The Entrepreneur

Recorded at Mises University 2003.

Recorded at Mises University 2001.

Recorded at the Reassessing the Presidency seminar; March 2004. (25:41)

The negative stereotype of businessmen is as false as Marxist theory itself. While millions have, and continue to, suffer under Marxist or socialist economic regimes, entrepreneurs at work in the capitalist world invest capital, organize resources, develop new products, create jobs and make the world a better place for the millions that are affected by their energy and vision.

Government has total power to make and break businessmen. This state of affairs compels businessmen, especially large, successful businessmen, to pay regular extortion money to politicians and government officials. They have to pay bribes, in the form of "campaign contributions" and "donations," to various pressure-group organizations in order not to be harmed or altogether destroyed.

Entrepreneurs are widely considered to be important parts of economic activity. Why would they not be studied carefully by those who are supposed to know so much about this activity? Yet actual policies in actual economies affecting actual human beings have been crafted by economists who have, for the most part, largely ignored entrepreneurial activity.

Brazil, which is so blessed by nature and by an entrepreneurial population with one of the highest rates of self-employment in the world, has been kept down by a misleading ideology. Antony Mueller explains the political effects of embracing Auguste Comte, an embrace which no financial bailout can fix.

What set in motion the explosive technological advance of the last 250 years was the world of ideas. Great thinkers began to understand the internal logic of the market economy and its potential for liberating mankind from poverty, dependency, and despotic rule.

While it is perfectly clear that an individual capitalist or speculator may make losses on the stock exchange, it is very doubtful whether "society" can make such losses. The question with which we are concerned here is whether an individual's losses from domestic stock exchange transactions represent a loss to the society to which that individual belongs.

My 7-year old daughter asked me the other day whether I was born before email. "Yes," I confessed. Then she quickly followed up: "Where you born before plastic?" "No," I said, "I was born after plastic but before email." Satisfied that she had placed me within the structure of the history of the world, she went back to her weekend play.