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The more entrepreneurial Americans are those from wealthy backgrounds, well networked backgrounds, or desperate circumstances. Notice, all three of the above d

• noir-york 12y ago
  Exactly
• api 12y ago
  You can certainly botch entrepreneurship with business-unfriendly policies, but they are not the ones right wingers always harp on about. High-ish taxes are okay as long as they are not punitively high. Regulations are okay as long as they are easy to follow and simple to understand, and as long as they aren't over the top ideologically-driven stop-everything sorts of things. Keep fear mongers, authoritarians, and ideologues away from the regulatory pen. Complexity is death. Regulations that categorically stop you from acting are death. Things that encumber agility are death. Anything that saps your time is death, since time is often worth more than money. As a founder I'd rather pay more in taxes on profit as long as the government stays the F out of the way of my time and my executive decisions. The ideal setup for maximum entrepreneurship would probably be some kind of libertarian socialism: moderate and moderately progressive taxation, health coverage, guaranteed minimum income or negative income tax, and a simple regulatory structure that makes it easy to form new ventures, hire and fire, etc. Other than that the governments gets out of the way and lets people try new things. One caveat on progressive income taxes: they should not be too progressive and there probably should be lower taxes on capital gains. Investing in long-sighted things should be a form of tax shelter. That's a good thing. The best would probably be a progressive tax curve but where the curve doesn't start to increase until you get really, really up there. Another rationale here is diminishing marginal utility of money-- eventually you get to the point where more money does not materially alter your circumstance in any perceptible way. That's the point at which taxation should become more progressive. At that point you are as rich -- as subjectively experienced -- as a human being can possibly be, and the rest is "savings beyond planned investment" as Keynes would say.
  • WildUtah 12y ago
    "maximum entrepreneurship would probably be some kind of libertarian socialism" Yes, but your libertarian socialism is neither libertarian nor socialist. Socialism is the central control and planning of the means of production while libertarianism is the limitation of central power to maintenance of peace and property. Your proposal involves essentially no central planning and plenty of state activity beyond the night watchman libertarian limits. In fact, you propose the welfare state. The government provides or funds basic social insurance for everyone by taxing mildly progressively everyone with income and property. Health care, education, basic income in case of misfortune, and pensions are arranged for everyone, but the economy is not tightly regulated, monopolized, planned, or centrally administrated. Welfare statism works very well in practice if socialism can be kept out of it. Note that socialism actually does not require any redistribution of income and the implicit redistribution from social insurance actually accomplishes more redistribution than mid-twentieth century socialism did in practice.
    • api 12y ago
      Yeah my terminology is probably off, but I think the ideas are fairly sound.