More Entrepreneurship Would Help Progressive Causes, But Progressives Do Not Understand It At All
Last week I was walking through one of our area's large upscale resorts. The resort was hosting what looked like a huge conference of a large franchising organization. What struck me immediately in the lobby and everywhere on the grounds was how many people of color were there -- it might have been as many as half. And the crowd was WAY more than half women. I don't want to argue right now about buying a franchise as a path to entrepreneurship -- there are pros and cons. But it really helped reinforce something I always suspected -- that entrepreneurship is a particularly important path of self-improvement for women and people of color.
These all sound like worth progressive goals, and in fact many progressive profess to support entrepreneurship. Here is a screen shot from Beto O'Rourke's web site a loyal reader sent me:
Amazing. We are going to promote entrepreneurship by showering the economy with regulations (1000 new bills a year in progressive CA) and making sure many of the returns from an entrepreneurs' money and effort go to other people.** This is like saying we really want to promote the growth of the rabbit population and we are going to do it by putting out lots of rabbit traps and making sure all the carrots the rabbits are eating are given to others.
** By the way, perhaps the #1 great progressive misunderstanding is that without one single government intervention, the vast majority of the entrepreneur's efforts go to others. Employees will earn far more in total than will the entrepreneur herself, and consumers will be left with far more value from the products and services they buy than the entrepreneur ever got back in profit. Steve Jobs created far more wealth and well-being for the rest of us than he did for himself.