rights abuses inside China and the suppression of Hong Kong freedom fighters by China’s communist government. More important, Nike and the NBA’s China agenda helps explain why Nike pitchmen LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick enthusiastically smear the United States as inherently racist and evil. From Joseph Stalin to Fidel Castro to our own time, the communists’ favorite propaganda tactic has been to paint the West, and the U.S. in particular, as racist.

The militant social justice messaging of James and Kaepernick serves the interests of not only the Chinese Communist Party and globalist corporations like Nike, but also our political Left. Kaepernick’s National Anthem defiance in 2016 gave the Left an opportunity to politicize football, America’s new national pastime, and force it into the kind of “progressive” posturing already commonplace in the NBA and Hollywood. Arrogance, lack of foresight, and the advice of an inner circle that included former Clinton administration press secretary Joe Lockhart as the NFL’s vice president of communications, explain commissioner Roger Goodell’s laissez-faire approach to Kaepernick’s protest. Underestimating the determination of the Left and the power of social media to intimidate corporate America, Goodell and the NFL’s TV partners wrongly thought that the Kaepernick controversy would fade over time.

Instead, four years after Kaepernick first knelt, the Leftist mob has forced the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association to take their own knees and pay homage to the dishonest Black Lives Matter narrative on police brutality. The NFL plans to paint social justice messages across its end zones this season and to allow players to wear helmet decals with the names of alleged police victims. The San Francisco 49ers fly a BLM flag next to an American flag at Levi’s Stadium. MLB opened its COVID-shortened season with “BLM” carved into pitcher’s mounds, and the Boston Red Sox put up a 254-foot BLM billboard outside Fenway Park. NHL players are now regularly kneeling during the National Anthem. The NBA’s basketball bubble at Disney World is a virtual shrine to BLM: “Black Lives Matter” is painted on the court, players wear social justice messages on the back of their jerseys, and it’s major news when a player stands during the National Anthem.

The entire American sports world—a culture that traditionally celebrates victors, meritocracy, colorblindness, and patriotism—has suddenly immersed itself in black victimization and left-wing radicalism. This immersion threatens to do permanent damage to American culture as a whole. It has certainly undermined national pride. A country that no longer believes in its founding ideals cannot prosper and survive.

***

If our sports stadiums and arenas have become the Gettysburg of the culture war, Lebron James and Colin Kaepernick are playing the roles of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, fighting to divide the nation even further than it is. The mainstream media is only half right in casting them as modern-day equivalents of Muhammad Ali. Ali’s religious sect, the Nation of Islam, was certainly divisive: it championed black secession. But unlike the BLM movement, it also rejected victimhood. Its founder Elijah Muhammad and its spokesman Malcolm X promoted bootstrap self-reliance and were disdainful of liberal politics. “The worst enemy that the Negro [has],” said Malcolm X,

is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal. It is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems.

Pro-BLM athletes today have moved beyond the idea of a role model that was debated in 1993—the idea of modeling behavior to be imitated, such as self-reliance, hard work, responsibility, and good parenthood. Through the power of social media, to which they are addicted, these modern role models exert influence by promoting commercial products and political causes. In the case of NBA athletes like Lebron James, this means turning their backs not only on the oppressed people of China and Hong Kong, but also on the poor and underprivileged in America among whom so many of these wealthy athletes grew up, and who they now condemn to victimhood and dependency with their political activism.

Charles Barkley was right 30 years ago. Parents, not athletes, should be role models. Today the situation is even worse, with sports further dividing an already dangerously divided nation, rather than providing the unifying and even healing force Nelson Mandela described. Predictably, there are now calls to boycott sports, and it seems inevitable that the TV ratings of the pro sports leagues will decline. This is unlikely to matter, however, to the suddenly-woke billionaire team owners and their handpicked commissioners.

As fans, we can only hope and pray that these feckless leaders will reconsider their embrace of the BLM cult—a necessary first step to returning American sports to what it has been in the past: a force for unity and a model of a diverse and colorblind meritocracy.

This article was first published by Hillsdale College’s Imprimis.

Entrepreneurship Is The One Institution We Can Rely Upon To Maintain A Prosperous And Civil Society.

June 26, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

In this time of social unrest, Americans’ confidence in our institutions is in decline. A sample from Gallup’s frequent annual poll includes these selected comparisons between 2019 (latest available data) and 2000.

% Confidence in Institutions (Great Deal + Quite a lot)
	2019	2000
Congress	11	24
Big business	23	29
Newspapers	23	37
Banks	30	46
Small Business	68	57

Relatively few Americans declare confidence in political institutions, as represented by Congress. Roughly twice as many – but still less than a quarter of Americans – express more confidence in big business and banks. Newspapers, similarly, command only low levels of confidence. All the poll data from 2019 are lower than those from 2000, indicating across-the-board declines of confidence in institutions in general.

The Institution Of Entrepreneurship

Except for small business. Two thirds of Americans declare confidence in this institution, and that number is higher than in 2000. We can easily look beyond the structural definition of small business – which is, after all, defined by government statisticians gathering employment data – into the institution of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs are those individuals who shoulder the task of making things better for the rest of society. They are society’s optimists. They recognize current conditions for what they are – and then imagine a future in which conditions are better. Then they sacrifice themselves to bring that future about, expending capital and labor now for the prospects of revenue in the future. That future is uncertain – entrepreneurs do not know if their initiative will be as well-received by customers as they hope it will. They press on anyway, their goals being discovery and achievement and making a difference, more than profit.

In this sense, entrepreneurs perform the kind of social function that is badly needed in a time of lost confidence in institutions. Having little time for the rear view mirror and gazing intently through the windshield at the road ahead, they substitute sanguine imagination for everyone else’s dissatisfaction and disappointment with the status quo. They don’t dwell on past injustices, as so many young people seem inclined to do today; they’d rather concentrate on what is possible in the future. When they see barriers they dismantle them.

Solving The Problems Of Others

Entrepreneurs are problem solvers – and the problems they solve are those that their fellow citizens (all potential customers) deem most pressing. If you’re looking for a solution to a problem, seek out an entrepreneur rather than an elected official or bureaucrat.

Entrepreneurs’ problem-solving technique combines empathy with rigorous cause-and-effect thinking. Empathy is the entrepreneur’s tool to understand why people – why society – feels a certain way. What does dissatisfaction stem from? Why do people feel uneasy the way they do? Entrepreneurs take society’s pulse and measure society’s level of pain. From this input, which is largely emotional, they try, as rigorously and logically as they can, to reverse-engineer a cause-and-effect chain. If dissatisfaction and pain are the outcomes, what are the causes? Entrepreneurs are not policy-makers like politicians, whose aim is to appease. They are obliging and accommodating collaborators whose aim is to please.

Entrepreneurial Creativity

Entrepreneurship is a profoundly human, social and creative activity that changes our world for the better. In contrast to the destruction that our current social justice warriors seek to impose, entrepreneurs create new economic value via a transformative act of human imagination. Their ingenuity is limitless.

What are the entrepreneurial actions that result from this creative societal problem-solving disposition? Entrepreneurs start firms, grow businesses, research and introduce innovations, lower customers’ costs and increase customers’ convenience. Their guiding principle is that whatever customers want, customers can have. The responsibility to improve life is given to the customer, in that they are tasked with communicating, as clearly as possible, what needs to be done and what needs to be provided and what needs to be changed to make them feel better. Entrepreneurs put their own private property at risk to create customer benefits that add up to social benefits for all. The customer is sovereign in this exchange – what they want is what is produced. If they stop wanting it, entrepreneurial production ceases.

Contrast this with political action. Politicians put none of their own private property at risk. In fact, they steal property from some citizens, through taxation and debt (which is a tax on future citizens), in order to redistribute it in some new form to a different set of citizens. They appease one group of citizens with the property of another group. Where the entrepreneur’s collaborative deal with customers is win-win (entrepreneurs make profits when customers approve their initiatives), the politicians’ deal always involves loss. The politician achieves office when an opponent loses an election, and makes policy that imposes loss on some part of the population. Politicians deal in losses, entrepreneurs deal in benefits.

Individual Action, Social Benefits

Society would be happier and healthier if we turned to entrepreneurs for all our solutions, and to politicians solely to protect the system of private property and freedom of contract that makes entrepreneurship possible. It would be healthier still if we were to encourage the spirit of entrepreneurship in a larger group: the spirit of service to fellow-citizens through innovative technological problem-solving. The measure of success for this system is what historian and economist Deirdre McCloskey calls “trade-tested betterment”. What she means by that is the customer-determined improvement in the quality of life (i.e., betterment) validated by customers buying or not buying what entrepreneurs offer as potential solutions to their problems and their pain (i.e. trade-tested).

If those who protest and complain today were themselves to adopt the entrepreneurial spirit in their own lives, they would find that they could not only build better platforms for progress, but also introduce more purpose, meaning and autonomy into their own lives. The entrepreneurial life is purpose-driven (solving others’ problems), a source of meaning (solving problems is more meaningful than carrying protest signs or throwing rocks) and the ultimate autonomous lifestyle (discarding dependency on employment wages or welfare payments).

Entrepreneurship is an American institution. Every immigrant who ever came here brought an entrepreneurial spirit: life will be better for me and others if I escape from the limitations of my current situation and join this open, betterment-demanding, property-protecting, innovation-welcoming country and see what I can do. The institutions that grew up with our innovating immigrants and their offspring are now largely decayed and decrepit. But entrepreneurship is one institution that there is no need to abandon. In fact, it’s necessary that we revive it.

Young People Can Get A Great Start On Entrepreneurship Around The Family Dinner Table.

March 3, 2020/in Articles /by Raushan Gross

While you were young, did you gain knowledge and learn skills that gave you the human capital necessary to become an entrepreneur or a small business owner? Human capital consists of the knowledge and habits developed as a youngster that form skillsets that later in life can be used in the business world. These skills are developed either through the family unit, culture, or regional location and determine the success or failure of entrepreneurial pursuits and performance. In the young, the development of skills and knowledge are applicable to future ventures in entrepreneurship or small business ownership.

Everything you learned from family dinner conversations and your culture served to build your human capital. Across the globe, the people of various regions cultivate certain skills that enable individuals to consider entrepreneurship as a viable choice of work. Some of you never had the social or family setting that gave you entrepreneurial insights. Some people get this while they are young, and some do not. Acquiring human capital at a certain age bolsters the chance of entering entrepreneurship or small business ownership. If human capital or business insights are not embedded culturally or acquired at a certain point, some individuals will never consider entrepreneurship or be successful at it.

We cannot all become successful entrepreneurs, especially if only a few of us come from a cultural background that rewards an ethic of hard work and related values versus a cultural background in which achieving entrepreneurial success is never even thought of.1 What is valued in the family unit and what is rewarded or praised contributes to our future entrepreneurial skills. Ludwig von Mises noted, “the inequality of men, which is due to differences both in their inborn qualities and in the vicissitudes of their lives, manifests itself.”2 The region of the world in which one lives and the context of the acquired human capital skills are equally vital to having an entrepreneurial skillset.

We hear from many entrepreneurs, and those who are not entrepreneurs per se, that much of their education occurred around the family dinner table, or that they lived in a place where small business activity was plentiful.3 Human capital that is based on family, culture, and regional differences has consequential effects for many considering entrepreneurship.

Cultural factors are critical in developing entrepreneurship. Often these cultural factors are overshadowed by the technical aspects of operating a business—the seen versus the unseen. Parents and the elderly pass on their values to their children, values such as taking risks, being independent, challenging uncertainty, etc. Children who are rewarded or not rewarded will either be encouraged or discouraged to pursue entrepreneurial activities in the marketplace. If a child is never taught to be independent, how is he or she able to systemically think of and identify potential profit opportunities and bring opportunities to fruition?

Habits form over time, and many are culturally based. In some cultures, some children spend up to twelve hours a day playing videogames and entertaining themselves on social media. In other cultures, children are expected to work long hours helping mom and dad with their business or studying to earn the best grade. These youths may work at an uncle’s garage learning all about vehicles or attend college to gain business knowledge. In either situation, these youths are learning about private property, e-commerce, revenues, profit and loss, bookkeeping, and so on—gaining skillsets and knowledge in order to run a business of their own in the future.

Generally, whatever is cultivated in the family unit and culture will manifest and have consequences in the marketplace. Children who acquire a work ethic and values related to entrepreneurial success will have an advantage over their peers who have not had the same experience. The children who have not learned these things will have a much later start or never acquire the skills and the know-how needed to pursue entrepreneurship or small business ownership.

Not everyone has an equal opportunity to become an entrepreneur, as some must acquire a collection of basic skills, knowledge, and habits that may take decades to develop. Taking risks, working longer hours, and making critical decisions require a certain upbringing. Entrepreneurs are not created overnight but over time. However, ten years of working with mom, dad, or an uncle as a youth, gaining practical knowledge, surely provides advantages later in life.

We cannot disregard the location and region in which we lived during the time of our early human capital acquisition. Being located in one region of the earth versus another can surely impact our ability to develop a predisposition or entrepreneurial insights needed for entrepreneurial behavior. Perhaps we live in an area where several industries exist. Being surrounded by these industries allows us to either work for or start a business in a vein that is familiar to us.

As with any location or local market, our human capital can be stymied in a region or location where a product or service is not valued or not supported although it might be highly valued in another market (i.e., if one has to take their product knowledge to another region where the consumers have higher subjective valuations of their productive goods or services).

Unfortunately, the opportunity to attain the same human capital at the same time and place that leads to entrepreneurship is not equally available to everyone. Without the requisite human capital, one can only dream of becoming a successful entrepreneur or business owner. Families and family cultures vary among peoples across the globe, and so does the dissemination of knowledge at the family dinner table. We all come from backgrounds that either reward or punish certain behaviors that later transform into predispositions and values that underpin our ability to, at a minimum, think like and be an entrepreneur. Ludwig von Mises said that entrepreneurs “owe their position exclusively to the fact that they are a better fit for the performance of the functions incumbent upon them than other people are.”4 An interpretation of Mises on this point is that the skills and knowledge develop over time that enable entrepreneurs to uniquely perform the production of products and services for the consumer.

1.See Thomas Sowell’s The Quest for Cosmic Justice. In the section titled “Freedom versus Equality,” he discusses equal performance and social barriers.
2.See Ludwig von Mises’ Planning for Freedom.
3.See Ryan McMaken’s article “Three Economics Lessons I Learned from My Dad.” For example, three lessons that he learned were: lower the cost of doing business, politicians drive up the cost, and the world is always changing.
4.See Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action on the Entrepreneurial Function.

Raushan Gross is an Associate Professor of Business Management at Pfeiffer University and writes frequently at mises.org.

A Thoughtless Immigration Policy Leads To A Society That No Longer Believes In Its Own Traditional Values.

February 6, 2020/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings (Republished)

“Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years,” say researchers at the University of Cambridge. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.”

No wonder. Certainly, America is a severely divided country. “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule,” argues Donald L. Horowitz, a scholar of democracy, at Duke University.

Having studied “constitutional engineering” in divided societies like South Africa, Horowitz has concluded,

In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity.

The Democratic Party has morphed into such a political organ. It’s responding to the fact that minorities in the United States will soon form a majority. This rising majority, as polling trends indicate, will speak in one political voice, for most immigrants to the United States are not from Europe and Canada, but from Latin America and Asia, south and east. And this cohort of immigrants is reliably progressive: It votes Democratic.

Likewise, the poor and the unskilled are well-represented among our country’s immigrant intake. It’s the way we roll. Poor immigrants favor the rearranging of the income curve in their new home.

The policy establishment preaches well-meaning pieties. Our ruling idiocracy, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, claims that all these energetically imported, fractious minorities will relinquish race and tribe as unifying principles, and adopt our U.S. constitutional design and “our values.”

Democrats know better. Oh, the founding population, they expect, naïvely will hitch its existential survival to a political dispensation called liberal democracy.

The duped, historic majority of the United States willingly will cede political and institutional dominance in return for the constitutional safeguards—for the abstractions—offered by democracy. This, Democrats know only too well.

Moreover, being pushover-passive on matters domestic, many legacy Americans are generally pro-immigration, the more exotic and culturally incongruent, the better. It gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling about ourselves. But while Americans don’t see race; the people they’re importing see nothing but race.

Take Indian-Americans. They’re a relatively new addition to the United States’ top-down, state-planned, multicultural mess of pottage. Most Indian-Americans have “arrived in America over the past two decades.” But they are highly aggressive politically and reliably Democrat.

By the Economist’s telling, “Capitol Hill, for example, is crammed with staff and interns of Indian-American heritage. They also appear to be ‘over-represented’ in academia, the media and other influential posts.” And, it is their indisputable habit to deploy and grow “informal networks, as well-connected Indian-Americans find jobs for each other’s offspring.”

Caste and ethnicity: It’s what the scrupulously candid English magazine is here hinting at, ever so genteelly. As many in the corporate world know all too well—once an individual of South-Asian descent gets into a position of power, he is inclined to hire others of the same persuasion, talent be damned. Meek Anglo-Americans, on the other hand, hire by talent, not by tribe. They don’t seem to have that screw-or-be-screwed DNA to do battle with such flinty duplicity.

This mercenary, extractive approach to politics prevails among the immigrants being imported at a furious rate by the immigration-industrial-complex. Asians, aforementioned, are especially primed to seek, and aggressively extract, advantage from positions of power.

Take Kamala Harris. Although she “rarely mentioned the Indian side of her family while campaigning,” the senator’s mother migrated to California from Chennai, in southern India. Angry, anti-white, and highly receptive to theories that blacken the West and porcelainize the undeveloped world—Kamala and those who share her way of thinking cannot be trusted to relinquish race as an organizing principle, in favor of a complete commitment to a constitutional design, in the America she and her progeny hope to inherit.

What about that seething Somali, Ilhan Omar, the representative from Minnesota? Who will be the loser in her brave, new, tribal America?

In the context of democracy and its discontents, Anglo-American elites and policymakers have courted and engineered their own demise. No other group expresses such incontinent exhilaration at the prospects of turning their historic populations into minorities.

“The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world,” states Pew Research. “Immigrants and their U.S.-born children now number approximately 89.4 million people, or 28 percent of the overall U.S. population,” says the American Community Survey (ACS). According to the Migration Policy Institute, “One in seven U.S. residents is foreign-born.”

As stated, the foreign-born are, for the most part, from alien, often-hostile cultures.

“A century ago, more than 80 percent of [America’s] foreign-born population came from Europe; now the figure is only 10 percent. . . . America is becoming less European,” bewailed the Economist in one issue, inexplicably.

“Inexplicably,” because this (superb) news magazine usually glorifies the ethnic transformation of European societies through exotic immigration.

Confusion born of contradictions peaks in the next issue, where Robert Guest, of the same open-borders Economist, lectures and laments that, “The simplest way to make the world richer is to allow more people to move. Yet the politics of migration has never been more toxic.”

D’oh! While extolling endless migration to the West, the very same, November 16th-22 issue of the magazine depicts a world beset by unrest:

It is hard to keep up with the protest movements under way around the world. … only the global unrest of the late 1960s was similar in scope.

After much dissembling, it is eventually conceded that the global unrest is engulfing “well-functioning democracies” big time, too.

In fact, “a related phenomenon [in the unrest equation] is the weakening of the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy—that losers, who may represent a majority of the popular vote, will accept rule by the winners until the next election. The millions on the streets do not accept the patience that trade-off demands.” (Emphasis added.)

“A weakening of the bargain at the heart of Western-style democracy”? I wonder why?

Because flooding western democracies with non-western people has created societies without social capital; societies that share no enduring bonds other than the quest to extract as much power and possessions possible from the political process.

Western nation-states are now imperiled entities. Their central authorities have worked to erode delicate sectarian and ethnic balance within, and thus hope for lasting comity among disparate communities.

By using their police powers to swamp their already fractious populations with alien nations—where are the referenda on mass immigration?—governments have undermined existing ethnic balance in western democracies, and, with it, the fellow feeling so essential to democracy’s endurance.

Consider: Before Comrade Ted Kennedy’s coup of 1965, America was, by and large, a biracial nation. To quote author Ann Coulter, “From 1620 to 1970, the U.S. was demographically stable. . . . The country was about 85 percent to 90 percent white, almost entirely British, German, French and Dutch, and 10 percent to 15 percent African American.” In other words, America was largely a biracial compact; never a multicultural “nation of immigrants.”

Blacks and whites were only just beginning to come to terms with each other and with a shared, painful past.

Arguably, by opening the floodgates to mass, Third-World immigrants, the government of the day forever upset the teetering biracial balance within America.

When Politicians Create Divisions, The Assimilated Culture Of America Itself Is Called Into Question.

November 30, 2019/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

As the Seventh U.S. Army prepared to seize Axis-held Sicily in July 1943, Gen. George S. Patton sent the troops a message. “When we land,” Patton said, “we will meet German and Italian soldiers whom it is our honor and privilege to attack and destroy.”

Patton is famous for his martial exhortations, but Stanford historian David M. Kennedy paraphrases his Sicily address to highlight what it said about immigration. “Many of you have in your veins German and Italian blood, Patton said, “but remember that these ancestors of yours so loved freedom that they gave up home and country to cross the ocean in search of liberty,” whereas the Germans and Italians targeted in the Allied assault chose to remain “as slaves.”

The American soldiers Patton was talking to, Mr. Kennedy tells me, were “the sons of those immigrants who’d come 20, 30 years earlier.” A great wave of immigrants, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, had arrived in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and Germans had been coming since before that. These groups “were thought to be unassimilable,” Mr. Kennedy says. Yet Patton effectively told them, “I’m counting on your being so assimilated that you can kill your ancestors or your relatives.”

The general thus colorfully rejected ethnic nationalism and gestured at an American creed that could encompass anyone committed to defending American values. Today, the 78-year-old Mr. Kennedy, author of “Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War,” a Pulitzer Prize winner in 2000, sees this creed faltering. He worries that “in this big, throbbing, pulsing, kinetic, diverse society,” a sense of American “common purpose and common belonging” is being lost. Incompatible views of identity and immigration are fracturing politics.

“Societies that have deep, chronic, intergenerational ethnic differences inside the same body politic don’t have particularly encouraging histories,” Mr. Kennedy notes. “The basic human instinct to prefer one’s own kind to another is impossible, I think, to eradicate entirely.” That means forging “a coherent society out of people who are different in their origins and aspirations is a project,” and a fragile one. America’s capacity for absorption has been exceptional.

One early observer of American pluralism was J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman living in 18th-century New York. In his “Letters from an American Farmer,” he asks, “what, then, is the American, this new man?” British settlers formed the core of the colonies, but Crèvecoeur “acknowledges all of the different peoples that have come to America,” Mr. Kennedy says, like “the Germans, and the French, and the Huguenots, the Dutch.” Crèvecoeur said “they all were melding their identities into this new creature under the sun.”

In the 21st century the notion that Crèvecoeur was even looking at a diverse society, Mr. Kennedy says, seems “kind of quaint.” Besides enslaved African-Americans, “they’re all Europeans, they’re all white, what’s the diversity here?” Yet this mix of nationalities was unprecedented in the Old World.

Mr. Kennedy doubts the “psychological distance” between groups in America is greater now than then. Imagine if we could compare the perception of Germans in 1785 to that of Poles in 1905 to that of Asian and Hispanic immigrants today. “My instinct is that the sense of difference is pretty comparable over time,” Mr. Kennedy says.

Then why are the politics of immigration so fraught today? One answer is polarization. As American identity fractures deeply into red and blue versions, new arrivals are losing a common ideal of citizenship into which they can assimilate.

Immigrants are also regarded by the political parties not only as workers or neighbors but as a voting bloc. Democrats tout America’s declining white share of the population as a key to their long-term governing majority; Republicans fear the opposite. Restrictionism on the right is rooted not only in cultural difference but also a fear that more immigration risks a loss of political power.

Immigration politics didn’t always sort neatly along party lines. During the wave of immigration between 1890 and 1914, immigrant votes were “up for grabs,” Mr. Kennedy says. “The political identity of immigrants and immigrant-descended communities really didn’t solidify” until the New Deal, after a 1924 law and the Great Depression reduced immigration. Franklin Roosevelt appointed a far larger number of Catholic judges than had the Harding, Coolidge and Hoover administrations. This showed that Democrats were “out trying to recruit loyalty in these immigrant communities, which were largely Catholic and Jewish.”

Mr. Kennedy sees today’s Republican Party as having all but “conceded that they will not make any inroads in immigrant communities,” as “nativist elements” in the GOP “seem to have gained the upper hand.” Yet the left’s changing approach has also made the politics of immigration more divisive. “In the last generation or two,” Mr. Kennedy says, “diversity became not just an observed fact, but something to be valorized in its own right.”

The dominant American view until the late 20th century was that “we welcome all kinds of people but we expect them to assimilate into some range of standard values, behaviors, aspirations, ambitions.” Now, diversity itself has become the paramount value in parts of American culture. When celebrating difference replaces creedal values like liberty, fair play and respect for the Constitution, that undercuts “the project of assimilation,” Mr. Kennedy says.

Diverse societies need stories, even myths, to articulate what they have in common or what they are working toward collectively. Mr. Kennedy suggests that academic historians no longer contribute to this national understanding. When he was trained in the 1960s, most historians agreed on a “master narrative about American history.” It was based on the “perfection of the idea of democracy of this country.” That process was “incremental, slow, back and forth” but you could “still trace the arc.” And it gave Americans a way to talk about their national project.

Academic history is dominated today by “subsidiary questions” about “ethnic or racial or gender” groups, Mr. Kennedy says. These are “all interesting and legitimate stories in their own right,” but they have “squeezed energy out” of “the big, integrative, long-term project.” He worries that “the history of America is no longer the history of America—it’s about things that happened in America. But the fact that they happened in America is kind of incidental to the story.”

Mr. Kennedy is clearly alarmed by Donald Trump’s anti-immigration politics. But from “a purely analytical or historical point of view,” he says, it should not be surprising. “There seems to be a threshold percentage of immigrants in the population that triggers a pretty robust nativist reaction. And the threshold,” based on the reactions in the 1850s, 1920s and today, “seems to be somewhere in the 11%, 12%, 13% range.”

Some trends suggest the reaction could abate. Mr. Kennedy says absorption in the early 20th century was accelerated by the fact that the immigrant stream “was highly variegated in terms of ethnicity, religion, language, culture.” The fact that “quite literally, Polish Jews could not talk to Greek Orthodox could not talk to Sicilian Catholics,” he says, reduced the sense of challenge to U.S. English speakers. By contrast, Hispanic immigrants exceeded 50% of all new arrivals in the early 21st century, with those from Mexico making up the majority.

Yet the immigrant stream has diversified once again in the past decade. Asia now tops Latin America as the No. 1 source of new arrivals. “Asia’s a big place, as Europe was 100 years ago,” Mr. Kennedy says, and “Filipinos and Chinese and Laotians and so on don’t easily fit into one cultural category.” In that sense “we’re returning to a more familiar historical pattern where immigrants come from a variety of places.” That could reduce political frictions that come with immigration. So would “consistent and robust economic growth,” Mr. Kennedy says, which “lubricates all kinds of social issues.”

If the American creed is exceptional in its ability to fold immigrants into its fabric, so it also is in its resistance to socialism, Mr. Kennedy suggests. He points to the German sociologist Werner Sombart’s observation that America’s early embrace of “more or less full political rights,” at least for white men, prevented European-style socialism from taking root in the 19th century. Despite the label’s brief revival in the Democratic primary, “my own view is that it still has a lot of toxic residue in big parts of the body politic,” he says.

Mr. Kennedy recently returned from a teaching trip in China, where the rules of national membership couldn’t be more different than in the U.S. The idea that one could “show up as blond, blue-eyed Irish German Caucasian and say, ‘I want to become Chinese,’ ” Mr. Kennedy muses—“the proposition kind of defeats itself as soon as you articulate it.”

The Chinese are deeply worried about “their integrity as a society and their coherence,” Mr. Kennedy says. “They’ve been ruled by outsiders for centuries in the Manchu dynasty,” he observes. They’ve faced severe “internal divisions, and the country has been fragmented and come back together, and fragmented again.” Asia’s geography adds to Beijing’s anxiety about social cohesion, given that China has “land borders or the near equivalent with 14 other countries.”

By contrast, the American story has been one of almost linear ascension. Its two neighbors are relatively weak and friendly, and it has only fragmented politically once in its 243-year history.

The ultimate manifestation of China’s drive for homogeneity is its treatment of the Uighurs in Xinjiang province. Mr. Kennedy visited Kashgar, a city in Xinjiang, though he didn’t enter the internment camps where more than a million Muslim Uighurs are undergoing “re-education.” Still, Mr. Kennedy says, “I could not have imagined a security surveillance state of that density and weight.”

“Every 250 meters, there’s a fortified police station,” Mr. Kennedy says. “Every intersection, there’s a little riot squad of cops, waiting to go. There are surveillance cameras everywhere, just absolutely everywhere. You go into a little noodle shop, mom-and-pop noodle shop, half the size of this room—you go through a metal detector, and there’s an armed security officer standing right there.”

Throughout U.S. history, the sense of what it means to be an American has been shaped by the country’s external enemies. Americans repudiated, or saw themselves as repudiating, monarchism in the revolution, imperialism in World War I, fascism in World War II and communism in the Cold War. Mr. Kennedy notes that “an adversary that is challenging enough” can “mobilize, and discipline, and focus, and even deprive citizens of certain things in order to get the common purpose achieved.”

China’s disregard for individual rights, equality and pluralism draws attention to America’s remarkable national success at sustaining all three. Some policy makers and intellectuals in Washington hope a “new Cold War” could unite Americans and revitalize the American creed.

As for Mr. Kennedy, he says the jury is still out on China’s ambitions. And he doesn’t think the U.S. can count on its Cold War model for national unity. “You can’t go home again,” he says, citing the famous Thomas Wolfe novel. Maintaining stable and inclusive politics amid unprecedented diversity is “not just going to happen automatically—you have to think hard about it and work at it.” That means recognizing that the U.S. has never been an ethnic state or a hodgepodge of groups, but a “national community” that stands for a distinctive creed, still worth aspiring to.

Jason Willick is an editorial page writer for the Wall Street Journal, where this article first appeared.

The Culture Of Entrepreneurship Promises An Exciting Breakout From Government, Corporatism And Dependency.

July 24, 2019/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

The science of economics has a big problem with vocabulary. It attempts to capture complex concepts in single words and phrases, which only serve to confuse and befuddle and cause arguments. To take a current example, the word “socialism”, for an economist, means state ownership of the means of production (which, in itself, is a good example of clunkiness in economic terminology). But when the country and its journalists and its bloggers argue about socialism and who is or is not a socialist, they’re not arguing about who owns the means of production. They’re arguing about forcible redistribution of people’s income by government, and about the top-down imposition of all-encompassing resource allocation schemes like Green New Deal and Government Health Care. They’re arguing about the role and scope of government and what it means to be free. “Ownership of the means of production” doesn’t help us understand the issues to any great extent.

The opposite of socialism is entrepreneurship. This is another word that comes from economics, and is even harder to define than socialism. The definition of entrepreneurship at the Library Of Economics And Liberty (econlib.org) is 2000 words long. Within those 2000 words, there are references to the many disagreements between economists as to what entrepreneurship really means.

Let’s propose that, instead of defining entrepreneurship, we examine it as a complex and multi-faceted system of individual and social human behavior, and identify its consequences.

Entrepreneurship is the system for the generation of betterment for all in a society characterized wholly or partially by both collaboration and private property.

Entrepreneurship is action. Entrepreneurial individuals, teams or groups are alert to situations where their fellow citizens are dissatisfied with current conditions – when they feel things could be better. Entrepreneurs see this as an economic opportunity: if they take action to devise a new, different and better offering than is currently available, people might buy it to improve their condition, delivering a profit to the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs do take that action – that’s what separates them from others. There’s a risk in acting. It takes time to design and produce the new offering; the finished product or service may not be as good as the entrepreneur imagined in the design phase; the selling price may not be right; the consumer may have changed preferences over time and no longer wants this new solution, instead preferring someone else’s offering. But whatever the outcome for the individual entrepreneur, the system is a win-win. The consumer ultimately has the choice of the various new offerings, and at least one entrepreneur is rewarded, and society is better off. The entrepreneurs who were not chosen by the consumer in this case will redirect their efforts in another direction until they find the right exchange in which they can reap the reward of the marketplace.

The nature of the entrepreneurial system is that both consumers and producers experience reward when one responds to the other in a way that aligns what the consumer wants with what the entrepreneur can provide. It’s a collaborative win-win, and society (i.e. all the producers and consumers rolled up) progresses and improves. Consumers are more satisfied. Entrepreneurs are more fulfilled. GDP per capita rises. The world gets better.

The system works for everyone.

The econlib.org encyclopedia entry on entrepreneurship informs us that widely cited studies conclude that between one third and one-half of the differences in economic growth rates across countries, states and localities can be explained by differing rates of entrepreneurial activity. Economic growth is the economists’ way of saying “things get better for everybody”.

That’s because the goal of entrepreneurs is to help customers towards better lives, in which they experience feelings of greater satisfaction. When they succeed, the entrepreneurs get paid, i.e. achieve the monetary reward of profit. And they, too, also feel greater satisfaction: a sense of achievement and the expanded horizons that come with success. Entrepreneurs’ personal pursuit of higher aspirations results in consumers’ attainment of higher levels of satisfaction and happiness. Everybody wins.

Entrepreneurship blossoms in a culture that supports it and admires it.

Entrepreneurship requires an institutional and cultural framework in which it can blossom. Primarily, it thrives in political and economic systems that protect and secure private property rights. The entrepreneur must have control over private property in order to transform it into new offerings and solutions for consumers to choose and enjoy. In this case, private property includes their own personal effort and ideas, physical resources and capital, and money to invest.

More broadly, entrepreneurship thrives in a framework of economic freedom: low taxes, minimal regulation constraining entrepreneurial imagination, and an unbiased and rapidly-functioning judicial system to resolve any contract disputes that arise. Empirically, the level of entrepreneurial activity in a country correlates closely with the Economic Freedom Index, a measure of the existence of premarket institutions.

There’s also an important element of how we think about feel about and talk about entrepreneurs and business’s role in our culture. If the culture tags the successful entrepreneur as an exploiter rather than a hero, and emphasizes the inequity of outcomes – some succeed, some don’t – rather than the achievement of those who establish and grow successful firms, then society will turn against those who bring betterment. We must, as Professor Deirdre McCloskey insists, assign dignity to our entrepreneurs.

The main barriers to entrepreneurial productivity are governments and corporatism.

Government action – regulations, subsidies, tariffs, taxes, manipulation of labor markets and financial markets, and so much more – impedes entrepreneurship. Governments limit the scope of entrepreneurial imagination and freedom, by restricting what is possible. They divert the productive efforts of entrepreneurs through taxation, which is the confiscation of the fruits of productivity so that they can be put to unproductive uses. They restrict productivity via regulatory constraints, such as the limitations on the location of new production facilities (think solar energy farms) and the distribution of produced goods (think interstate electricity distribution). Government, by its very nature, is anti-entrepreneurial.

As government gets bigger and more interventionist, it brings into existence new barriers to entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurial action can take place at any organizational scale – single employee companies, small businesses and venture-funded startups, and within medium and large-sized businesses. But, as Michael Munger explains, government distorts the incentives for entrepreneurship by creating conditions in which a dollar invested in lobbying can provide a greater return than a dollar invested in R&D and innovation. If a large corporation can secure the passage of a bill or a regulation or a tax or a tariff that is favorable to its business and unfavorable to competitors, domestic or foreign, it will be tempted to make that investment. R&D is starved, innovation is slowed or stopped, and incumbent corporations are insulated from the creative destruction that entrepreneurs generate and which raises consumer satisfaction through innovative improvement.

If we can restrict government and reduce its level of regulatory and fiscal activity, we will enjoy a double boost in economic productivity because the temptation for corporations to spend money cozying up to regulators and legislators will be reduced, if not removed, and the level of investment in entrepreneurial innovation will be increased.

Entrepreneurship is the antidote to the culture of dependency.

At the level of individual behavior and attitude, the culture of entrepreneurship can be energizing, motivating and fulfilling in ways that the current culture industry of state schools, leftist media and welfare state socialism can never emulate. The entire cultural edifice of government and its associated institutions is dependency. This culture insists that individuals can not be successful without state assistance, welfare, subsidies, and regulatory control. Since our children are continuously and exclusively indoctrinated in this dependency framework from the earliest age in state schools, it is not surprising that most of them never get to experience the joys and rewards of entrepreneurial striving. They feel that they must depend on others, especially the welfare bureaucrats, to achieve whatever goals they are capable of conceiving. As a result, self-reliance, imagination, resourcefulness and entrepreneurial energy are under-developed attributes among our young population. The long-term drift towards suffocating hopelessness and helplessness sometimes feels irreversible.

Yet the spirit of entrepreneurship has not been fully extinguished. We still have some entrepreneurial heroes, despite the cultural repudiation of “millionaires and billionaires”. We still have some supportive branches of our institutional framework, including local small business groups, entrepreneurial business school courses, private online education, incubators, venture capital, private loan platforms, and exchange platforms like Upwork and Angie’s List. Perhaps someday, we’ll be able to extend that list to include pro-entrepreneurship public policy.

Until that day, let’s celebrate every entrepreneur who breaks out from statism, corporatism and dependency.

Here’s Another Call For the Proud And Enthusiastic Embrace of Individualism.

July 5, 2019/in Articles /by Hunter Hastings

Some are fighting an uphill battle to restore the word “liberalism” to “true” (that is: classical) liberals. Labeling in politics is always a complicated issue, and at the end of the day what really matters is how other people see you. In a sense, labeling someone, or even labeling yourself, is a “positional” effort: it is needed to put you in relation with others. You can use one word or another depending on how other people use them, and what really matters is the meaning _they_ attach to them.

For this reason, I find intriguing a proposal by Steve Davies, that in a recent piece masterfully argue for adopting the word “individualism”.

Using “classical liberal” is – Davies writes – problematic, as it is ‘essentially a historical term, referring to the ideas and personalities of a specific historical period (broadly the 1780s to the 1900s). The danger with using this as a label is that it implies you are advocating a kind of embalmed truth rather than a living intellectual tradition.’ At the same time, ‘simply using the term “liberal” without qualification is attractive, but there is a definite tradition of collectivist liberalism now and this means a constant need to explain how your own position is different from that, or a qualification of the core individualist perspective.’ The term “libertarian” has some problems too: for Davies, mainly that it is colored in such a way that it gives prominence to the economic side of liberalism at the expense of its cultural, or more broadly defined, political side. That is, “libertarian” would be very close to “free market” and, given the long standing association of free markets and the right, you could paradoxically end up with a “libertarian nationalism.” I think that is actually country-dependent. Davies is writing about the Anglo-sphere, whereas in Italy the problem is the opposite one: “libertarian” is a semi-substitute for libertine, with a strong emphasis on individual (civil) rights and little regard for the economic dimension of liberty.

What is the best label we can use then?

Davies’s answer will surprise many. ‘There was always another label available to’ Anglophone classical liberals ‘and for a long time they made enthusiastic use of it. This was the term “individualism” and the associated “individualist.”’

Individualism was a word that had undergone the change from being a term of opprobrium to one of positive identity. It had originally had connotations of selfishness and egoism but by the 1870s had been adopted by a number of radical liberals as a label for their views, on both sides of the Atlantic (and, interestingly, particularly in France).

In the 1880s and 1890s there was a vigorous intellectual debate on both sides of the Atlantic between the self-defined individualists on one side and the self-defined “collectivists” (in the UK, Canada, and Europe) or “progressives” (in the U.S.) on the other. Subsequently the terms “individualist” and “individualism” remained the main labels used by advocates of the radical case for personal, individual liberty. This was true in the 1920s and even as late as the 1940s and early 1950s (Friedrich Hayek used the term for example and spoke of “those of us who adhere to the individualist position”).

Then quite suddenly, in the middle of the 1950s, all of this changed. People who had described themselves as individualists and identified with that label suddenly stopped using it (with a very few exceptions such as Frank Chodorow). Many adopted the label “conservative,” particularly in the U.S. Most however took to calling themselves classical liberals or libertarians (a word that had previously referred to communist anarchists of the Peter Kropotkin type). The term “individualist,” which had been used until then by both friends and critics, almost vanished.

I like that. In part for historical reasons: I have lots of sympathy for “Individualists” such as Herbert Spencer, Auberon Herbert, or Ernest Benn for that matter. In part because if there is something that is apparent, in “individualism”, is the word: individual. And the “individual” (the real, present, acting individual: not a future “new” man, suited to live in a happily transformed society) is exactly what we oppose to grand collective catchwords, such as nation, country, the working class, et cetera.